Anthropology
The nearly complete skeleton of a female hominid known as ‘ Little Foot’ discovered in a South African cave more than 20 years ago was finally freed from her stone casing, and researchers have announced that she is “3.67-million-year-old” and belonged to a species of her own.…
…The earliest dog remains found in North America were buried nearly 10,000 years ago in what is now Illinois. By 7,000 years ago, other bones show that “we have lots of dogs all over the place…” But then, sometime after the 15th century, these ancient dogs disappeared.…
Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala… Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications. … thought to have been home to millions more people than other research had previously suggested.…
A powerful controlled explosion designed to demolish a giant limestone boulder blocking the path of the road exposed the entrance to a giant limestone cave which had been sealed for over 200,000 years.… "Qesem Cave…"
"It's a very special cave," he said. "It reflects an unknown stage in the history of humanity. We don’t know which type of human lived here. We know that they acted differently than everyone else who lived in this area before them. They seem like a different type of human. They didn't just behave differently, but they also looked differently. If we aren't mistaken, they were more similar to us ( humans today), and not their forefathers the Homo erectus.…"
"This site is approximately 400,000 years old. If you look at what (the early humans) did here, on their hunting strategies, the way they made their tools and how they prepared their food, it points to one of the most important changes in the history of mankind.…
…This intellectual revolution has infected anthropology (among many fields) with a dangerous, self-contradictory nihilism that rejects the possibility of objective Truth toward which we may move and posits many different truths held by different peoples — all equally valid. Yet they behave as if their belief in many truths must be treated as The Truth that must not be questioned.
Anthropologists insist on the relativity of knowledge, except when it comes to their own statements, which they take to be The Absolute Truth.…
…Conducting the first large-scale, genome-wide analyses of ancient human remains from the Near East, an international team led by Harvard Medical School has illuminated the genetic identities and population dynamics of the world’s first farmers.
The study reveals three genetically distinct farming populations living in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture 12,000 to 8,000 years ago: two newly described groups in Iran and the Levant and a previously reported group in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.
The findings… also suggest that agriculture spread in the Near East at least in part because existing groups invented or adopted farming technologies, rather than because one population replaced another.…
…An unknown hominin species that bred with early human ancestors when they migrated from Africa to Australasia has been identified through genome mapping of living humans.
The genome analysis also questions previous findings that modern humans populated Asia in two waves from their origin in Africa, finding instead a common origin for all populations in the Asia-Pacific region, dating back to a single out-of-Africa migration event.…
…Archaeologists in Texas have found a set of 16,700-year-old tools which are among the oldest discovered in the West. Until now, it was believed that the culture that represented the continent’s first inhabitants was the Clovis culture. However, the discovery of the ancient tools now challenges that theory, providing evidence that human occupation precedes the arrival of the Clovis people by thousands of years.…
The evolutionary “out of Africa” theory—which holds that humans evolved in Africa and split off on different evolutionary paths as they migrated away from that continent—has been given yet another jolt by new DNA studies which have called the dating behind the belief into question.… involves measurements of the rate at which children show DNA changes not seen in their parents—the so-called “mutation rate”… authors calculate the last common ancestor for human mitochondrial lineages to around 160,000 years ago.…
…there remains hundreds of tribes cut off from global civilization, who, in many ways, live as our ancestors did thousands of years ago.… For decades, state and international policy has largely protected these tribes, granting them the right to live their lives in isolation.… In a recent issue of the journal PLoS ONE, Professor Robert Walker, Dr. Dylan Kesler, and Professor Kim Hill argue that no-contact policies should not ignore the well being of the very societies they are designed to protect.… "If populations are small and declining… then current policy approaches should be deemed ineffective…" The trio also insists that the desire to leave cultures isolated is misguided. "In our experiences from interviews with people after contact, there is a unanimous consensus that people stay isolated mostly because of fear of extermination and slavery. People want to trade, particularly for access to steel machetes and axes, and they crave exposure to new ideas and new opportunities. Humans are a gregarious species that intrinsically desire and benefit from outside interactions with other groups."
The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. …
…Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.
The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University.…
…three and a half years after discovering that Ötzi was murdered, experts have now found discovered was suffering from a nasty stomach bug. It is this bug which has shed fascinating new light on the migration patterns of prehistoric man, showing that Europe’s first farmers are most likely to have come from the Middle East.…
New evidence from a recently-published scientific study indicates that humans started crafting stone-tipped weapons 200,000 years earlier than previously believed. …previously attributed to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals around 300,000 years ago, but the new findings indicate that a shared ancestor between the two, Homo heidelbergensis, was practicing the craft 500,000 years ago.…
Meet Homo naledi, the newest member of the human family. Its physical traits are weird, its circumstances are unique and its age is totally unknown… engaged in surprisingly sophisticated behavior for its brain size…
Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.…
Instead of localising the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region in Africa, the researchers discovered a complex record of interbreeding and genetic stratification, challenging the view of evolution in one place. … According to the study, the Khoe-San diverged from other populations more than 100,000 years ago but the genetic structure within the populations dated back to about 35,000 years ago, when it split into a northern and a southern group. [35Kya. There's that number again.]
Researchers have discovered an elaborate 44,000-year-old Neanderthal house in Molodova, eastern Ukraine, made from mammoth bones, delicately decorated with carvings and pigments.... suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time....
Satellite pictures in January revealed this community was living near the border with Peru. A flight expedition over the area in April confirmed that they are about 200 in numbers.... The community and its four straw-roofed huts were spotted in the Javari Valley, which is believed to be hiding around 2000 uncontacted tribes in the world....
A newfound vulture-bone flute is likely the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument, a new study says. The 40,000-year-old flute may add to evidence that music helped do in the Neanderthals.
More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stony ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes.
"This is the first link to all humans, the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."
Researchers have made a virtual reconstruction of a female Neanderthal pelvis found in Israel. Although the size of the reconstructed birth canal shows that Neanderthal childbirth was about as difficult as in present-day humans, the shape indicates that Neanderthals retained a more primitive birth mechanism than modern humans.
The fingernail-size shells, already known from 82,000-year-old Aterian deposits in the cave, have now been found in even earlier layers. While the team is still awaiting exact dates for these layers, they believe this discovery makes them arguably the earliest shell ornaments in prehistory. ... the Aterian in Morocco dates back to at least 110,000 years ago.
the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago. It was created by Richard Neave, one of Britain's leading forensic scientists, using fossilised fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.
Anthropologists have uncovered ancient fossil footprints in Kenya dating back 1.5 million years, the oldest evidence yet that our ancestors walked like present-day humans