DNA analysis of Denisovan molars offers more clues about ancient human relative (Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members from Germany, Canada and Russia has conducted a DNA analysis of two molars found in the Denisova caves in Siberia shedding more light on the origins of the Denisovans—a hominin species that lived or at least visited Siberia approximately a hundred thousand years ago. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes their analysis and what they have learned about the extinct species. The existence of the Denisovans was discovered back in 2008 when a team of scientists found a finger bone and a tooth in the Denisova caves in the Russian mountains. The size of the teeth suggests that the Denisovans had very large jaws and more likely resembled Neanderthals than humans. The Denisovans are considered to be cousins of modern humans, occupying a branch of the family tree-but, like the Neanderthal, they eventually disappeared. Explore further: Human evolution has become multi-colored
Rebel Paleolithic artist breaks the rules, draws a campsite 13,800 years ago Take a good look at the image above: You could be seeing one of the earliest depictions of a hunter-gatherer camp ever discovered. The ancient engraving dates back about 13,800 years to the upper Paleolithic era. It was unearthed at the Moli del Salt site in Spain, about 30 miles west of Barcelona. If you look closely, you can make out what look like seven semi-circular huts that were drawn on a slab of stone, probably with another rock or a pointed flint artifact. Archaeologists say the find is especially exciting because it breaks the rules of prehistoric art, which generally follow very strict stylistic and thematic conventions, and usually involve animals, non-figurative signs and the occasional human figure. "We think that someone was experimenting with new themes, focusing for the first time on the social realm," said Marcos Garcia-Diez and Manuel Vaquero, co-authors of a paper describing the engraving published in PLOS One.
What can a 45,000-year-old mammoth carcass say about human history? Living above the Arctic circle provides a suite of challenges for humans, particularly during the last Ice Age. They would have struggled to keep warm and gather the necessary resources to survive the cold landscape, or so we thought. New research suggests anatomically modern humans may have lived remarkably far North in central Siberia as early as 45,000 years ago, a feat that would mean our ancestors were more technologically advanced than we previously believed. And this finding could have significant implications for the history of human migration, including the peopling of the Americas, according to a new paper published Friday in the journal Science. Scientists announce this discovery based on clues from a strange source: a dead mammoth. "This is well-supported evidence for humans being that far North at 45,000 years ago," study lead author Vladimir Pitulko tells The Christian Science Monitor in an interview. A mammoth discovery of human adaptability And it wasn't just the Arctic.
Study: Chopping food, eating meat helped ancient humans evolve Slicing up a mound of raw food isn’t just a tedious chore on the way to dinner. Chopped food, along with an embrace of meat, helped make us human, new evidence suggests. Both meat consumption and the Paleolithic version of kitchen prep paved the way for major changes in the anatomy of ancient humans, according to a study in this week’s Nature. Those anatomical changes not only made early humans look more like the Homo sapiens we know today, but also may have helped them run and talk. Previous research highlighted cooking as a turning point in the evolution of our species. “Cooking is important, but it’s not the whole story,” says Harvard University’s Daniel Lieberman, an author of the new study. The paper also stands out for depending on locally sourced goat carcasses. The volunteers’ teeth couldn’t break down the tough goat. The scientists calculate that adding meat, especially sliced meat, to the diet allowed early humans to tuck away just as many calories with less jaw action.
Skara Brae ancient settlement 2 clicks please History can a bit dry and boring at times. It seems to exist solely between the musty pages of old books. But once in awhile, you come across a bit of history that appears to come alive the moment you discover it. That’s how I felt when I heard about this place. In a small bay in Scotland, a well-kept secret is hidden among the green hills. Thousands of years ago, it was a bustling society. Nestled in the mossy, green hills on the Orkney Islands off Scotland is a secret older than the great pyramids of Egypt. flickr/lizsmith At first, it might not look like much, but the fact is, this is a unique and magical place. flickr/readingtom Because within this rolling hillside is a perfectly preserved prehistoric village called Skara Brae. flickr/jonlord The winter of 1850 hit Orkney hard. flickr/philnorton The settlement consists of eight stone houses and was inhabited between roughly 3180 and 2500 B.C., makingSkara Brae one of the oldest agriculture villages in the UK. flickr/raffsid flickr/suejackson
Ancestral Lines 2 clicks please Evolutionary biologists use a cladogram, the treelike diagram of evolutionary branches or clades, to organize species into lines of evolutionary descent across time. Biologists use three types of evidence to deduce evolutionary connections: genetics, morphology, and geologic dating. (Behavior, normally a key part of evolutionary studies, can only be inferred in extinct species — for example, by examining the ecology in which the species flourished and the species adaptations for eating and locomotion.) Analyses of primate fossils and the genetic relatedness of living primates converge to the conclusion that humans and chimpanzees branched from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. The rest of the puzzle must be deduced from morphology (physical form, as reconstructed from the bones) and geologic dating. The cladogram for human evolution shown above currently lacks key pieces of evidence. These are some of the most interesting but currently unanswered questions about human descent:
Study: Early Men and Women Were Equal in Tribal Society Inequality among men and women is a feature of our post-agrarian society, not a quality inherent to earlier hunter-gatherer groups, according to new analyses done by anthropologists at University College London. The study opposes the notion that sexual equality is merely a goal of modern society that is mostly free of concerns over resource scarcity. The researchers examined how contemporary hunter-gatherer groups formed social relationships and self-organized, one in the Congo and one in the Philippines, "including kinship relations, movement between camps, and residence patterns, through hundreds of interviews." They found that women had as much say as men concerning the group's most important decision, such as when to move on from an area and with whom the groups should socialize. Specifically, anthropologists believe women's influence resulted in larger and more diverse social networks — a quality that was surely advantageous form an evolutionary perspective.
Neanderthals Built Mystery Cave Rings 175,000 Years Ago They painted magnificent cave paintings. They mastered fire and used tools. And now we know they constructed complex buildings deep within subterranean caves, and they did it more than 175,000 years ago. A team of archaeologists led by Jacques Jaubert at the University of Bordeaux in France has just completed an archaeological examination of a mysterious find: the rubble of two ancient Neanderthal-made buildings meticulously crafted from stalagmites. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below "Because Neanderthals were the only [human-related primate] group present in western Europe at that time, the discovery provides the first directly dated evidence for Neanderthals' construction abilities. 3D reconstruction of the structures in the Bruniquel Cave. Xavier MUTH - Get in Situ, Archéotransfert, Archéovision -SHS-3D, base photographique Pascal Mora The scientists found more than 400 stalagmites of similar size meticulously stacked to form the walls of two mysterious circular structures.
Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Creations of Neandertals, Not Modern Humans Hand stencils in El Castillo cave are older than previously thought. Image: courtesy of Pedro Saura In a cave in northwestern Spain called El Castillo, ancient artists decorated a stretch of limestone wall with dozens of depictions of human hands. They seem to have made the images by pressing a hand to the wall and then blowing red pigment on it, creating a sort of stencil. Determining the ages of cave paintings—from the hands in the Panel de las Manos in El Castillo to the mammoths and other Ice Age beasts that adorn the walls of Chauvet in France—has proved a difficult thing to do. Now researchers writing in the June 15 issue of Science report that recent advances in another radiometric technique called uranium-thorium dating have allowed them to circumvent the problems of radiocarbon dating and determine minimum ages for the paintings. Intriguingly, some of the paintings were significantly older than suspected. Cave painting wouldn’t be the first sign of Neandertal sophistication.
Where Did Agriculture Begin? Oh Boy, It's Complicated The Zagros Mountain range, which lies at the border between Iran and Iraq, was home to some of the world's earliest farmers. JTB Photo/UIG via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption JTB Photo/UIG via Getty Images The Zagros Mountain range, which lies at the border between Iran and Iraq, was home to some of the world's earliest farmers. JTB Photo/UIG via Getty Images Sometime around 12,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors began trying their hand at farming. First, they grew wild varieties of crops like peas, lentils and barley and herded wild animals like goats and wild oxen. The earliest farmers lived in the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East including modern-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Palestine, southeastern Turkey and western Iran. But a new study suggests something different — that multiple groups of people in the Fertile Crescent started agriculture, and these groups were genetically distinct from one another. Courtesy of Joachim Burger/JGU Mainz
We were all told they walked over a land bridge from Asia. Now that theory’s being called into question. You were probably told in school about how the first people reached North America over ten thousand years ago. The explanation most history or social studies teacher’s gave was that they crossed what is known as the Bering Strait Land Bridge (the Beringa) from Siberia to Alaska. This has been the prevailing theory since the 1930s. There is DNA evidence to support that people did in fact cross the Beringa and may even have lived on it for thousands of years, following herds and making their way little by little. A new study in the journal Nature gives striking evidence that casts it into doubt. The “Clovis First Model.” Radiocarbon dating puts the first human groups in North America as early as 15,000 years ago. With these cores in hand, researchers were able to determine the exact conditions along the Bering Strait route including what plants and animals, algae, pollen, and more lived there at the time. But the only plant life on the Beringa were patches of grass. Clovis spear heads.
Denmark - History - Prehistory Denmark 6. History 6.1 Prehistory [Main menu] - [Previous paragraph] - [Next paragraph] The Stone Age (until c. 1700 BC) The Palaeolithic Period (until c. 9300 BC). The Mesolithic Period (c. 9300-3900 BC). The Neolithic Period (3900-1700 BC). A picture of a changing lifestyle emerges with the finds from the Single Grave Culture (the period 2800-2400 BC). The last period of the Stone Age, 2400-1700 BC, known as the Dagger period, coincided with the early Bronze Age in the British Isles and Central Europe. The Bronze Age (c. 1700-500 BC) The domed grave mounds from the early Bronze Age still characterise the Danish landscape. Rock carvings and bronze sculptures, such as the Sun Chariot from Trundholm, provide an insight into the religious beliefs of the Bronze Age. The Iron Age (c. 500 BC-750 AD) Our knowledge of the earliest Iron Age is very limited. [Top of document] - [Main menu] - [Previous] - [Next] © The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Australia was colonized by a single group 50,000 years ago | Ars Technica There are two central mysteries about human history in Australia. First, when did people arrive on the world's southernmost inhabitable continent? And second, how did they colonize it? By studying the mitochondrial DNA of Aboriginal Australians from all across the continent, University of Adelaide biologist Alan Cooper and his team were able to trace the population back to its most recent common ancestor, a woman who lived between 43,000 and 47,000 years ago. At the time that this group was walking into Australia, the continent was joined to New Guinea in a larger landmass called Sahul. But as Aboriginals were colonizing Australia, something relatively unusual happened. That's not what the genetic data tells us, however. Amazingly, it seems that from around this time [of colonization] the basic population patterns have persisted for the next 50,000 years—showing that communities have remained in discrete geographical regions. Haplogroups and the Stolen Generations Nomadic sedentism
DNA Samples Reveal That Aboriginals Have Been in Australia For About 50,000 Years Already The first people appeared in Australia about 50,000 years ago and Aboriginal people have been present in the same regions continuously since then. This was revealed by DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s. These findings are the first detailed genetic map of Aboriginal Australia before the arrival of Europeans and confirm the Aboriginal communities’ strong connection to the country. The University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), in partnership with the South Australian Museum, has recently launched the Aboriginal Heritage Project and these are the first results from that study. In a series of remarkable anthropological expeditions across Australia from 1928 to the 1970s, 111 hair samples were collected and these are now part of the South Australian Museum’s unparalleled collection of hair samples. Mitochondrial DNA is used to trace maternal ancestry. Kaurna Elder, Mr. Save