Prehistoric human migration from Africa. Homo naledi: new species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists | Science. A huge haul of bones found in a small, dark chamber at the back of a cave in South Africa may be the remnants of a new species of ancient human relative. Explorers discovered the bones after squeezing through a fissure high in the rear wall of the Rising Star cave, 50km from Johannesburg, before descending a long, narrow chute to the chamber floor 40 metres beneath the surface. The entrance chute into the Dinaledi chamber is so tight – a mere eight inches wide – that six lightly built female researchers were brought in to excavate the bones.
Footage from their cameras was beamed along 3.5km of optic cable to a command centre above ground as they worked inside the cramped enclosure. The excavators recovered more than 1,500 pieces of bone belonging to at least 15 individuals. In this short video, the leaders of the National Geographic-funded project discuss their discovery of the “human ancestor”. The conclusion is not widely accepted by others.
DNA study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group. 18 March 2015Last updated at 14:00 ET By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News "What's fascinated historians is why over such a short space of land, the people are so different", as Pallab Ghosh reports A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK. According to the data, those of Celtic ancestry in Scotland and Cornwall are more similar to the English than they are to other Celtic groups. The study also describes distinct genetic differences across the UK, which reflect regional identities.
And it shows that the invading Anglo Saxons did not wipe out the Britons of 1,500 years ago, but mixed with them. Published in the Journal Nature, the findings emerge from a detailed DNA analysis of 2,000 mostly middle-aged Caucasian people living across the UK. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteProf Mark RobinsonOxford University Striking similarities Who do you think you are? Continue reading the main story. Neolithic-agricultural-revolution-may-have-reached-britain-2000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought-10073458. Scientific tests suggest that a major aspect of the Neolithic agricultural revolution may have reached Britain 2000 years earlier than previously thought. The research - carried out by scientists at the universities of Bradford, Birmingham and Warwick - reveal that wheat, probably already ground into flour, was being used at a Mesolithic Stone Age site in around 6000 BC.
The discovery - just published in the academic journal, Science - is likely to be viewed with some degree of consternation by many archaeologists because it completely changes accepted views of what happened in Britain (and indeed most of western Europe) in pre-Neolithic times. The species of domesticated wheat - an early form, known as einkorn - was identified by scientists from the University of Warwick, using DNA analysis.
The area was dry land 6000 years ago - but within 30 or 40 years had been permanently inundated by the sea, as a result of melting Arctic and other glaciers following the end of the Ice Age. The 4,000-year-old mystery that has finally been solved. (Picture: PRA/WikiMedia) The hieroglyphs on an ancient disc found in modern day Crete have left archaeologists and linguistics experts stumped for years… until now. Dr Gareth Owens, of the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Crete, believes that after six years of hard work involving a team of international scholars most of the mysterious words on the “Phaistos Disc” have been decoded.
The clay disc was discovered in a palace on the island of Crete in 1908 but is estimated to date back to around 1,700 BCE, according to Discovery News. Dr Owens believes the disc, which is said to possess 242 picture segments created from 45 individual symbols, represents a prayer to a Minoan “mother goddess”. Cretan hieroglyphs are one of two ancient Minoan languages that are largely yet to be deciphered - the other being known as Linear A. The languages are believed to be the origins of Linear B, which was later used by the Mycenaean civilisation - the earliest known form of ancient Greek. Ancient human bone helps date our first sex with Neanderthals | Science. An ancient leg bone found by chance on the bank of a Siberian river has helped scientists work out when early humans interbred with our extinct cousins, the Neanderthals. A local ivory carver spotted the bone sticking out of sediments while fossil hunting in 2008 along the Irtysh river near the settlement of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia.
The bone was later identified as a human femur, but researchers have learned little else about the remains until now. The importance of the find became clear when a team led by Svante Pääbo and Janet Kelso at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig ran a series of tests on the fragile material. Radiocarbon dating of pieces of the leg bone put the remains at around 45,000 years old. The team went on to extract DNA from the bone, which allowed them to reconstruct the oldest modern human genome ever.
But amid the DNA were more clues to when humans and Neanderthals reproduced. Discovery of oldest human DNA in Spanish cave sheds light on evolution | Science. Researchers have read strands of ancient DNA teased from the thigh bone of an early human who died 400,000 years ago in what is now northern Spain. The genetic material was pieced together from a clutch of cells found in bone fragments – the oldest human remains ever to yield their genetic code. The work deepens understanding of the genetics of human evolution by about 200,000 years, raising hopes that researchers can build a clearer picture of the earliest branches of the human family tree by studying the genetic make-up of fossilised remains dug up elsewhere.
"This is proof of principle that it can be done," said Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "We are now very eager to explore other sites of a similar age. " The thigh bone was among the remains of at least 28 early human ancestors found at the bottom of a vertical shaft in a cave complex in the Atapuerca mountains in northern Spain. The downside of sex with Neanderthals | Science. One question seemed to hang in the air more than any other when scientists first turned the powerful techniques of modern genetics on the fragile and damaged remains of ancient humans: did we or didn't we? Have sex with them, that is. The answer came after years of painstaking work, when material extracted from the leg of a Neanderthal and the fingerbone of a Denisovan, an apparent sister species, yielded readable DNA. It turned out that most of us have some of their genes.
The Neanderthals contributed up to 4% of modern Eurasian genomes, while the Denisovans contributed roughly 4-6% of modern Melanesian genomes. That doesn't happen by holding hands. And so the scene was set. But the question of whether our ancestors mated with these other human-like groups was always just the starting point for a line of inquiry. A glimpse of the legacy of those ancient encounters is revealed in a study reported today in the US journal, Science. But the scientists think there was a downside. Is this the stomach-turning truth about what the Neanderthals ate? | Science | The Observer.
It was the tell-tale tartar on the teeth that told the truth. Or at least, that is what it appeared to do. Researchers – after studying calcified plaque on Neanderthal fossil teeth found in El Sidrón cave in Spain – last year concluded that members of this extinct human species cooked vegetables and consumed bitter-tasting medicinal plants such as chamomile and yarrow. These were not brainless carnivores, in other words. These were smart and sensitive people capable of providing themselves with balanced diets and of treating themselves with health-restoring herbs, concluded the researchers, led by Karen Hardy at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona.
Our vision of these long-extinct people needs adjusting, they argued. But now this tale of ancient tartar has taken a new twist with two researchers at London's Natural History Museum challenging the Barcelona group's conclusions. This point is backed by Stringer. Skull of Homo erectus throws story of human evolution into disarray | Science. The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution. Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years old.
Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks. The latest fossil is the only intact skull ever found of a human ancestor that lived in the early Pleistocene, when our predecessors first walked out of Africa. Other researchers said the fossil was an extraordinary discovery. New human species identified from Kenya fossils. 8 August 2012Last updated at 13:06 ET By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News A new species of human: One of several co-existing in Africa two million years ago Researchers studying fossils from northern Kenya have identified a new species of human that lived two million years ago. The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa.
The research adds to a growing body of evidence that runs counter to the popular perception that there was a linear evolution from early primates to modern humans. The research has been published in the journal Nature. Anthropologists have discovered three human fossils that are between 1.78 and 1.95 million years old. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Nature was developing different human prototypes only one of which, our species, was ultimately successful” End QuoteProfessor Chris StringerNatural History Museum, London The March of Progress had many dead ends.
Blow to multiple human species idea. 17 October 2013Last updated at 14:03 ET By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News The 1.8 million-year-old skull is the most complete hominid skull ever found The idea that there were several different human species walking the Earth two million years ago has been dealt a blow.
Instead, scientists say early human fossils found in Africa and Eurasia may have been part of the same species. Writing in the journal Science, the team says that Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus are all part of a single evolving lineage that led to modern humans. But others in the field reject this. A team looked at the most complete hominid skull ever found, which was uncovered in Dmanisi, Georgia. It had a small braincase, large teeth and a long face, characteristics it shares with H. habilis. The 1.8-million-year old skull comes from a site that has given up the biggest collection of well-preserved early-human remains known anywhere in the world.
The skull had a very small braincase. Ancestry5_large.jpg (JPEG Image, 3000 × 1536 pixels) - Scaled (41%) The Greeks who worship the ancient gods. 19 June 2013Last updated at 20:26 ET By Matthew Brunwasser PRI's The World, Mount Olympus The summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it's a special time for people in Greece who worship the country's pre-Christian gods.
"I love the energy this place has," says Exsekias Trivoulides who has pitched his tent on what he considers to be the holy site of Mount Olympus. Trivoulides is a sculptor who studied art history and classics, and these days, he is living his passion. Along with a few thousand others he is taking part in the Prometheia festival, which celebrates the ancient Greek hero Prometheus, who helped humans by stealing fire from the gods. It's the most important annual festival for followers of The Return of the Hellenes - a movement trying to bring back the religion, values, philosophy and way of life of ancient Greece, more than 16 centuries after it was replaced by Christianity.
The 12 Olympians. How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect. Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species. This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species. The chimpanzee and bonobo, formerly called the “pygmy chimpanzee,” are the two species most closely related to humans in the evolutionary tree.
“The similarity in the form and function of the gestures in a human infant, a baby chimpanzee and a baby bonobo was remarkable,” said Patricia Greenfield, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and co-author of the study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology. Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. Why did the Neanderthals die out? | Science. The puzzle is one of the greatest surrounding our species. On a planet that bristled with different types of human being, including Neanderthals and the Hobbit-like folk of Flores, only one is left today: Homo sapiens. Our current solo status on Earth is therefore an evolutionary oddity – though it is not clear when our species became Earth's only masters, nor is it clear why we survived when all other versions of humanity died out.
Did we kill off our competitors, or were the others just poorly adapted and unable to react to the extreme climatic fluctuations that then beset the planet? These key issues are to be tackled this week at a major conference at the British Museum, in London, called When Europe was covered by ice and ash. At the meeting scientists will reveal results from a five-year research programme using modern dating techniques to answer these puzzles. Using radiocarbon technology to date remains that are 40,000 years old has always been tricky. Ape-like feet 'found in study of museum visitors' Scientists have discovered that about one in thirteen people have flexible ape-like feet. A team studied the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science. The results show differences in foot bone structure similar to those seen in fossils of a member of the human lineage from two million years ago.
It is hoped the research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, will establish how that creature moved. Apes like the chimpanzee spend a lot of their time in trees, so their flexible feet are essential to grip branches and allow them to move around quickly - but how most of us ended up with more rigid feet remains unclear. Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University and a colleague asked the museum visitors to walk barefoot and observed how they walked by using a mechanised carpet that was able to analyse several components of the foot. Most of us have very rigid feet, helpful for stability, with stiff ligaments holding the bones in the foot together. Stonehenge builders travelled from far, say researchers. Ancient migration: Genes link Australia with India. Lock of hair pins down early migration of Aborigines. Invention of cooking made having a bigger brain an asset for humans | Science. Humans hunted for meat 2 million years ago | Science | The Observer.
Origin of Human Intelligence --"Linked to a Genetic Accident 500 Million Years Ago" Neolithic discovery: why Orkney is the centre of ancient Britain | Science | The Observer. DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed 'X-woman' Lost cities & ancient mysteries of ...