Read moreAbout 12,000 years ago, humans began farming, living in denser settlements and burying their dead, so skeletons younger than that are plentiful, said Stanley Ambrose, an African archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the study.
But relatively little is known about the people who came before them. Only a handful of human burials around the world date from about 12,000 to 30,000 years ago, Ambrose said.
To learn more about this lost period of human history, Tryon and his colleagues took a second look at specimens that were sitting in the collections of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. The artifacts were unearthed in the 1970s at rock shelters at Lukenya Hill, a granite promontory that overlooks the savanna in Kenya.
Among the finds was the top portion of an ancient skull. The team took several measurements of the skull, then compared it with skulls from Neanderthals, several other fossil human skulls from the same time and other periods, as well as those of modern-day humans.
Though the skull clearly belonged to a Homo sapien who was anatomically modern, its dimensions were markedly different from those of both the European skull and the African skulls from the same time. In addition, the skull was thickened, either from damage, nutritional stress or a highly active childhood. (There is not enough evidence to say the fossil represents a subspecies of Homo sapien, Tryon said.)
By measuring the ratio of radioactive isotopes of carbon (or carbon atoms with different numbers of neutrons), the team concluded that the skull was about 22,000 years old. That means the ancient human would have lived during the height of the last ice age.
Modern-day Africans have greater genetic diversity than other populations. But the new findings suggest that during this early period of human history, Africa may have supported even greater human diversity, with small, offshoot lineages that no longer exist today, Tryon said.
prehistory
Read moreScientists have unearthed rare, ancient human remains in silts close to the River Seine in France.
The left arm bones are dated to about 200,000 years ago, and look to be Neanderthal – although the researchers say that with no other fossils it is impossible to make a full description
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Not much can be said about the individual because it is represented solely by the three long bones of the arm – the humerus, ulna and radius.
Their robustness would support a Neanderthal interpretation, says the team, and they could have come from a juvenile or young adult.
One interesting observation is a raised crest, or ridge, on the upper-arm bone that may be the result of muscle damage at the shoulder.
The team speculates in its paper that the individual might have been hurt by repeatedly throwing something.
The scarring looks very similar to what has been documented in professional throwing athletes.
“We have a particular morphology on the humerus where we have this very important crest that is related probably to a specific movement – a specific movement that has been repeated by this individual,” Dr Maureille told the BBC.
“Right at that point, we have a kind of micro-trauma, which could be related to a movement that is more difficult, and it has created this strange relief.”
Quite what that repetitive movement might have been is open to debate.
“If the evidence for the strong development of the deltoid region on the humerus has been interpreted correctly, this could provide an important clue that thrown spears were already in use in Europe about 200,000 years ago, something which many experts have questioned,” commented Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London.
“There has been a widespread view that Neanderthals and earlier humans were reliant on thrusting spears, used for dangerous close-range confrontational hunting, and that only modern humans perfected launched projectiles – that view could now be questioned.”
Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art
Rock art is notoriously tricky to date because it is not immediately linked to human or animal bones that can be carbon-dated. Finlayson, however, is confident that the etching was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago. A layer of sediment that once covered the engraving contained stone tools typical of those made by Neanderthals dating to between 30,000 and 39,000 years ago. This means that the engraving must be even older, Finlayson says, perhaps 40,000 to 45,000 years old. Humans did not arrive at Gorham’s Cave until more than 10,000 years later, and long after Neanderthals were gone.
The team’s dating of the Gorham etching makes it one of the oldest examples of cave art in Europe. A smudge of pigment in the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain dates to more than 40,000 years ago, but it is not clear whether Homo sapiens or Neanderthals created it.
To better understand the engraving, Finlayson’s team tried replicating them using original Neanderthal stone tools. They found that only dozens of purposeful, repeated motions could create similar etchings. “We wanted to show that this was not a doodle, a casual thing,” he says, unlike the helter-skelter scratchings that the authors left when they sliced fresh pork skin on rock, for instance. The team’s results appear in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art
Read more "Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art"Read moreAs work progressed, a portrait of [9000 year old] Kennewick Man emerged. He does not belong to any living human population. Who, then, are his closest living relatives? Judging from the shape of his skull and bones, his closest living relatives appear to be the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, a remote archipelago 420 miles southeast of New Zealand, as well as the mysterious Ainu people of Japan.
“Just think of Polynesians,” said Owsley.
Not that Kennewick Man himself was Polynesian. This is not Kon-Tiki in reverse; humans had not reached the Pacific Islands in his time period. Rather, he was descended from the same group of people who would later spread out over the Pacific and give rise to modern-day Polynesians. These people were maritime hunter-gatherers of the north Pacific coast; among them were the ancient Jōmon, the original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands. The present-day Ainu people of Japan are thought to be descendants of the Jōmon. Nineteenth-century photographs of the Ainu show individuals with light skin, heavy beards and sometimes light-colored eyes.
Jōmon culture first arose in Japan at least 12,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 16,000 years ago, when the landmasses were still connected to the mainland. These seafarers built boats out of sewn planks of wood. Outstanding mariners and deep-water fishermen, they were among the first people to make fired pottery.
The discovery of Kennewick Man adds a major piece of evidence to an alternative view of the peopling of North America. It, along with other evidence, suggests that the Jōmon or related peoples were the original settlers of the New World. If correct, the conclusion upends the traditional view that the first Americans came through central Asia and walked across the Bering Land Bridge and down through an ice-free corridor into North America.
Sometime around 15,000 years ago, the new theory goes, coastal Asian groups began working their way along the shoreline of ancient Beringia—the sea was much lower then—from Japan and Kamchatka Peninsula to Alaska and beyond. This is not as crazy a journey as it sounds. As long as the voyagers were hugging the coast, they would have plenty of fresh water and food. Cold-climate coasts furnish a variety of animals, from seals and birds to fish and shellfish, as well as driftwood, to make fires. The thousands of islands and their inlets would have provided security and shelter. To show that such a sea journey was possible, in 1999 and 2000 an American named Jon Turk paddled a kayak from Japan to Alaska following the route of the presumed Jōmon migration. Anthropologists have nicknamed this route the “Kelp Highway.”
“I believe these Asian coastal migrations were the first,” said Owsley. “Then you’ve got a later wave of the people who give rise to Indians as we know them today.”
What became of those pioneers, Kennewick Man’s ancestors and companions? They were genetically swamped by much larger—and later—waves of travelers from Asia and disappeared as a physically distinct people, Owsley says. These later waves may have interbred with the first settlers, diluting their genetic legacy. A trace of their DNA still can be detected in some Native American groups, though the signal is too weak to label the Native Americans “descendants.”
Whether this new account of the peopling of North America will stand up as more evidence comes in is not yet known. The bones of a 13,000-year-old teenage girl recently discovered in an underwater cave in Mexico, for example, are adding to the discussion. James Chatters, the first archaeologist to study Kennewick and a participant in the full analysis, reported earlier this year, along with colleagues, that the girl’s skull appears to have features in common with that of Kennewick Man and other Paleo-Americans, but she also possesses specific DNA signatures suggesting she shares female ancestry with Native Americans.
Kennewick Man may still hold a key. The first effort to extract DNA from fragments of his bone failed, and the corps so far hasn’t allowed a better sample to be taken. A second effort to plumb the old fragments is underway at a laboratory in Denmark.
Read moreA group of scientists, including UC Santa Barbara’s James Kennett, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science, posited that a comet collision with Earth played a major role in the extinction. Their hypothesis suggests that a cosmic-impact event precipitated the Younger Dryas period of global cooling close to 12,800 years ago. This cosmic impact caused abrupt environmental stress and degradation that contributed to the extinction of most large animal species then inhabiting the Americas. According to Kennett, the catastrophic impact and the subsequent climate change also led to the disappearance of the prehistoric Clovis culture, known for its big game hunting, and to human population decline.
“We conclusively have identified a thin layer over three continents, particularly in North America and Western Europe, that contain a rich assemblage of nanodiamonds, the production of which can be explained only by cosmic impact,” Kennett said. “We have also found YDB glassy and metallic materials formed at temperatures in excess of 2200 degrees Celsius, which could not have resulted from wildfires, volcanism or meteoritic flux, but only from cosmic impact.”
To date, scientists know of only two layers in which more than one identification of nanodiamonds has been found: the YDB 12,800 years ago and the well-known Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago, which is marked by the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, ammonites and many other groups.
“The evidence we present settles the debate about the existence of abundant YDB nanodiamonds,” Kennett said. “Our hypothesis challenges some existing paradigms within several disciplines, including impact dynamics, archaeology, paleontology and paleoceanography/paleoclimatology, all affected by this relatively recent cosmic impact.”
Source of Stonehenge Bluestone Rocks Identified
The Wiltshire, England, site harbors evidence of ancient occupation, with traces of pine posts raised about 10,500 years ago. The first megaliths at Stonehenge were erected 5,000 years ago, and long-lost cultures continued to add to the monument for a millennium. The creation consists of massive, 30-ton sarsen stones, as well as smaller bluestones, so named for their hue when wet or cut…
The new findings raise more questions than answers about how the rocks could have made it to Stonehenge.
But pinpointing the exact location of the stones’ origins could help archaeologists looking for other evidence of ancient human handiwork near the area, which could then shed light on the transportation method, Bevins said.
“For example, if we could determine with confidence that the stones had been worked by humans in Neolithic times, then the ice-transport theory would be refuted,” Bevins said.
Source of Stonehenge Bluestone Rocks Identified
Read more "Source of Stonehenge Bluestone Rocks Identified "
For a long time, scientists had assumed a gradual expansion of African people through Sinai into both Europe and Asia. Then, bizarrely, it became clear from both genetics and archaeology that Europe was peopled later (after 40,000 years ago) than Australia (before 50,000 years ago).
Meanwhile, the geneticists were beginning to insist that many Africans and all non-Africans shared closely related DNA sequences that originated only after about 70,000-60,000 years ago in Africa. So a new idea was born, sometimes called the “beachcomber express,” in which the first ex-Africans were seashore dwellers who spread rapidly around the coast of the Indian Ocean, showing an unexpected skill at seafaring to reach Australia across a strait that was at least 40 miles wide. The fact that the long-isolated Andaman islanders have genes that diverged from other Asians about 60,000 years ago fits this notion of sudden seaside peopling.
Sea levels were 150 feet lower then, because the cold had locked up so much moisture in northern ice-caps, so not only were most Indonesian islands linked by land, but the Persian Gulf was dry and, crucially, the southern end of the Red Sea was a narrow strait. Recent work by Prof. Geoffrey Bailey and colleagues from York University in Britain has shown that the gap was often less than 2½ miles wide for up to 60 miles. People would not have needed to move through Sinai and the inhospitable Arabian desert to reach the Indian Ocean shoreline. They could raft or swim across a narrow marine canal.
The story grew more complicated last year when a team led by Hans Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tübingen in Germany described a set of stone tools found under a rock overhang in eastern Arabia, dating from 125,000 years ago. The tools were comparable to those made by east Africans around the same time. This was when Arabia was wetter than today, but the Red Sea crossing was wider.
So maybe Arabia was colonized early and there was a long pause before the Beachcomber Express set off for southeast Asia? If so, the genetics of Arabians should show convergence on an ancient ancestor of more than 125,000 years ago. They don’t: Recent research suggests a common ancestor only 60,000 years ago.
Two ways out of the impasse come to mind. One is that the Arabian settlers of 125,000 years ago died out and were replaced by a new exodus from Africa. The second is that there may have been back-migration into Africa to muddy the genetic water. Complicating the issue is the volcanic eruption of Toba, in Sumatra, around 74,000 years ago, which injected so much sulfurous dust into the high atmosphere that it caused prolonged droughts that might have come close to wiping out many human populations.
Prof. Bailey reckons the answer to these riddles lies beneath the waters of the Red Sea, where ancient coastlines, teeming with undisturbed archaeology, remain to be explored. (via Matt Ridley on Early Humans Leaving Africa | Mind & Matter – WSJ.com)
Read moreRead moreUntil recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.
But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast coastal plains—attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”
Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing crucial new data on voyages from northeast Asia to the Americas 15,000 years ago, from Japan to the remote island of Okinawa 30,000 years ago, and from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago. New evidence even raises the possibility that our modern human ancestors may have journeyed by raft or simple boat out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, crossing the mouth of the Red Sea. “If they could travel from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago, the question now is, how much farther back in time could they have been doing it?” Bailey asks. “Why not the Red Sea?”
Read moreInitially, the lance suggested that the skeleton on the biggest platform was a male warrior, possibly an Etruscan prince. The jewelry probably belonged to the second body, the warrior prince’s wife.
But bone analysis revealed that the prince holding the lance was actually a 35- to 40-year-old woman, whereas the second, partially incinerated skeleton belonged to a man.
Given that, what do archaeologists make of the spear?
“The spear, most likely, was placed as a symbol of union between the two deceased,” Mandolesi told Viterbo News 24 on Sept. 26.
Weingarten, however, doesn’t believe the symbol of unity explanation. Instead, she thinks the spear shows the woman’s high status. The other explanation is “highly unlikely,” Weingarten told LiveScience. “She was buried with it next to her, not him.”
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Whereas Greek women were cloistered away, Etruscan women, according to Greek historian Theopompus, were more carefree — working out, lounging nude, drinking freely, consorting with many men and raising children who did not know their fathers’ identities.
Instead of using objects found in a grave to interpret the sites, archaeologists should first rely on bone analysis or other sophisticated techniques, Weingarten said.
“Until very recently, and sadly still in some countries, sex determination is based on grave goods. And that, in turn, is based almost entirely on our preconceptions. A clear illustration is jewelry: We associate jewelry with women, but that is nonsense in much of the ancient world,” Weingarten said.
“Guys liked bling, too.”
Read moreThe ancient ancestor of the modern domestic dog is the wild wolf of the pre-LGM (Last Glacial Maximum: ca 26,000–19,000 years BP). Until recently, the earliest well-preserved and well-documented remains of early domestic dog all came from European contexts dating to no earlier than ca 14,000–9,000 years ago. Recent research, however, has provided a canine skull from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Goyet (Belgium) with a direct age (that is, an date made on the skull itself rather than on artefacts found with the skeleton) of ca 36,000 cal. BP. This skull, however, has physical traits which do not allow for a clear determination of whether this particular animal represents the remains of a very early domesticated dog or a completely wild wolf. More certain, is the well-preserved remains of a ‘dog-like canid’ from Razboinichya Cave (Altai Mountains, Siberia). These remains are dated to ca 33,000 cal. BP, and most interestingly, seem to represent a group of dogs which were in the process of being domesticated by the local people before climatic and cultural changes associated with the LGM disrupted their transformation into domesticated animals. Consequently, this particular line of dogs does not have any direct domesticated ancestors.
This data, along with other lines of evidence, demonstrates that dog domestication was a multi-regional process—that is, groups of people in various areas domesticated their local dog populations creating their own domestic breeds, rather than a single group of dogs being domesticated on one occasion by one group of people, and then these animals being transported around the globe. In the Australian context, we have the now-native dingo which was transported here from East Asia by Indigenous Australians around 5000 years ago.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 