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coldrum
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|  Posted 19-06-2010 at 12:06
Tools show ancient human diet
Almost two million years ago, early humans began eating food such as crocodiles, turtles and fish – a diet that could have played an important role in the evolution of human brains and our footsteps out of Africa, according to new research.
In what is the first evidence of consistent amounts of aquatic foods in the human diet, an international team of researchers has discovered early stone tools and cut marked animal remains in northern Kenya. The work has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
“This site in Africa is the first evidence that early humans were eating an extremely broad diet,” says Dr Andy Herries from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the only researcher from Australia to have worked with the team. The project represents a collaborative effort with the National Museums of Kenya and is led by David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Jack Harris of Rutgers University in the US.
The researchers found evidence of the early humans eating both freshwater fish and land animals at the site in the northern Rift Valley of Kenya. It is thought that small bodied early Homo would have scavenged the remains of these creatures, rather than hunting for them.
“This find is important because fish in particular has been associated with brain development and it is after this period that we see smaller-brained hominin species evolving into larger-brained Homo species- Homo erectus - the first hominin to leave Africa,” says Dr Herries, of the School of Medical Sciences.
“A broader diet as suggested by the site’s archaeology may have been the catalyst for brain development and humanity’s first footsteps out of Africa.”
Dr Herries dated the archeological remains using palaeomagnetism, a technique that identifies the fossilised direction of the Earth’s magnetic field in sediments.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20100206-21022.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 19-06-2010 at 12:10
Flint findings in Kent reveal new era of prehistory
Archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown epoch in British pre-history when Stone Age hunters re-entered Britain after an absence of up to 90,000 years – because of climatically induced sea-level changes which turned the English Channel into dry land.
Until last month, no proof had ever been found for human occupation in Britain between 200,000 and 65,000 years ago – but now new evidence has revealed a human presence here in the middle of that period.
Although early humans originally arrived in Britain at least 700,000 years ago, they had been repeatedly forced out by particularly cold spells within the Ice Age.
But over subsequent millennia, their descendants and others gradually acclimatised to Europe's intermittently chilly conditions. As these early humans became more used to the cold, they evolved into a separate species of humanity, known as Neanderthal man.
Archaeologists from Southampton University and a commercial excavation unit, Oxford Archaeology, have discovered evidence of stone-tool manufacture, demonstrating that Neanderthals were living in Kent about 110,000 years ago.
Prior to that, the world had been warmer, the ice caps smaller, sea levels higher and the Channel had consequently been full of water and therefore uncrossable.
But then temperatures plummeted, sea levels dropped, the Channel dried up and big game in Britain migrated northwards – and the Neanderthals followed their dinner.
The Kent discovery is an example of how unprepossessing archaeological finds can have huge implications. For the objects which have changed our understanding of such a huge chunk of prehistory are just two pieces of flint – one 8cm-long probable cutting implement and a waste flake, almost certainly discarded while a Neanderthal hunter was making a similar tool.
"They were found in perfect razor-sharp condition near Dartford, on a spur of high ground overlooking the confluence of two rivers – the Darent and a small, now long-vanished tributary," said Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, an archaeologist from Southampton University.
They had probably been lost or discarded by a group of Neanderthal hunters using the spur as an observation point from which to observe herds of migrating horse, deer, mammoth and woolly rhino as they made their way along the river valley below.
The Neanderthals would have moved around in groups of up to 20 to 25 individuals. Usually they would have lived in the open, surviving on a diet of meat, fruit, roots and possibly insects.
They knew how to light and maintain fires – and they relied on spears as their main hunting weapon. It is not known whether or not they wore rudimentary animal-skin clothes – or whether they had to rely on their own probably dense hair cover to keep themselves warm.
The finds have been dated at Oxford University to c110,000BC by a system known as "optically stimulated luminescence" (OSL), a technique often used to date particularly ancient sites. It does this by measuring tiny quantities of light emitted from crystalline material, especially the quartz often found in sand.
The technique uses the quantity of released light to calculate when a grain of sand or other crystalline material was last exposed to sunlight and therefore how long it has been buried for.
Virtually everything on earth is subject to low levels of radiation from naturally occurring radioactive materials. In crystalline material, this radiation produces tiny electrical charges in the form of free electrons.
Some of these electrons get trapped in defects in the crystalline matrix. Normally this trapped energy manages to escape – but when material is buried, the solar light energy which triggers the release of trapped electrons is no longer available. As a result, the electrons stay trapped inside the defects in the crystal until the material is re-exposed to light.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/flint-findings-in-kent-reveal-new-era-of-prehistory-1988009.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 19-06-2010 at 12:16
Crocodile and Hippopotamus Served as 'Brain Food' for Early Human Ancestors
Your mother was right: Fish really is "brain food." And it seems that even pre-humans living as far back as 2 million years ago somehow knew it.
A team of researchers that included Johns Hopkins University geologist Naomi Levin has found that early hominids living in what is now northern Kenya ate a wider variety of foods than previously thought, including fish and aquatic animals such as turtles and crocodiles. Rich in protein and nutrients, these foods may have played a key role in the development of a larger, more human-like brain in our early forebears, which some anthropologists believe happened around 2 million years ago, according to the researchers' study.
"Considering that growing a bigger brain requires many nutrients and calories, anthropologists have posited that adding meat to their diet was key to the development of a larger brain," said Levin, an assistant professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "Before now, we have never had such a wealth of data that actually demonstrates the wide variety of animal resources that early humans accessed." Levin served as the main geologist on the team, which included scientists from the United States, South Africa, Kenya, Australia and the United Kingdom.
A paper on the study was published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and offers first-ever evidence of such dietary variety among early pre-humans.
In 2004, the team discovered a 1.95 million-year-old site in northern Kenya and spent four years excavating it, yielding thousands of fossilized tools and bones. According to paper's lead author David Braun of the University of Cape Town (South Africa), the site provided the right conditions to preserve those valuable artifacts.
"At sites of this age, we often consider ourselves lucky if we find any bone associated with stone tools. But here, we found everything from small bird bones to hippopotamus leg bones," Braun said.
The preservation of the artifacts was so remarkable, in fact, that it allowed the team to meticulously and accurately reconstruct the environment, identifying numerous fossilized plant remains and extinct species that seem to be a sign that these early humans lived in a wet -- and possibly even a marshy -- environment.
"Results from stable isotopic analysis of the fossil teeth helped refine our picture of the paleoenvironment of the site, telling us that the majority of mammals at the site subsisted on grassy, well-watered resources," Levin said. "Today, the Turkana region in northern Kenya is an extremely dry and harsh environment. So, clearly, the environment of this butchery site was very different 1.95 million years ago -- this spot was much wetter and lush."
Using a variety of techniques, the team was able to conclude that the hominids butchered at least 10 individual animals -- including turtles, fish, crocodiles and antelopes -- on the site for use as meals. Cut marks found on the bones indicate that the hominids use simple, sharp-edged stone tools to butcher their prey.
"It's not clear to us how early humans acquired or processed the butchered meat, but it's likely that it was eaten raw," Levin said.
The team theorizes that the wet and marshy environment gave early pre-humans a way to increase the protein in their diets (and grow larger brains!) while possibly avoiding contact with larger carnivores, such as hyenas and lions.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100609122857.htm
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coldrum
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| Posted 19-06-2010 at 18:35
'Oldest' stone artifacts may be younger
Fragments of stone tools found at the Sunabara remains in Izumo, Shimane Prefecture, may not be as old as originally thought, according to archaeologists.
At a meeting of the Japanese Archaeological Association in Tokyo on Sunday, the fragments were estimated to date from 70,000 to 127,000 years ago.
In September, a team led by Kazuto Matsufuji at Kyoto's Doshisha University announced that 20 stone tool fragments were found in a 120,000-year-old stratum.
But further research revealed a 70,000-year-old stratum of volcanic ash right above the find.
Before the discovery in September, the oldest stone artifacts in Japan were believed to be 90,000-year-old tools found at the Kanedori site in Iwate Prefecture, among other locations.
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201005240277.html?
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coldrum
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| Posted 19-06-2010 at 18:36
Archaeologists: 1200 Flint Stones Dating Back to 250, 000 Years Discovered in Syria
Archaeological discoveries -1200 pieces of flint stones dating back to 250, 000 years ago were unearthed at al-Sharar Valley near Daraa, Southern Syria.
The pieces were discovered by the expedition of Damascus University in cooperation with the Directorate of Antiquities and Museums in the governorate. Head of the expedition Prof. Ahmad Diab said the findings prove that the Acholic and Mousteric civilizations existed in Horan, proved to be in light of the findings one of the most important and old-inhabited places in Syria.
He indicated that the area where the study was done enjoys lime characteristics and rain-fed agriculture, especially olives, in addition to its proximity to al-Zaidi Valley, one of the most important places of residence for the ancient men where dozens of caves and grottos are found.
He stressed the importance of cooperation between these missions and the Antiquities Directorates in the governorates to discover more on the history of the Syria, and thus exploring the civilizations prevalent thousand of years ago.
For his part, archeological researcher Yaser Abu Nokta said the Directorate works since 1999 to explore all the ancient places of residence in Horan area.
The expedition discovered a set of stone tools belonging to many pre-historic phases, especially the Paleolithic age, in addition to a number of pieces dating back to the Neolithic age, indicating that there is scarcity in the findings which date back to the Paleolithic era.
''Hence the importance of these missions in pursuing the discoveries of the directorate seven years ago at al-Maisari site, 4 km southeast of Daraa, one of the most important sites dating back to the Paleolithic age (8000 B.C.) and Neolithic age (500 B.C.),'' Abu Nokta added. (SNAA)http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/201005266021/Travel/archaeologists-1200-flint-stones-dating-back-to-250-000-years-discovered-in-syria.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 20-06-2010 at 12:22
Ancient Humans May Have Dined on Hyenas
THE GIST
* Ancient bones in an Iberian cave suggest humans butchered hyenas for food -- at least once.
* There are very few cases of humans eating carnivores and no others of ancient hominids eating hyenas.
* Humans and hyenas have a long history of competing for food and shelter.
It's already been shown that hyenas ate humans, but did early humans likewise dine on hyenas? They might have, say Spanish researchers who found evidence of human "processing" of hyena bones in an ancient hyena den.
"Although the interaction between hyenas and hominids is a constant throughout human evolution, consumption of these animals by our ancestors has never before been documented," said researcher Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. His paper announcing the discovery appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Taphonomy.
The suspect hyena bones come from Maltravieso cave in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which is on the southwestern tip of Europe. The cave has rooms with archaeological sites ranging from the Middle Pleistocene to the Bronze Age. The Hyena bones come from what's called the Sala de Huesos (Hall of Bones), which is filled with debris dated to between 117,000 and 183,000 ago.
"In this chronology, in Europe, there was only one hominid species," Rodríguez-Hidalgo told Discovery News. "We assume that Neanderthals were responsible for this...activity."
The Sala de Huesos appears to have been primarily a hyena den, but also might have been used by humans, although there are no human bones found there, he said.
"It's very common that hyena and humans used the same dens at different times," said Lucinda Blackwell of the University of Witwatersrand's Institute for Human Evolution in South Africa. In fact in Africa there's plenty of evidence that humans and hyenas have a long history of vying for resources including shelter. They are both, after all, large mammals that live in large social groups and eat herbivores.
"What interests me about this paper is that they only show one bone and I'd like to see more," said Blackwell. She'd also like to look the cut marks with more powerful instruments to measure their depth and compare them to other samples.
Blackwell is not convinced humans were eating hyenas, however.
"They could have been processing them for their beautiful pelts," she told Discovery News.
Over all, evidence of humans eating carnivores is scarce, agreed Rodríguez-Hidalgo.
"During the Palaeolithic carnivore consumption by hominids is as uncommon as today," Rodríguez-Hidalgo said.
In the later part of the Palaeolithic there are a few cases of humans processing the carcasses of foxes, bobcats and badgers. They were probably using their fur, but perhaps eating the meat as well. There are also signs from Maltravieso and elsewhere in southern Europe that hominids processed lynx, fox, badgers and lions.
"Among the large carnivores, bears are sometimes killed," Rodríguez-Hidalgo said. "However, the hyena never appears as a game prey."
Eating hyenas is actually forbidden in parts of Africa, he said.
"Professor Hans Kruuk, University of Aberdeen, probably the person who best knows the behavior of hyenas said that throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the hyena is considered taboo as food," said Rodríguez-Hidalgo.
"This is explained by the habit of scavenging hyenas; eat garbage and even the bodies of the dead in cemeteries. Nevertheless, studies on current and hunter-gatherer Hadza of Tanzania indicate that hyenas have been hunted and eaten on occasion."
There are no hyenas in Europe today.
http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-hyenas-cave.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 23-06-2010 at 19:36
Separation between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred 500,000 years earlier
The separation of Neardenthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred at least one million years ago, more than 500.000 years earlier than previously believed after DNA-based analyses. A doctoral thesis conducted at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana) -associated with the University of Granada-, analysed the teeth of almost all species of hominids that have existed during the past 4 million years. Quantitative methods were employed and they managed to identify Neanderthal features in ancient European populations.
The main purpose of this research –whose author is Aida Gómez Robles- was to reconstruct the history of evolution of Human species using the information provided by the teeth, which are the most numerous and best preserved remains of the fossil record. To this purpose, a large sample of dental fossils from different sites in Africa, Asia and Europe was analysed. The morphological differences of each dental class was assessed and the ability of each tooth to identify the species to which its owner belonged was analysed.
The researcher concluded that it is possible to correctly determine the species to which an isolated tooth belonged with a success rate ranging from 60% to 80%. Although these values are not very high, they increase as different dental classes from the same individual are added. That means that if several teeth from the same individual are analysed, the probability of correctly identifying the species can reach 100%.
Aida Gómez Robles explains that, from all the species of hominids currently known "none of them has a probability higher than 5% to be the common ancestor of Neardenthals and Homo sapiens. Therefore, the common ancestor of this lineage is likely to have not been discovered yet".
Computer Simulation
What is innovative about this study is that computer simulation was employed to observe the effects of environmental changes on morphology of the teeth. Similar studies had been conducted on the evolution and development of different groups of mammals, but never on human evolution.
Additionally, the research conducted at CENIEH and at the University of Granada is pioneer –together with recent studies based on the shape of the skull- in using mathematical methods to make and estimation of the morphology of the teeth of common ancestors in the evolutionary tree of the human species. "However, in this study, only dental morphology was analysed. The same methodology can be used to rebuild other parts of the skeletum of that species, which would provide other models that would serve as a reference for future comparative studies of new fossil finds."
To carry out this study, Gómez Robles employed fossils from a number of archaeological-paleontological sites, such as that of the Gran Colina and the Sima de los Huesos, located in Atapuerca range (Burgos, Spain), and the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. She also studied different fossil collections by visiting international institutions as the National Museum of Georgia, the Institute of Human Paleontology and the Museum of Mankind in Paris, the European Research Centre Tautavel (France), the Senckenberg Institute Frankfurt, the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and the Museum of Natural History in New York and Cleveland.
Although the results of this research were disclosed in two articles published in one of the most prestigious journals in the field of human evolution, Journal of Human Evolution (2007 and 2008), they will be thoroughly presented within a few months.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/uog-sbn062310.php
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| Posted 23-06-2010 at 19:43
Scientists announce discovery of 3.6 million-year-old relative of 'Lucy'
Early hominid skeleton confirms human-like walking is ancient
Cleveland . . . Meet "Lucy's" great-grandfather. Scientists from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University, Addis Ababa University and Berkeley Geochronology Center were part of an international team that discovered and analyzed a 3.6 million-year-old partial skeleton found in Ethiopia. The early hominid is 400,000 years older than the famous "Lucy" skeleton. Research on this new specimen indicates that advanced human-like, upright walking occurred much earlier than previously thought. The discovery and results from this initial analysis will be published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The partial skeleton belongs to "Lucy's" species, Australopithecus afarensis. It was found in the Woranso-Mille area of Ethiopia's Afar region by a team led by first author Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Curator and Head of physical anthropology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The partial skeleton was excavated over five years after the discovery of a fragment of the lower arm bone in 2005. The excavation recovered the most complete clavicle and one of the most complete shoulder blades ever found in the human fossil record.
The specimen was nicknamed "Kadanuumuu" (kah-dah-nuu-muu) by the authors. "Kadanuumuu" means "big man" in the Afar language and reflects its large size. The male hominid stood between 5 to 5 ½ feet tall, while "Lucy" stood at about 3 ½ feet.
"This individual was fully bipedal and had the ability to walk almost like modern humans," said Haile-Selassie. "As a result of this discovery, we can now confidently say that 'Lucy' and her relatives were almost as proficient as we are walking on two legs, and that the elongation of our legs came earlier in our evolution than previously thought."
Co-author Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, Kent State University professor of anthropology, explained, "The new specimen tells us much more about the pelvis, thorax, and limb proportions than 'Lucy' was able to alone."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/cmon-sad061810.php
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coldrum
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| Posted 23-06-2010 at 19:44
Lucy fossil gets jolted upright by Big Man
Partial skeleton suggests ancient roots for humanlike walking.
An older guy has sauntered into Lucy’s life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species.
Excavations in Ethiopia’s Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago.
A nearly complete skeleton of an A. afarensis child has been retrieved from another Ethiopian site (SN: 9/23/06, p. 195).
Discoverers of the skeleton, led by anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, consider this a Desi Arnaz moment. As the late actor often exclaimed on his classic television show, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!” But other researchers are not so convinced that the new fossil changes much of what they already knew about Lucy and her kind.
Haile-Selassie’s team has dubbed its new find Kadanuumuu, which means “big man” in the Afar language. At an estimated 5 to 5½ feet tall, he would have towered over 3½-foot-tall Lucy. Excavations between 2005 and 2008 in a part of Afar called Woranso-Mille — about 48 kilometers north of where Lucy’s 3.2-million-year-old remains were found — yielded fossils from 32 bones of the same individual.
Big Man’s long legs, relatively narrow chest and inwardly curving back denote a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle, according to a preliminary report published online June 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lucy has often been portrayed as having had a fairly primitive two-legged gait and a penchant for tree climbing.
Big Man’s humanlike shoulder blade differs as much from those of chimpanzees as it does from those of gorillas, Haile-Selassie says. The shape of that bone, combined with characteristics of five recovered ribs, suggest to Haile-Selassie’s team that Big Man’s chest had a humanlike shape. Earlier reconstructions of Lucy’s rib cage had endowed her with a chimplike, funnel-shaped chest.
So despite chimps’ close genetic relationship to people, he says, this new fossil evidence supports the view that chimps have evolved a great deal since diverging from a common human-chimp ancestor roughly 7 million years ago and are not good models for ancient hominids.
Big Man’s shoulder blade bolsters recent analyses of 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus that also challenge traditional views of ancient hominids as chimplike (SN: 1/16/10, p. 22).
Estimates of Lucy’s build were based on comparisons to chimps and indicated to some scientists that she lacked the easy, straight-legged stride of people today. Haile-Selassie and his colleagues suspect that their final reconstruction of Big Man’s anatomy will provide a better model for assessing what Lucy looked like.
“Whatever we’ve been saying about afarensis based on Lucy was mostly wrong,” Haile-Selassie says. “The skeletal framework to enable efficient two-legged walking was established by the time her species had evolved.”
Lucy’s legs were short because of her small size, he adds. If Lucy had been as large as Big Man, her legs would have nearly equaled his in length, Haile-Selassie estimates.
Although lacking a skull and teeth, Big Man preserves most of the same skeletal parts as Lucy, as well as a nearly complete shoulder blade and a substantial part of the rib cage.
“This beautiful afarensis specimen confirms the unique skeletal shape of this species at a larger size than Lucy, in what appears to be a male,” remarks anthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia.
A long-standing debate over how well Lucy’s kind walked and whether they spent much time in the trees appears unlikely to abate as a result of Big Man’s discovery, though. “There’s nothing special I can see on this new find that will change anyone’s opinion” on how the species navigated the landscape, comments Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman.
Haile-Selassie’s team disagrees. Big Man demonstrates that A. afarensis spent most of the time on the ground, the researchers conclude.
“They were good walkers, but we don’t know how well they ran,” Haile-Selassie says. Big Man’s long-legged stride indicates that members of his species could have made 3.6-million-year-old footprints found more than 30 years ago at Laetoli, Tanzania (SN Online: 3/22/10),
Anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio, a coauthor of the new paper, regards Big Man as having been an “excellent runner.” His pelvis supported humanlike hamstring muscles and, as indicated by the Laetoli footprints, his feet had arches, Lovejoy holds.
Fossil hominid skeletons as complete as Big Man “are few and far between,” says anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York. But the new find mostly confirms what was already known about Lucy, he asserts. Lucy’s kind, including Big Man, were decent tree climbers, even if they couldn’t hang from branches or swing from limb to limb as chimpanzees do, he says.
“Riddle me this,” asks Jungers in considering Hailie-Selassie’s emphasis on a ground-dwelling A. afarensis. “Where did they sleep? Did they wait for fruit to fall to the ground? Where did they go to escape predators?”
Groups of A. afarensis individuals must have devised ground-based strategies to ward off predators, Lovejoy responds. Some big cats would have negotiated trees better than Lucy’s kind, he notes.
Jungers also doubts Lovejoy and Haile-Selassie’s contention that a nearly humanlike gait had evolved in A. afarensis. Big Man includes only one nearly complete limb bone, from the lower left leg, which makes it difficult to estimate how long his legs were relative to his arms, Jungers contends.
Limb remains of hominid species that came after afarensis indicate that they evolved increasingly longer legs and a more efficient walking stance, Jungers adds.
In his view, hips conducive to walking slowly with legs wide apart evolved in an even earlier hominid, 6-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis (SN: 3/29/08, p. 205)
] and characterized later Australopithecus species, including Lucy’s kind.
Haile-Selassie counters that features of Big Man’s pelvis related to walking closely resemble those of a 1.4-million to 900,000-year-old female Homo erectus from another Ethiopian site (SN: 12/6/08, p. 14).
Big Man’s legs also demonstrate that the comparably long legs of nearly 2-million-year-old South African hominids don’t represent a transition to the Homo genus (SN: 5/8/10, p. 14), Haile-Selassie asserts.
Haile-Selassie doubts that additional pieces of Big Man’s skeleton will turn up. “If anything more was there, we would have found it by now,” he says with a resigned laugh.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60454/title/Lucy_fossil_gets_jolted_upright__by_Big_Man
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coldrum
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| Posted 01-07-2010 at 17:20
Ancient legends once walked among early humans?
Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads — have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?
Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.
But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.
Wild people?
Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.
Heaney notes that legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries. "The reports of wild men, although having typical mythic overtones, do often reflect what we know of primitive hominins," Heaney says, by e-mail. "The presumed almases of Central Asia could be any one of a number of pre-(homo) sapien ancestors."
What about their gold-mine-guarding griffon foes? In a 1993 companion piece to a look at the Arismaspians by Heaney, Stanford historianAdrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, suggested their legend sprang from dinosaur bones unearthed by nomads in their travels across the steppes of Western Mongolia.
"That region could well be Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) in western Mongolia and environs, where I have wandered many long days and have seen ancient and contemporary small gold mines," says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, who calls a dinosaur-bone origin for griffon stories reasonable. But as for Arimaspians being the same as the newly-discovered archaic humans, Davis-Kimball has pretty strong doubts.
"We have excavated Bronze Age hunters and gatherers and small villagers along the Eurasian rivers — these were the people that precede the nomads by a 1,000 or maybe even many more years. I've seen lots of skeletons from many locales in my travels from Hungary to Mongolia, but none that correlates with this new hominid line or with the one-eyed Arimaspians," Davis-Kimball says, by e-mail. "It's too difficult for me to believe that hominids living 1,000,000 years ago could be perpetuated in a myth to the time of Herodotus or about 450 BC."
Another explanation came in a 2008 Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia journal study by Dima Cheremisin of the Russian Academy of Sciences who looked at the ancient Pazyryk people of Siberia, an Iron Age tribe whose burial mounds dot the Altai Mountains. "The mythical griffon is the most popular figure in Pazyryk art, suggesting that the Pazyryk people maybe identified with the 'griffons guarding gold,' mentioned by Aristeas and Herodotus," Cheremisin noted.
And cryptozoologists, who make a study of legendary creatures, have offered similar archaic human explanations in the past for sightings of the Yeti or Bigfoot. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of modern cryptozoology, theorized in the 1980's that such sightings of the wild people could be based on ancestral memories of Neanderthals.
Of course, it does turn out that people seem to have interbred with Neanderthals, according to a May Science magazine report led by Svante Pääbo, a long-time ancient genome researcher who also was a co-author on the Denisova Cave discovery report. More than 50,000 years ago, most likely in the Near East, intermingling of early modern humans and Neanderthals led to modern-day Europeans and Asians typically having a genome that is 1- 4% Neanderthal, according to the study.
Such interbreeding is another staple of old stories. Hercules, the hero of Greek myths, walked around in a lion skin with a club over his shoulders and was wondrously strong, a bit like a Neanderthal, due to half-divine parentage.
Even the Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children.
"These stories go back millennia, but they don't go back that far," says biblical archaeologist Robert Cargill of UCLA. "There's no way that the author of the Book of Genesis had in mind Neanderthals." Most likely, ancient people were trying to explain the origin of tall people, Cargil says, and pointing back to a time when things were so bad that even semi-divine creatures were misbehaving.
Of course, it's fun to speculate. After all, researchers in 2003 discovered another human species, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbits" for their puny stature about three feet tall, who died out perhaps 12,000 years ago in Indonesia.
So we have hobbits, giants, and possibly cyclopean wild men, running around in prehistory. It's not quite The Lord of the Rings, but we can certainly forgive Herodotus for some of his taller tales.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-06-18-ancient-legends_N.htm
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coldrum
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| Posted 01-07-2010 at 17:29
Separation between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred 500,000 years earlier
The separation of Neardenthal and Homo sapiens might have occurred at least one million years ago, more than 500.000 years earlier than previously believed after DNA-based analyses. A doctoral thesis conducted at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana) -associated with the University of Granada-, analysed the teeth of almost all species of hominids that have existed during the past 4 million years. Quantitative methods were employed and they managed to identify Neanderthal features in ancient European populations.
The main purpose of this research –whose author is Aida Gómez Robles- was to reconstruct the history of evolution of Human species using the information provided by the teeth, which are the most numerous and best preserved remains of the fossil record. To this purpose, a large sample of dental fossils from different sites in Africa, Asia and Europe was analysed. The morphological differences of each dental class was assessed and the ability of each tooth to identify the species to which its owner belonged was analysed.
The researcher concluded that it is possible to correctly determine the species to which an isolated tooth belonged with a success rate ranging from 60% to 80%. Although these values are not very high, they increase as different dental classes from the same individual are added. That means that if several teeth from the same individual are analysed, the probability of correctly identifying the species can reach 100%.
Aida Gómez Robles explains that, from all the species of hominids currently known "none of them has a probability higher than 5% to be the common ancestor of Neardenthals and Homo sapiens. Therefore, the common ancestor of this lineage is likely to have not been discovered yet".
Computer Simulation
What is innovative about this study is that computer simulation was employed to observe the effects of environmental changes on morphology of the teeth. Similar studies had been conducted on the evolution and development of different groups of mammals, but never on human evolution.
Additionally, the research conducted at CENIEH and at the University of Granada is pioneer –together with recent studies based on the shape of the skull- in using mathematical methods to make and estimation of the morphology of the teeth of common ancestors in the evolutionary tree of the human species. "However, in this study, only dental morphology was analysed. The same methodology can be used to rebuild other parts of the skeletum of that species, which would provide other models that would serve as a reference for future comparative studies of new fossil finds."
To carry out this study, Gómez Robles employed fossils from a number of archaeological-paleontological sites, such as that of the Gran Colina and the Sima de los Huesos, located in Atapuerca range (Burgos, Spain), and the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. She also studied different fossil collections by visiting international institutions as the National Museum of Georgia, the Institute of Human Paleontology and the Museum of Mankind in Paris, the European Research Centre Tautavel (France), the Senckenberg Institute Frankfurt, the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and the Museum of Natural History in New York and Cleveland.
Although the results of this research were disclosed in two articles published in one of the most prestigious journals in the field of human evolution, Journal of Human Evolution (2007 and 2008), they will be thoroughly presented within a few months.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/uog-sbn062310.php?
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coldrum
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| Posted 01-07-2010 at 18:33
Russians restore face to 30,000+ year-old Kostenki cave man
According to a Jan. 1, 2010 BBC news article, by BBC News science reporter, Paul Rincon, "DNA analyzed from early European," scientists have studied and extracted DNA from the remains of a 30,000 year old European cave man who hunted wild mammoths in the region of Kostenki, Russia about five to ten thousand years before the last ice age began, at a time when Russia was warmer than it is today. Also, in another study, scientists found that about 4 percent (from 2% to 5%) of Europeans, East Asians, Papua-New Guineans, but not any Africans, have inherited Neanderthal genes, at least traces of them. The prehistoric man is known as the Markina Gora skeleton.
These genes may have been acquired thousands of years ago when bands of roaming Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens possibly mated in the Middle East/Levant or Central Asia area. Homo Sapiens mixed with a few Neanderthals then migrated throughout Asia all the way to China and Papua-New Guinea, then attached to mainland Asia, and then turned West and expanded from Central Asia and India into Europe, carrying traces of Neanderthal genes. At one time, about 60,000 years ago Neanderthals lived in the Levant/Middle East, with Neanderthals and humans eventually retreating back into Europe when the Levant opened up during a warmer interstatial period between two ice ages. By 50,000 years ago, both humans and Neaderthals lived in Europe, but their territories didn't overlap too much.
Neanderthals lived in Western Europe, and Homo Sapiens lived mainly in Eastern Europe, until another ice age forced Homo Sapiens further west into Europe, the Cro-Magnons, who settled in refuges during the ice age in Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans, gradually overtaking the Neaderthal's territory. The last refuge of the Neanderthals was in Western Portugal and Spain. But for a time, Neanderthals and humans shared living spaces or territories in what today is Croatia and Romania.
After 50-000 to 45,000 years ago Homo Sapiens moved into Eastern Europe moving in a Northwestern direction from areas Southeast as the Neanderthals who had lived all over Europe for the past 200,000 years retreated back to their familiar Western European homeland. For those 200,000 years, Homo Sapiens lived in Eastern Africa, gradually moving east through Asia, and then turning west from Asia into Eastern Europe.
By 40,000 years ago, humans from Central Asia again met Neanderthals on their way to Eastern Europe as the both groups moved toward Western Europe. Since Neanderthals mated in small numbers with humans, they shouldn't be called a different species. Usually different species can't breed fertile offspring. But since 2% to 4% of Neanderthal genes are found in humans, just traces, but still it shows they did have offspring together on a small scale.
Neanderthals lived mostly in Western Europe and the Levant, whereas early Homo Sapiens before the last ice age lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, before later moving into Western Europe, where the Neanderthals retreated by 28,000 years ago to Western Portugal and Spain. Basically, in another study, scientists found there was mating between the two with children resulting in that 2% to 5% of the population of humans today, of traces of Neanderthal genes. For further information on how this study was done, check out the article, "Neanderthal Genes Found in Some Modern Humans." Also see, "Neanderthal Gene Found in Human DNA of People Living Out of Africa."
The facial restoration reported in the Jan. 1, 2010 BBC News article, DNA analyzed from early European, of the 30,000 year old man in Russia, depicts an ancient Homo Sapien man in Europe who perhaps still retains his undifferentiated features before the last ice age. After the latest ice age, the features on ancient skulls appear to change in Europe, possibly due to thousands of years of diminished sun light and extreme cold. In fact, all over the world, people were undifferentiated from their original African features from the time humans left Africa about 80,000 years ago to populate the world.
Features also began to change when humans migrated out of India to Central Asia, remaining there thousands of years, until they began to enter Eastern Europe from Central Asia and the steppes thousands of more years later, arriving in Russia, about 40,000 years ago for the Gravettian age. Before that time, people also entered Europe from the Levant, about 44,000 years ago, taking refuge in Spain and S. France. But again, scientists are still researching these theories.
Not only have the scientists extracted DNA to trace the origins and migrations of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which points to where his mother came from theoretically, artists also restored his face on the preserved skull to show what he looked like before Europeans began to change whatever facial features they had to look like most do today. Basically, he still retained his robust, but modern features.
He's a homo sapien whose so-called 'race' had not been yet changed by the cold of the last ice age climate that began in Europe about 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. At 30,000 to 32,000 years ago, his estimated age, cave paintings show rhinos in France, and lions as well as mammoths and other prehistoric animals throughout Europe.
Where'd he come from before reaching Russia? Probably, Central Asia, and before that? Possibly, NW India or where Pakistan is located today. After 13,000 years ago, you'd also find more diversity in the Kostenki, Russia region as people expanded from France and Spain into that area. But at 30,000 years ago, the Gravettian culture coming out of the steppes and Central Asia walked through Russia, living in caves and building houses outside of them with mammoth bones from the Ukraine to Siberia.
Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens). Scientists had to work with efficacy to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination. In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to overcome this hurdle.
According to the BBC article, Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study genetic information from human remains unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki, Russia.
Excavations at Kostenki, on the banks of the river Don in southern Russia, have yielded large concentrations of archaeological finds from the Palaeolithic (roughly 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago). Some of the finds date back as far as 45,000 years.
So who was the man? The tall, athletic 20-25 year old handsome 'hunk' (when his face was restored by sculptors) had been buried with meticulous attention to detail in an oval grave or pit. Obviously, he was well-liked by his companions or family. In comparison, you see Neanderthal womens' skeletons dumped on the garbage heaps, whereas the men were buried with flowers.
But various mainstream media as well as numerous science publications report that Homo sapien men, and homo sapien female skeletons also, were buried carefully with compassion and elaborate positions. Some nearby skeletons in Russia from the period 25,000 years ago and before, were buried with hundreds of ivory beads, fur hats, jewelry made from perforated fox teeth, and other signs of being buried with food, clothing, and possessions to take with them in the next world.
It's a sign of how the society values its moms when you find them tossed onto the garbage heap while the men are buried with their hunting tools, as the Neaderthals had done, at least in one finding, compared to the Homo sapiens that showed dignity and respect to all members of the family, at least in how they were buried and what tools and garments they took with them.
The 30,000 year old skeleton of Kostenki is known as the Markina Gora skeleton. Archaeologists found him lying in a crouched position with fists reaching upwards and a face orientated down towards the dirt. The bones were painted with a pigment called red ochre, thought to have been used in prehistoric funeral rites. Interestingly, red ochre resembles blood, which is way most babies look when they're first born.
The ochre seemed to symbolize preparing the body for a birth in reverse, a journey back to where he came from, Mother Earth, so to speak. Why else would he be painted in a red pigment as opposed to yellow ochre which was a common pigment also used then for skin decor?
The type of DNA extracted and analyzed is that stored in mitochondria - the "powerhouses" of cells. This mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down from a mother to her offspring, providing a unique record of maternal inheritance. When archaeologists and other scientist test the 30,000 year old bones for DNA, they can separate Neanderthal mtDNA from Homo Sapien because there are at least 27 differences in the genes between Neanderthal and Homo Sapien DNA.
The new technology prevents looking at contamination from modern DNA and mistaking it for ancient types. That new technology has been pioneered in the study of DNA from Neanderthal bones. Actually there are three features that distinguish modern DNA from ancient DNA, which prevents contamination, using this new technology. For more information on it, check out the BBC article, DNA analyzed from early European.
One example would be that fragments of ancient DNA are often shorter than those from modern sources. You need the new technology because researchers found many fragments of ancient DNA were too small to be amplified by older method. Another example that's characteristic of ancient DNA is its tendency to show particular changes, or mutations, in the genetic sequence at the ends of DNA molecules.
And worse yet, the third feature was a characteristic breakage of molecules at particular positions in the DNA strand. That's why the new technique of analysis has been developed to distinguish between all three issues when looking at ancient DNA.
The biggest problem when looking at ancient bones is that modern DNA can infiltrate ancient remains. Scientists even find that ancient bones of animals are so contaminated by modern human DNA that researchers usually find modern human DNA on old animal bones that have been handled so much just digging them out.
Now, the new technique allowed researchers to sequence a full mtDNA genome--that is the full mitochondrial DNA that looks at what the ancient man inherited from his mother as far as mtDNA. He was found at the Markina Gorahave area in Kostenki, Russia, a home to many ancient cave people from before the last ice age. The question is why were relatively so many Europeans living in Russia 30,000 years ago?
Scientists have been trying to find out whether those people living in Europe 30,000 years ago are the direct ancestors of the modern populations living there today, or whether they were replaced by immigrants from elsewhere who arrived only a few thousand years ago from the Balkans and the Middle East to introduce farming to Europe.
That's what local and national media keeps reporting. But this is the first time that mainstream science news publications have published articles from more advanced technical research reporting that modern people do have some Neanderthal genes, but not Africans from Africa (not mixed with Europeans or East Asians). So how many Sacramentans are concerned that they have traces of Neanderthal genes? Not many. But what are they physical characteristics of Neanderthals compared to Homo Sapiens?
Neanderthals were more muscular with more body fat, a wide waist, and also had a wide rib cage, short limbs, stocky, short bodies, and didn't run very fast. The circular bones in their inner ears that helped to control gait, kept them from moving fast on foot. In contrast, homo sapiens had larger circular bones in their ears, allowing them to run fast. They were tall and thin.
Basically, homo sapiens were perfectly suited to African climate. Neanderthals were suited to very cold weather, for example, the climate in ice age Europe. Neanderthals had larger brains and heads, but were shorter in height and had short life spans. But both had similar hyoid bones, allowing for at least basic speech. Neanderthal women had larger pelvic inlet depths making childbirth easy, but the babies were larger. But the fact that they could inter-breed and produce fertile offspring might signal they were not different species.
The modern European gene pool contains a wide variety of mtDNA lineages that includes descendants of the Huns and other Central Asians, N. Europeans, S. Europeans, Middle Eastern peoples, and East Asians as well as any one else arriving in Europe in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years. What happened to those who arrived in Europe 30,000 to 50,000 years ago? And did they come from Central Asia, the Middle East, or anywhere else?
Studying these maternal lineages provides scientists with clues to the origins and histories of human populations. Scientists look for genetic signatures in order to classify an individual's mtDNA into different types, or "haplogroups". These haplogroups represent major branches on the family tree of Homo sapiens. The 30,000-year old Russian cave man had U2 mtDNA. And people in Europe today have U2 DNA as well as people living in India.
You have numerous people with U2e, the European version of U2 living in Europe, especially in Italy today, and Germany as well as other places in Europe. It's widely distributed throughout all of Europe in current times. And you have Indian-specific U2i mtDNA living primarily in India, especially N.W. India and Kashmir.
So was Europe populated by people from India, Kashmir, and Pakistan as well as the rest of Central Asia? Yes. And after that migration, around 40,000 years ago moving West into Russia and then into the rest of Europe came another migration from the Middle East, when climate allowed it to open up, around 45,000 years ago. A lot of those cave people were mammoth hunters or followed the animal herds before the last ice age began. But U2 in Europe is still pretty rare in modern populations, although it does exist.
According to the BBC news article, "U2 appears to be scattered at low frequencies in populations from South and Western Asia, Europe and North Africa."
Actually, you have U6 mtDNA living in North Africa today, U5 in Europe, U7 in the Middle East, U3 in Europe and the Middle East, U4 in the Caucasus, and U1 in Europe as well as K, which is a branch of U, throughout Europe and especially in the Alpine mountain areas, N. Italy, and Austria. But H is the most common mtDNA in Europe today.
Even though the cave man's U2 is a bit rare, it's still found in numerous Europeans today scattered in almost any country of Europe. That means the Paleolithic hunters had direct descendants alive today still living in Europe, including Russia, where they were found 30,000 years ago when tigers, lions, and rhinos roamed Europe before the last ice age.
You have to separate the ancient U2, from the more common U5 in Europe today, but realize, people with U2 are still in Europe and perhaps are the great grand children thousands of generations forward, of that cave man. So the ancient U2 probably arrived in Europe during Paleolithic times, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, and has a link back in time with the U2 found in India. In fact the U branch of mtDNA is the oldest in Europe.
According to the BBC article, scientists found that there were a very high percentage of U types in the skeletal remains of ancient hunter-gatherers from Central Europe compared with later farming immigrants and modern people from the region. H mtDNA is the most common in Europe today also, especially in Western Europe. But H also lived 20,000 years ago in Spain and Southern France, using the Pyrenees as a refuge from the ice age. At that time, penguins roamed in the Mediterranean, and winters during the ice age were similar to modern winters in Alaska.
In 2009, an analysis of mtDNA from 28,000-year-old remains unearthed at Paglicci Cave in Italy showed this individual belonged to haplogroup "H" - the most common type found in modern Europeans. Basically scientists surmise that about 80 percent of Europeans are descended from these early hunters that entered Europe about 50,000 years ago from Central Asia, about 45,000 years ago from the Levant.
And about 20 percent of farmers entered Europe between 10,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago from the Middle East, Turkey (Anatolia), and the Balkans, with farming arriving about 7,000 years ago, more or less, depending upon how far north the ideas of farming traveled to the fishing villages to introduce cheese making and planting vegetables instead of picking wild berries and roots. For futher information see the BBC News article, DNA analyzed from early European. Or browse the paperback book, How to Interpret Family History and Ancestry DNA Test Results for Beginners - Google Books.
If you want to have your own DNA tested to see whether you're related to this ancient hunter-gatherer or any other type, Family Tree DNA tests DNA for ancestry, including deep ancestry. There's also the Family Finder Test to see what other people are related to you back about seven generations from anywhere in the world. That tests your autosomal DNA. Or you could test your Y chromosome for male ancestors or mtDNA to see where in time or possibly geography your mother's side might have come from. That's one way to cover your own culture from prehistory to present in the media or for your private viewing.
The UC Davis Anthropology Department is distinctive in its respect for multiple pathways through the discipline. The majors there specialize in Evolution or Socioculture. The major is organized into two Wings, a Sociocultural Wing including Linguistic Anthropology, and an Evolutionary Wing including Archaeology and Biological Anthropology.
So when news of genetic testing of Neanderthals from Europe, Croatia, for example and modern humans from around the world are compared, it's the scholarly magazines and news services from Europe rather than the local daily papers that made national news media with the announcement that about four percent, (ranging from two to five percent) of all modern humans not of African descent have Neanderthal genes left over from matings between the two peoples in prehistoric times.
The latest finding last month was not reported in the local media, but would have interested Sacramentans to find out that many of them have traces of Neanderthal genes from human-Neanderthal matings that happened more than 30,000 years ago. In fact, Sacramentans who are not of African descent, that means those with European, East Asian, and certain Pacific Islands ancestry (Papua-New Guinea) were surprised to find out from mass media science magazines and mainstream news publications that they carry an average of 4% (with a range of 2% to 4%) of Neanderthal genes, according to the latest genomic studies reported in the mass media, according to the May 7, 2010 article in Cosmos Magazine, "Neanderthal genes found in some modern humans."
Mainstream media in Sacramento doesn't report too often scientific breakthroughs unless they have to do with healthcare or recalled food rather than ancient history and genomics, except for the few articles coming out of UC Davis. British magazines report more archaeology findings than daily newspapers and magazines that focus on local news. But Sacramentans do have two universities locally both offering majors in special areas of anthropology and archaeology.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6113665-russians-restore-face-to-30000-yearold-kostenki-russia-cave-man
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coldrum
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| Posted 01-07-2010 at 18:33
'Lucy' Predecessor Turns Back The Clock On Walking
Anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie talks about a recently unearthed Australopithecus afarensis skeleton nicknamed "Kadanuumuu." He says the individual predates "Lucy" by about 400,000 years, and that the bones suggest upright walking originated earlier than previously thought.
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. Last year, we met the hominid Ardi, who lived in Africa 4.4 million years ago. Even more famous than Ardi, of course, is the star of the bunch, Lucy, a three-and-a-half-foot-tall female, who lived more recently in our evolutionary past, 3.2 million years ago.
Well, this week, scientists added another individual to the family tree, Kadanuumuu, a five-foot-tall male, whom the scientists say is in Lucy's species. But he walked the earth 400,000 years before her, and walking is the right word because it appears that he stood and walked upright like Lucy, which is significant, and which we'll talk about a little bit later.
Details about the Kadanuumuu appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. What can we learn from this new hominid skeleton? What is so significant about walking, Big Man, his name in English, Big Man.
Joining us to talk about that is a guest, a member of the team that discovered Kadanuumuu. Yohannes Haile-Selassie is the curator and head of the physical anthropology department at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio, and he joins us on the phone from Ethiopia today. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
Mr. YOHANNES HAILE-SELASSIE (Curator, Physical Anthropology Department, Cleveland Museum of Natural History): Oh, thank you.
FLATOW: You're welcome. Where did you find this fossil?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: This fossil was found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, like Lucy and Ardi. As you know, the Afar area is very rich in fossils of ancient human ancestors. So we kept looking for them in that area, and this is from a new study area called Woranso-Mille, which we've been working on for the last six years.
FLATOW: And he is how much of the skeleton did you actually uncover?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: We have as much as Lucy's, but what the difference is, in Kadanuumuu, we have specimens that were unknown from Lucy previously. Some of the elements that we have for Kadanuumuu are also more complete than were for Lucy.
For example, we have a complete shoulder blade, which was unknown for Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, and we also have more rib bones, which will enable us to reconstruct the ribcage of the species of Lucy.
So in terms of the (unintelligible), the amount of specimens recovered, they would be about the same, but we have more information from this new individual. Kadanuumuu is also 400,000 years older than Lucy.
FLATOW: And you feel that this is the same species as Lucy?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: This is the same species as Lucy because what we did was since Lucy is also as complete as Kadanuumuu, we compared those two specimens, and what we found out is that their difference is merely a size difference and also a sex difference.
Otherwise, in terms of their detailed shapes of their bones, they're the same. And what we can learn from this is that Kadanuumuu actually shows us that advanced, upright walking, humanlike walking, has actually evolved long before most of the anthropologists thought.
FLATOW: Much older, it looks like.
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: Yes, older than Lucy.
FLATOW: Older than Lucy.
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: Yes.
FLATOW: But you're missing the skull. Couldn't you learn a lot more if you had the teeth and the skull and things like that?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: If we had the teeth and the cranium, of course, people wouldn't have doubted our assignment of Kadanuumuu to Australopithecus afarensis, which is Lucy's species, because most traditionally, most of the classification is based on teeth and the cranium.
However, we did not find the head or the teeth of Kadanuumuu, but what we had from below the neck was enough to put it into Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis.
FLATOW: And how does this change the picture of what you think about hominids now?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: Well, many anthropologists in the past thought that Lucy was not fully adapted to upright walking, and this was because of her small legs and also the overall size of Lucy being small indicated to those anthropologists that Lucy probably didn't, was not fully adapted to upright walking.
But in Kadanuumuu, what we're seeing, even being 400,000 years older than Lucy, is that its legs and body proportions show very humanlike proportions, and Kadanuumuu was actually able to walk very close to the way modern humans walk.
So this is the skeletal evidence for what we previously had as footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania, which are also dated to about 3.6 million years ago. So the humanlike advanced upright walking is not something that came later in our evolution, as people thought previously.
Now we have with Kadanuumuu, we have good evidence that very advanced upright walking actually evolved as early as 3.6 million years ago, if not earlier. So that's a big breakthrough for (unintelligible) anthropology.
FLATOW: Now, we keep hearing so much about how close humans are to chimps. Does this tell us anything about, this skeleton, about how much different we are than chimps?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: Humans and chimpanzees are closely related, genetically speaking. However, what we've learned not only from Kadanuumuu but also from Ardi, is that chimpanzees have evolved so much since the split from the common ancestor they shared with us.
So this is reflected in their boney anatomy. And of course, when we look at Kadanuumuu's shoulder blade, or what we call the scapula, it has so many features that are shared with gorillas than to the exclusion of chimpanzees.
So what that tells us is that some of our body parts, like the shoulder area, are very primitive. They did not evolve that much because some of them are even shared with gorillas.
So chimpanzees, since the split, have evolved so much in a very different way, but genetically, as we know, they are very closer to us than the gorillas are. So that's what we learned from Ardi, that chimpanzees have evolved so much, and that they cannot be used as the models to reconstruct, you know, the common ancestor they shared with us.
FLATOW: When Lucy was discovered, it was thought that because of her skeleton, she spent a lot of time in trees. But now this would seem to say that she didn't. I mean, this is an older one who walked upright and did not...
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: The reason why yeah, the reason why people thought Lucy would spend a lot of time on trees is because of her small size, and also, her small body frame is actually what made her arms longer, like apes.
And people would assume that since you also had her fingers, they would assume that she was probably spending more time in trees than on the ground. But what we're learning from Kadanuumuu, which is even 400,000 years older than she is, is that afarensis, her species, was in fact adapted to a fully advanced by upright walking as early as 3.6 million years ago.
So those previous interpretations of Australopithecus afarensis, based on Lucy, were probably misinterpretations based on her small size and also her shorter legs. But that was not proportionally short. It's just they were absolutely short.
FLATOW: Was it possible and people always want to know this, and we have a couple tweets coming in asking this was it possible to extract any DNA from these samples?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: These bones are too old to extract DNA from them. I think we've been able, in paleo-anthropological studies, we've been able to extract DNA from ancient fossils only as old as about 30,000 years.
Anything beyond that is less likely to yield any DNA evidence because all the organic material of these bones have already been entirely replaced by minerals.
So the chances of getting DNA from specimens like Kadanuumuu or Lucy, which are older than 3 million years, is very rare.
FLATOW: There was a discovery of some footprints, what, about 30 years ago that no one could really identify because they were so big. Does this seem to fit in now that you've discovered this specimen?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: I'm sure you're talking about the Laetoli footprints that I mentioned earlier.
FLATOW: Yes.
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: These are 3.6-million-year-old footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania, and of course, those footprints clearly showed a humanlike foot with the big toe connected to the other toes, unlike Ardi. So that indicated perfect bipedalism as early as 3.6 million years ago. But we did not have the sort of partial skeleton evidence for it until the discovery of Kadanuumuu.
So Kadanuumuu sort of complements those footprints that were found in 1979, which is 30-some years ago.
FLATOW: There have been some skeptics, some scientists or other paleontologists, who are saying, you know what, until you get the cranium, until you get the teeth, we are not going to be able to be sure how close this is to Lucy. Is that something you'll be looking for now?
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: This is well, I don't think we're going to be find the head or teeth of Kadanuumuu, but the one thing that we have to know is the use of head and teeth traditionally to put specimens into a present taxon is like traditional, but postcranial elements can also give us a lot of information and indicate taxonomic, you know, affinity.
For example, if you look at Ardi's foot, okay, by itself, nobody would have put that into Australopithecus afarensis because afarensis doesn't have a foot like that.
So that foot by itself, because of the morphology it has, could be diagnostic without the head. So it's not necessarily that we can't put postcranial elements to a taxon because if we have good comparative material, like Lucy, we can actually compare them to existing postcranial elements and determine their taxonomy. So that's exactly what we did.
Some of the critics we thought said, well, there is a species Kenyanthropus platyops born about 3.5 million years ago, and those skeptics or critics said why didn't you guys consider putting him into Kenyanthropus platyops.
But of course, Kenyanthropus platyops is known only from a head, a crushed head, and there is no way that we can compare postcranial elements with a head. It's totally inappropriate. So the only appropriate comparative material we had was Lucy and her species' remains that we have from sites such as Hadar, which is one of the best sites for Australopithecus afarensis, including Lucy.
So what we did was we used the available comparative material. We looked at the shape and form of these bones. We compared it with Lucy particularly, and Kadanuumuu was very much like Lucy except for the size and sex.
FLATOW: Well, thank you very much for staying up late and taking time to be with us today.
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: You're welcome. Thanks for having me here.
FLATOW: Good luck to you. You're welcome.
Mr. HAILE-SELASSIE: Thank you.
FLATOW: Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, talking with us from Ethiopia about this new discovery of Kadanuumuu. He is curator and head of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.
We're going to take a break, afterwards come back and talk about building lungs, actual lungs, in a beaker in the laboratory. They're doing it for rats, at least. We'll talk about the matrix. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128109196
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coldrum
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| Posted 07-07-2010 at 19:23
Early humans settled in England 800,000 years ago
Flint tools found in an English village show ancient humans settled northern Europe 800,000 years ago, far earlier than previously thought, which could prompt scientists to reassess the capabilities of early humans. Skip related content
An excavation in the eastern coastal village of Happisburgh reported in the journal Nature revealed over 70 flint tools, probably to cut wood or meat, and provides the first record of human occupation on the edges of the cooler northern forests of Eurasia.
"These finds are by far the earliest known evidence of humans in Britain, dating at least 100,000 years earlier than previous discoveries," said Chris Stringer, a specialist in human origins at London's Natural History Museum, who gave a briefing about the research.
"They have significant implications for our understanding of early human behaviour, adaptations and survival, as well as when and how our early forebears colonised Europe after their first departure from Africa."
The study extends findings published in 2005 from Pakefield in Suffolk which suggested humans had managed to reach Britain about 700,000 years ago, when the climate was warm enough to be comparable with the Mediterranean today.
Until then, humans were believed to have colonised only areas south of the Alps and Pyrenees in Europe.
Stringer said the discovery was likely to lead scientists to look again at the capabilities of early humans, since it showed, contrary to previous scientific thinking, that they were able to move to and live in cooler parts of northern Europe.
The evidence from Happisburgh also suggests the site lay on an ancient course of the River Thames, which now runs through central London. It had freshwater pools and marshes on its floodplain, as well as herbivores such as mammoths, rhinos and horses and predators like hyenas and sabre-toothed cats.
"The new flint artefacts are incredibly important because, not only are they much earlier than other finds, but they are associated with a unique array of environmental data that gives a clear picture of the vegetation and climate," said Nick Ashton an archaeologist from the British Museum, who also worked on the study.
The researchers believe the humans adapted their way of life to cope with tougher living conditions, with few edible plants and animals, and extremely cold winters. "My personal hunch is that they had some sort of clothing," said Ashton.
The scientists still hope to find human fossils, yet these are elusive -- "the 'holy grail' of our work," according to Stringer.
The ancient human populations were small, made up of a few hundreds, or possibly thousands, and would either be driven out or severely reduced due to the cold climate, only to repopulate approximately every 100,000 years, the scientists said.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100707/tsc-uk-britain-humans-011ccfa.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 07-07-2010 at 19:25
Unearthed tools rewrite saga of human migration
Early humans migrating out of Africa adapted to freezing climes more than 800,000 years ago, far sooner than previously thought possible, according to a landmark study released Wednesday. Skip related content
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A trove of flint tools found near Happisburgh in the eastern English county of Norfolk marks Homo sapiens' earliest known settlement in a location where winter temperatures fell below zero degrees Celsius (minus 32 degrees Fahrenheit).
The discovery implies our ancestors some 26,000 generations ago survived climates like those of southern Sweden today, perhaps without the comforting benefit of fire or clothes, the study says.
Until now, almost every archaeological site testifying to habitation across Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene period, 1.8 million to 780,000 years ago, has been below the 45th parallel, suggesting a natural temperature barrier to further northward expansion.
All these sites were either tropical, savannah or Mediterranean in character.
The climate boundary cut across southern France and northern Italy, Romania, southern Kazakhstan and Mongolia, as well as northeastern China and the northern tip of Hokkaido Island in Japan.
The only known exception -- a site at Pakefield in Suffolk, southern England -- was occupied by humans during a balmy interlude.
But the new research, led by Nick Ashton of the British Museum, has thrown down a challenge to the 45th-parallel rule.
It has shown for the first time that our hardy forebears, armed with a few stone tools or weapons, could survive in a challenging, frigid environment.
"The new flint artefacts are incredibly important," said Ashton.
"Not only are they much earlier than other finds, but they are associated with a unique array of environmental data that gives a clear picture of the vegetation and climate."
Piecing that information together required several strains of complex detective work.
To date the tools, the researchers examined the magnetic data locked in different layers and types of sediment, comparing them to known changes in the direction and intensity of Earth's magnetic fields.
The materials, however, did not lend themselves easily to such analysis, both because of the lack of magnetic minerals, and because of "noise" created by the presence of an iron-rich rock called greigite.
Ashton and colleagues also used a technique called biostratigraphy, which analyses the remnant traces of plants and animals.
By cross-referencing species known to be already extinct or not yet present, they succeeded in narrowing down the timeframe.
Together, the magnetic and biological evidence "indicate a date toward the end of the Early Pleistocene," concludes the study, published in the British journal Nature.
Reconstructing the climate and environment -- near an estuary of the River Thames, which has since changed course -- also called for identifying long-dead flora and fauna, including several types of pollen, seeds, pinecones, barnacles and beetles.
Summers probably averaged 16 to 18 C (61 to 64 F), and winters a frosty zero to - 3.0 C (32 to 26 F).
During the harsh winters, the area's two-legged predators almost certainly relied on hunting animals, as edible plants would have been in very short supply, the study says.
Still, they would have also benefited from the warming impact of the ocean, as well as species-rich freshwater pools, salt marshes and a large tidal flood plain with a large range of grass-eating creatures and their predators.
Further excavation is already under way to resolve other mysteries.
"It remains unclear whether expansion into northern latitudes with lower winder temperatures required human physical adaptation, seasonal migration or developments in technology such as hunting, clothes, the use of shelters or control of fire," the researchers said.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100707/tsc-unearthed-tools-rewrite-saga-of-huma-c2ff8aa.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 07-07-2010 at 19:26
'800,000-year-old Britons' revealed
A mysterious race of ancient Britons who had much in common with people today but belonged to another human species lived in Norfolk almost a million years ago, scientists believe. Skip related content
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'800,000-year-old Britons' revealed Enlarge photo
Examples of their stone tools were found close to the seashore at Happisburgh, near the Norfolk Broads, where coastal erosion has exposed a treasure trove of fossils.
Evidence suggests they were hunting mammoth and deer and hiding from sabre-toothed cats in the area more than 800,000 years ago, making them the oldest known human settlers in northern Europe.
The find pushes back the date when humans were first known to have occupied Britain by at least 100,000 years.
No bones of the tool-makers have yet been discovered, but scientists believe they may have been related to a species called Homo antecessor (Pioneer Man) that lived in southern Europe at the same time.
They were not ancestors of people living today, but represented a "dead end" branch of the human evolutionary tree.
Yet scientists believe they looked similar to modern humans, and probably wore animal-skin clothes and built shelters. They might even have known how to master fire.
During this pre-glacial period Britain had a climate similar to southern Scandinavia today, with mild summers but bitterly cold winters that would have been hard to survive.
Professor Chris Stringer, one of the scientists who reported the discovery on Wednesday in the journal Nature, said: "This was a species that was fairly human in terms of walking upright; these were not ape-men.
"They had quite big brains and were relatively advanced humans compared with their ancient forebears in Africa, but still lacking a lot of modern human features."
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100707/tsc-800-000-year-old-britons-revealed-4b158bc.html
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Andy B
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| Posted 24-08-2010 at 18:13
Neanderthal's Cozy Bedroom Unearthed
Even though it isn't wired for broadband, this prehistoric domicile does have beds and even a fireplace.
Anthropologists have unearthed the remains of an apparent Neanderthal cave sleeping chamber, complete with a hearth and nearby grass beds that might have once been covered with animal fur.
Neanderthals inhabited the cozy Late Pleistocene room, located within Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, anywhere between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago, according to a Journal of Archaeological Science paper concerning the discovery.
Living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the Neanderthals appear to have constructed new beds out of grass every so often, using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth.
"It is possible that the Neanderthals renewed the bedding each time they visited the cave," lead author Dan Cabanes told Discovery News.
Cabanes, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science's Kimmel Center for Archaeological Research, added that these hearth-side beds also likely served as sitting areas during waking hours for the Neanderthals.
"In some way, they were used to make the area near the hearths more comfortable," he said, mentioning that artifacts collected from various other Neanderthal sites suggest the inhabitants prepared stone tools, cooked, ate and snoozed near warming fires.
For this study, Cabanes and his team collected sediment samples from the Spanish cave. Detailed analysis of the samples allowed the scientists to reconstruct what materials were once present in certain parts of the cave at particular times.
The bedding material was identified based on the presence and arrangement of multiple phytoliths from grasses near the hearth area. Phytoliths are tiny fossilized particles formed of mineral matter by a once-living plant.
There was no evidence of plants growing, soil developing or animal transport of phytoliths via dung, so the scientists believe the only plausible explanation is that Neanderthals gathered the grass and placed it in this room of the cave.
While the hearth contained some grass phytoliths, most belonged to wood and bark, "indicating that this material was the main type of fuel used," according to the researchers. Some animal bones were also tossed into the hearth, perhaps to dispose of them after dinner and/or for use as extra fire fuel.
Evidence is building that Neanderthals in other locations constructed such functional living spaces within caves and rock shelters.
Earlier this year, Josep Vallverdu of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and his team identified a "sleeping activity area" at Spain's Abric Romani rock shelter.
Similar to the Esquilleu Cave finds, Vallverdu and his colleagues discovered the remains of hearths spaced enough for seating and sleeping areas.
"This set of combustion activity areas suggests analogy with sleeping and resting activity areas of modern foragers," Vallverdu and his team wrote. They added that such information can allow anthropologists to estimate the size of Neanderthal populations, in addition to learning more about how they lived.
The big question, according to Cabanes, is how such a resourceful species went extinct.
"In my opinion, Neanderthal extinction may have been caused by several factors working at the same time," he said. "Environmental changes, a slightly different social organization, a different rate of reproduction, spread of diseases, direct competition for resources and many other factors may have played an important role in the fate of Neanderthals."
He and other researchers have also not ruled out that Neanderthals were simply absorbed into the modern human population.
Cabanes is hopeful that future analysis of phytoliths, as well as other less obvious clues that have often been overlooked by scientists in the past, may shed additional light on the still-mysterious Neanderthals.
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/neanderthal-bedroom-house.html
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Andy B
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| Posted 24-08-2010 at 18:14
Tool Use by Early Humans Started Much Earlier
Small-brained human ancestors used stone tools to whack into large mammals some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Fossilized bones scarred by hack marks reveal that our human ancestors were using stone tools and eating meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study that pushes back both of these human activities to roughly 3.4 million years ago.
The first known human ancestor tool wielder and meat lover was Australopithecus afarensis, according to the study, published in the latest issue of Nature. This species, whose most famous representative is the skeleton "Lucy," was slender, toothy and small-brained.
"By pushing the date for tool use and meat eating in our lineage back by around 1 million years, our finds show that tool use and meat eating was not unique to (the genus) Homo, a widely accepted notion in our field," co-author Zeresenay Alemseged told Discovery News.
"Also, by showing that A. afarensis was involved in these activities, we showed that you do not need a large brain to do this," added Alemseged, director of the Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences.
"This is a kind of find that will force us to revise our human evolution and anthropology textbooks."
See what the faces of our early ancestors looked like.
He and his colleagues from the Dikika Research Project made the determinations while working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. There they unearthed two fossilized bones bearing stone tool marks. One of the bones belonged to a large, buffalo-sized, hoofed mammal, while the other was possibly from an Impala, gazelle or antelope.
Various types of electron microscopy, along with chemical analysis, determined that cut marks were inflicted while one or more individuals carved meat off the bones with a sharp stone tool. Percussion marks were also created when a stone tool broke open the bones to extract their nutritious marrow.
The fossilized bones were found sandwiched between volcanic deposits, which permitted reliable dating of them. Before this discovery, the world's oldest human evidence for butchery dated to 2.5 million years ago and came from Bouri and Gona, Ethiopia. No human remains were found in association with those fossilized prey bones, but A. afarensis remains were previously unearthed near the recent Afar Region discoveries.
Since the Afar stone tools were transported to the kill or scavenge site from nearly four miles away, A. afarensis must have valued the sharp objects. What's unclear, however, is whether or not the ancient hominids made the stones themselves, or just picked already sharp stones up from the ground.
Lead author Shannon McPherron told Discovery News that he and his team plan to next look for "the locations on the landscape where A. afarensis (likely) broke one stone with another to create a sharp-edged flake."
"This activity leaves behind debris, unused flakes and perhaps the stone from which the flakes were removed, which we can recognize as evidence of stone tool manufacture," said McPherron, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Alemseged added that "meat consumption has definitely contributed greatly to tool technology."
Archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town agrees. In a separate Nature commentary, Braun wrote that improved butchery methods "may have set the stage for a greater reliance on animal tissues and more sophisticated stone-tool production."
Since fossils for A. afarensis have been found in Kenya and Tanzania, in addition to Ethiopia, Braun is hopeful that future research can determine if this species was "a habitual tool user" or not.
"More surprises surely await us in the fossil-rich sedimentary basins of East Africa," Braun concluded.
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/early-human-tool-use.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 25-08-2010 at 10:56
Scientists discover oldest evidence of stone tool use and meat-eating among huma
Scientists discover oldest evidence of stone tool use and meat-eating among human ancestors
These two bones from Dikika, which have been dated to roughly 3.4 million years ago, provide the oldest known evidence of stone tool use among human ancestors. Both of the cut-marked bones came from mammals -- one is a rib fragment from a cow-sized mammal, and the other is a femur shaft fragment from a goat-sized mammal. Both bones are marred by cut, scrape, and percussion marks. Credit: Dikika Research Project, California Academy of Sciences
The evolutionary stories of the Swiss Army Knife and the Big Mac just got a lot longer. An international team of scientists led by Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously documented. While working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Alemseged's "Dikika Research Project" team found fossilized bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use—cut marks inflicted while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat. The research is reported in the August 12 issue of the journal Nature.
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"This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behavior for our ancestors," says Alemseged, Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. "Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making—a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones."
Although the butchered bones may not look like particularly noteworthy fossils to the lay person, Alemseged can hardly contain his excitement when he describes them. "This find will definitely force us to revise our text books on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years," he explains. "These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity."
Scientists discover oldest evidence of stone tool use and meat-eating among human ancestors
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These two cutmarks were made about 3.4 million years ago, when an Australopithecus afarensis carved meat off the rib bone of a cow-sized mammal. Credit: Dikika Research Project, California Academy of Sciences
Until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering with stone tools came from Bouri, Ethiopia, where several cut-marked bones were dated to about 2.5 million years ago. The oldest known stone tools, dated to around the same time, were found at nearby Gona, Ethiopia. Although no hominin fossils were found in direct association with the Gona tools or the Bouri bones, an upper jaw from an early Homo species dated to about 2.4 million years ago was found at nearby Hadar, and most paleoanthropologists believe the tools were made and used only by members of the genus Homo.
The new stone-tool-marked fossil animal bones from Dikika have been dated to approximately 3.4 million years ago and were found just 200 meters away from the site where Alemseged's team discovered "Selam" in 2000. Dubbed "Lucy's Daughter" by the international press, Selam was a young Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago and represents the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date.
"After a decade of studying Selam's remains and searching for additional clues about her life, we can now add a significant new detail to her story," Alemseged notes. "In light of these new finds, it is very likely that Selam carried stone flakes and helped members of her family as they butchered animal remains."
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The location and age of the butchered bones from Dikika clearly indicate that a member of the A. afarensis species inflicted the cut marks, since no other hominin lived in this part of Africa at this time. These fossils provide the first direct evidence that this species, which includes such famous individuals as Lucy and Selam, used stone tools.
"Now, when we imagine Lucy walking around the east African landscape looking for food, we can for the first time imagine her with a stone tool in hand and looking for meat," says Dr. Shannon McPherron, archeologist with the Dikika Research Project and research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones, animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source of food. This type of behavior sent us down a path that later would lead to two of the defining features of our species—carnivory and tool manufacture and use."
To determine the age of the butchered bones, project geologist Dr. Jonathan Wynn relied on a very well documented and dated set of volcanic deposits in the Dikika area. These same deposits were previously used to determine Selam's age, and they are well known from nearby Hadar, where Lucy was found. The cut-marked bones at Dikika were sandwiched between volcanic deposits that have been securely dated to 3. 24 and 3.42 million years ago, and they were located much closer to the older sediment. "We can very securely say that the bones were marked by stone tools between 3.42 and 3.24 million years ago, and that within this range, the date is most likely 3.4 million years ago," says Wynn, a geologist at the University of South Florida.
Both of the cut-marked bones discovered at Dikika came from mammals—one is a rib fragment from a cow-sized mammal, and the other is a femur shaft fragment from a goat-sized mammal. Both bones are marred by cut, scrape, and percussion marks. Microscope and elemental analysis using secondary electron imaging and energy dispersive x-ray spectrometry demonstrated that these marks were created before the bones fossilized, meaning that recent damage can be eliminated as the cause of the marks. Additionally, the marks were consistent with the morphology of stone-inflicted cuts rather than tooth-inflicted marks. Dr. Hamdallah Bearat from the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University determined that one cut-mark even contained a tiny, embedded piece of rock that was likely left behind during the butchering process.
"Most of the marks have features that indicate without doubt that they were inflicted by stone tools," explains Dr. Curtis Marean from the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, who helped with the mark identifications. "The range of actions that created the marks includes cutting and scraping for the removal of flesh, and percussion on the femur for breaking it to access marrow."
While it is clear that the Australopithecines at Dikika were using sharp-edged stones to carve meat from bones, it is impossible to tell from the marks alone whether they were making their tools or simply finding and using naturally sharp rocks. So far, the research team has not found any flaked stone tools at Dikika from this early time period. This could indicate that the Dikika residents were simply opportunistic about finding and using sharp-edged stones. However, the sedimentary environment at the site suggests another potential explanation.
"For the most part, the only stones we see coming from these ancient sediments at Dikika are pebbles too small for making tools," says McPherron. "The hominins at this site probably carried their stone tools with them from better raw material sources elsewhere. One of our goals is to go back and see if we can find these locations, and look for evidence that at this early date they were actually making, not just using, stone tools."
Regardless of whether or not Selam and her relatives were making their own tools, the fact that they were using them to access nutritious meat and marrow from large mammals would have had wide-ranging implications for A. afarensis both physically and behaviorally.
"We now have a greater understanding of the selective forces that were responsible for shaping the early phases of human history," says Alemseged. "Once our ancestors started using stone tools to help them scavenge from large carcasses, they opened themselves up to risky competition with other carnivores, which would likely have required them to engage in an unprecedented level of teamwork."
While many questions remain about the history of tool use, tool making, and related dietary changes among human ancestors, this discovery adds a rich new chapter to the story—a story that is deeply relevant to what makes us unique as a species.
Provided by California Academy of Sciences
http://www.physorg.com/news200736968.html
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coldrum
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| Posted 25-08-2010 at 10:57
Researchers in Israel Find World's First Steak Knives
Archaeologists digging in a cave in Israel have found what looks to be the world's first cutlery: tiny stone knives dating back at least 200,000 years that would have been used to cut meat during a meal.
Made of flint, the ancient knives are about the size and shape of a quarter. But these puny bits of stone have two razor-sharp edges and two dull edges. That made them easy to hold between two fingers and safe to wield close to the mouth, says Tel-Aviv University's Ran Barkai, leader of the team that made the finding.
Hand-held archaeological minuscule flake from Qesem Cave, believed to be the world's first cutlery.
Courtesy Ran Barkai
This flint flake that scientists argue was used to cut meat was found in Israel. A large batch of them was found around a central fireplace containing burned animal bones.
The miniature knives were the Stone Age equivalent of disposable tableware. They would've been used for a short time and then tossed aside, because they couldn't hold an edge, says the University of Pennsylvania's Harold Dibble, who has studied miniature stone tools from another archaeological site.
The idea that these utensils were used for eating "makes perfect sense," he says.
Procuring this mini-cutlery was almost as easy as running out to the supermarket. An early human who needed a steak knife at dinner had only to grab a stone, often a discarded tool, and tap it just so. (Barkai calls it "recycling.")
Barkai's team found marks on the tiny utensils showing they had made delicate cuts through soft meat, rather than hacking through bone.
Barkai also reproduced the mini-knives himself from stones he found in the cave. His colleague Cristina Lemorini of the University of Roma-La Sapienza then tested Barkai's replicas by cutting up a sheep carcass. The 21st-century versions easily sliced through muscles, skin and tendons.
Adding to the scientists' suspicion that the knives were used while eating, a large concentration of them was found around a central fireplace containing burned animal bones. Previous research has shown that the cave's early humans, known as hominids in scientific jargon, cooked their meat. They mostly ate deer but also dined on the odd horse or rhinoceros.
"These hominids were barbecuing ... and then maybe eating the cooked meat while sitting around the fire," Barkai says.
The finding will be published in the September issue of the journal Antiquity.
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/researchers-in-israel-find-worlds-first-steak-knives/19563689
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