Archaeologists unearth 5,000-year-old 'third-gender' caveman. Archaeologists investigating a 5,000-year-old Copper Age grave in the Czech Republic believe they may have unearthed the first known remains of a gay or transvestite caveman, reports the Telegraph. The man was apparently buried as if he were a woman, an aberrant practice for an ancient culture known for its strict burial procedures. Since the grave dates to between 2900 and 2500 BC, the man would have been a member of the Corded Ware culture, a late Stone Age and Copper Age people named after the unique kind of pottery they produced.
Men in this culture were traditionally buried lying on their right side with their heads pointing west, but this man was instead buried on his left side with his head pointing east, which is how women were typically buried. "From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova. A possible new link in human lineage -- all from a little finger. The pinkie fossil was found in 2008 in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains… (Johannes Krause / Associated…) DNA from a 40,000-year-old pinkie finger, belonging to a child and found in a cave in Siberia, indicates that the bone is from a previously unknown family of human relatives that lived among Neanderthals and modern humans, German researchers reported Wednesday.
The discovery, if confirmed by research already underway, would mark the first time that an entirely new species of hominid has been identified solely on the basis of DNA sequencing, the team reported online in the journal Nature. It also suggests that other currently unknown species could be similarly identified. With the recent, and still controversial, discovery of the Hobbit-like species Homo floresiensis that survived in Indonesia until about 13,000 years ago, the evidence now indicates that at least four species of human-like creatures walked the Earth at the same time.
Thomas.maugh@ latimes.com. First humans arrived in Britain 250,000 years earlier than thoug. Archaeologists explain how flint tools and other artefacts found on the Norfolk coast reveal how the first Britons lived. Video: Nature Link to video: Flint tools bring the first Britons to life A spectacular haul of ancient flint tools has been recovered from a beach in Norfolk, pushing back the date of the first known human occupation of Britain by up to 250,000 years.
While digging along the north-east coast of East Anglia near the village of Happisburgh, archaeologists discovered 78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools. The stone tools were unearthed from sediments that are thought to have been laid down either 840,000 or 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain. The flints were probably left by hunter-gatherers of the human species Homo antecessor who eked out a living on the flood plains and marshes that bordered an ancient course of the river Thames that has long since dried up. Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter. Hide captionOm Nom Nom: As we began to shy away from eating primarily fruit, leaves and nuts and began eating meat, our brains grew. We developed the capacity to use tools, so our need for large, sharp teeth and big grinders waned. From left, a cast of teeth from a chimpanzee, Australopithecus afarensis and a modern human.
William Kimbel/Institute of Human Origins Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Until, that is, we discovered meat. "What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says. Carving Up The Diet Tartare No More. JOURNEY OF MANKIND - The Peopling of the World.