Friday, June 22, 2012
Newly discovered Mayan calendar goes way past 2012
Newly discovered wall writings found in Guatemala show the famed Maya
culture's obsession with cycles of time. But they also show calendars
that go well beyond 2012, the year when the vanished civilization,
according to popular culture, expected the end of the world.
""So much for the supposed end of the world," says archaeologist William
Saturno of Boston University, lead author of a study in the journal
Science, which reported the discovery on Thursday."
You read it here first, folk. No need to panic. A new discovery in
Xultun shows long-count calendar dates beyond 2012. The article has a
nice 70-second video of the investigator, and he mentions dates out to
17 baktuns, at least.
here You Go
C4 and X in America
Kashani et al 2012
Mitochondrial Haplogroup C4c: A Rare Lineage Entering
America Through the Ice-Free Corridor?
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 147:35–39 (2012)
ABSTRACT: Recent analyses of mitochondrial genomes
from Native Americans have brought the overall number
of recognized maternal founding lineages from just
four to a current count of 15. However, because of their
relative low frequency, almost nothing is known for some
of these lineages. This leaves a considerable void in
understanding the events that led to the colonization of
the Americas following the Last Glacial Maximum
(LGM). In this study, we identified and completely
sequenced 14 mitochondrial DNAs belonging to one
extremely rare Native American lineage known as
haplogroup C4c. Its age and geographical distribution
raise the possibility that C4c marked the Paleo-Indian
group(s) that entered North America from Beringia
through the ice-free corridor between the Laurentide
and Cordilleran ice sheets. The similarities in ages
and geographical distributions for C4c and the previ-
ously analyzed X2a lineage provide support to the
scenario of a dual origin for Paleo-Indians. Taking into
account that C4c is deeply rooted in the Asian portion
of the mtDNA phylogeny and is indubitably of Asian
origin, the finding that C4c and X2a are characterized
by parallel genetic histories definitively dismisses the
controversial hypothesis of an Atlantic glacial entry
route into North America.
Bering Land Bridge 2000 years Earlier Than Thought!
A study of lake sediment cores from Sanak Island in the Gulf of Alaska
suggest deglaciation may have happened 2000 years earlier than
thought. The Monte Verde site in Chile and perhaps from Huaca Prieta
in Peru date to 14,200 years ago. 22 radiocarbon cores were utilized.
This earlier deglaciation would have allowed movement into the
Americas from Siberia 17,000 years ago. Sites at Monte Verde, Chile,
and perhaps Huaca Prieta, Peru, date back 14,000 to 14,200 years ago.
Pollen was also found indicating a dry tundra 16,300 years ago.
The report was published in the peer reviewed Quaternary Science
Reviews.
Eurekalert has the report here;
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/osu-ndd061912.php
Mike Ruggeri
Breaking Pre-Clovis and Clovis News
http://goo.gl/IZMWj
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Liujiang Homo sapiens fossil Skull S
by B. Bower
21st December 2002
If southern China's Liujiang skull is really more than 100,000 years old, this modern Homo sapiens fossil will shake up theories of human evolution. In 1958, farm workers digging in a cave in southern China's Liujiang County discovered several human bones including a skull. Relying on its resemblance to securely dated human fossils in Japan, scientists assigned this Homo sapiens skull an age of 20,000 to 30,000 years. The Liujiang finds may be much older than that, according to a report in the December Journal of Human Evolution. The fossils probably came from sediment dating to 111,000 to 139,000 years ago, says a team led by geologist Guanjun Shea of Nanjing (China) Normal University. He and his co-workers add that it's still possible that the Liujiang discoveries came either from a cave deposit dating from around 68,000 years ago or from one dating to more than 153,000 years ago. If any of these estimates pan out, "the Liujiang [specimen] is revealed as one of the earliest modern humans in East Asia," the team concludes. The presence of modern humans in this part of the world 100,000 years ago or more would roughly coincide with their earliest fossil dates in Africa and the Middle East. Evidence of such ancient roots for Homo sapiens in China creates problems for the influential Out of Africa theory of human evolution, Shen's group says. That theory holds that modern humanity originated in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and then spread elsewhere, replacing other Homo species. If the Liujiang dates were confirmed, Out of Africa adherents would need to find older African Homo sapiens fossils to show extremely quick migration from Africa to eastern Asia. The new dates suggest that more-primitive-looking Chinese Homo fossils that date to 150,000 to 100,000 years ago represent a lineage that coexisted with modem humans, Shen proposes. Scientific accounts from 1959 and 1965 of the Liujiang discoveries guided the determination of the fossils' likely burial site. Shen's team mapped various soil deposits in the cave and calculated the age of crystallised limestone samples by using the rate of uranium decay. Uranium analyses at other sites support an ancient origin of modern humans in southern China, Shen says. Homo sapiens teeth found at two other caves in this region come from sediment that his group dates to at least 94,000 years ago. Anthropologists with divergent views about human evolution say that the new age estimate for the Liujiang skull remains preliminary. It's still uncertain how the skull got in the cave and where it was originally buried, remarks Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer, an Out of Africa proponent, says that Shen's team members need to date either the skull itself or the calcite clinging to its surface to make their case. Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor agrees. "I'd love for the Liujiang skull to be as old as Shen proposes, but we'll never know for sure without directly dating the specimen," Wolpoff holds. In his view, modern humanity evolved simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe over the past 2 million years. Shen says that he hopes to work out an agreement with Chinese officials in charge of the Liujiang skull to date the specimen directly.ource
If southern China's Liujiang skull is really more than 100,000 years old, this modern Homo sapiens fossil will shake up theories of human evolution. In 1958, farm workers digging in a cave in southern China's Liujiang County discovered several human bones including a skull. Relying on its resemblance to securely dated human fossils in Japan, scientists assigned this Homo sapiens skull an age of 20,000 to 30,000 years. The Liujiang finds may be much older than that, according to a report in the December Journal of Human Evolution. The fossils probably came from sediment dating to 111,000 to 139,000 years ago, says a team led by geologist Guanjun Shea of Nanjing (China) Normal University. He and his co-workers add that it's still possible that the Liujiang discoveries came either from a cave deposit dating from around 68,000 years ago or from one dating to more than 153,000 years ago. If any of these estimates pan out, "the Liujiang [specimen] is revealed as one of the earliest modern humans in East Asia," the team concludes. The presence of modern humans in this part of the world 100,000 years ago or more would roughly coincide with their earliest fossil dates in Africa and the Middle East. Evidence of such ancient roots for Homo sapiens in China creates problems for the influential Out of Africa theory of human evolution, Shen's group says. That theory holds that modern humanity originated in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and then spread elsewhere, replacing other Homo species. If the Liujiang dates were confirmed, Out of Africa adherents would need to find older African Homo sapiens fossils to show extremely quick migration from Africa to eastern Asia. The new dates suggest that more-primitive-looking Chinese Homo fossils that date to 150,000 to 100,000 years ago represent a lineage that coexisted with modem humans, Shen proposes. Scientific accounts from 1959 and 1965 of the Liujiang discoveries guided the determination of the fossils' likely burial site. Shen's team mapped various soil deposits in the cave and calculated the age of crystallised limestone samples by using the rate of uranium decay. Uranium analyses at other sites support an ancient origin of modern humans in southern China, Shen says. Homo sapiens teeth found at two other caves in this region come from sediment that his group dates to at least 94,000 years ago. Anthropologists with divergent views about human evolution say that the new age estimate for the Liujiang skull remains preliminary. It's still uncertain how the skull got in the cave and where it was originally buried, remarks Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer, an Out of Africa proponent, says that Shen's team members need to date either the skull itself or the calcite clinging to its surface to make their case. Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor agrees. "I'd love for the Liujiang skull to be as old as Shen proposes, but we'll never know for sure without directly dating the specimen," Wolpoff holds. In his view, modern humanity evolved simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe over the past 2 million years. Shen says that he hopes to work out an agreement with Chinese officials in charge of the Liujiang skull to date the specimen directly.ource
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Copper Age earlier than Thought in Balkans
Belgrade - Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.
The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency.
'Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,' she said.
The Copper Age marks the first stage of humans' use of metal. It is thought to have started in about the 4th millennium BC in southeastern Europe and earlier in the Middle East.
Archaeologists at the Plocnik site also found furnace and melting pots with traces of copper, suggesting the site may have been an important metal age center of the Balkans.
'All this undeniably proves that human civilization in this area produced metal in the 5th millennium BC,' archaeologist Dusan Sljivar told Beta.
The Plocnik site was discovered in 1927 and first excavations began a year later when first neolithic items were found. It is part of the Vinca culture, Europe's biggest prehistoric civilization.
Vinca culture flourished from 6th to 3rd millennium BC in present-day Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Its name came from the village Vinca on the Danube river, some 14 kilometers downstream from Belgrade.Here
Monday, June 11, 2012
Seven rock-solid careers from the Stone Age
Some great info here!
If nuclear war, the Great Recession or some other calamity turns the economy back to the Stone Age, what kind of jobs and industries will pay the bills? Archaeologists, for reasons more to do with academic curiosity than preparing for doomsday, have been hard at work looking for an answer. Click ahead to check out seven jobs and industries their research has revealed............................
Source
Archaic Admixture or Deep African Substructure on the Deinekes Blog.
Dienekes Blog
I wanted to post this as a reply on Dienekes blog but it doesn't allow for enough space.
Some people REALLY want OoA to be true despite the death bells. This is from a paper quoted in the blog linked to above:
"There is a broad agreement that the contribution of archaic Homo populations to the modern gene pool, if any, must have been very limited [33], [34]. Different lines of evidence concur to suggest that the dispersal of anatomically modern humans from Africa was accompanied by repeated founder effects [35]–[38]. If these founder effects were drastic, most or all gene genealogies should actually be shallow, and hence the occurrence of ancient splits would imply some degree of introgression from archaic human forms. However, different consequences would be expected if only mild founder effects occurred when anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa. Under these conditions, gene trees would have a strong random component, and a certain fraction thereof, even in the absence of selection, would show two highly divergent major lineages [39]. The likelihood of finding gene genealogies with a very old common ancestor and very differentiated lineages would be even higher if the source African population was subdivided and structured genetically before dispersal, which is what most studies clearly suggest [40]–[43]. These theoretical considerations are actually matched by consistent results in simulation studies [5], [34], [44] and by variation in neurocranial geometry, suggesting significant levels of geographic structure among early modern humans from Africa [6]."
This is about the stupidest thing I've ever read by someone (presumably) with a college degree. Basically it's saying that people were more geographically/sexually isolated in Africa, then they came out and were less geographically/sexually isolated. In geneology we have thousands of examples of back-migrations into Africa...noteably by DE and CF y haplogroups and M and N mtdna haplogroups. Those, by the way, are the haplogroups which most scientists say probably evolved after any Out of Africa event, outside of Africa. They are also the haplogroups of people that have the most "neanderthal" alleles in their nuclear DNA, and the highest percentage of macrocephalin D.
Of course if DE, FC, M, and N were isolated from each other in Africa, each with the same amount of archaic genes (which was significantly more than all the other Africans) before OoA,and a now extinct population was also isolated from every other population in Africa, and all those groups left Africa separately and then decided to blend which each other sometime after they got to Eurasia....then sure, you'd see these same results....as long as the population that had microcephalin D went extinct shortly after passing on the gene to one of the other OoA populations. The problem with the theory is that whether it all happened out of Africa you'd see these same results too, and we don't have to explain why populations would have isolated themselves inside Africa for 100,000 years, then gone out of Africa, and then decided not to isolate themselves from ANYBODY anymore, even coming into Africa to procreat. We don't have to explain how the one population in Africa managed to keep from passing micro D onto anyone else in Africa for 180,000 years, or how all of the other offspring of 180.000 year old mitochondrial eve negatively selected against this 990,000 year old gene...bnut then started selecting for it 37,000 years ago. Nor do we have to explain how the 70,000 year old offspring of mito eve (DE, CF, and M and N) kept archaic genes in their genome for 110,000 years when the older clades (A, B and the Ls) effectively selected them out. Also, neanderthal not having macro D tells us absolutely nothing. There are plenty of other hominids we could have gotten macro D from - homo erectus soloensis, homo lufuensis (who was making Upper Paleolithic tools 50 thousand years before us despite a grapefruit sized brain), the Red Deer Cave People, the Denisovans, and the "almost sapien sapients" who were anatomically modern modern but most likely out of our genome, such as Balangoda Man, the 109,000 year old AMHS recently found in South China, Mungo Man, and others.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line...unless of course you're deeply attached emotionally to the outdated concept of the Out of Africa model.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Archaic African Admixture
The team that found archaic genes in central Africans says the interbreeding was a lot more extensive than most other scientists are ready to concede...
Source
Redating Peking Man and Primeval Forest
This old article on the redating of Peking Man speaks of a primeval forest which may have bloccked the route from Indonesia to China.
Source
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Sarcasm Gene Selected Against in Neanderthal Hybrids?
Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin talked about sarcasm being selected in our evolution back in 2008. Though I doubt that people who didn't understand sarcasm were negatively selected across ALL peoples (I have a few friends whose ancestors must have SURELY selected against it), I'm thinking that it might have something to do with selective sweeps across genomes....
i.e. What genes help individuals to understand tonal languages, and what genes help us to interact in cultures where where tone is used more for sarcasm, emphasis, surprise, etc...
Of course neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin can't be blamed for getting that one bit wrong, though; she's only a neurophysiologist. Maybe if she had a real job like me singing Rolling Stones songs at the beach bars she'd know that about sarcasm...
SNARK
Should the Chinese get or not get sarcasm since they are heavy on the old forms of macrocephalin and ASPM?
Chinese Sarcasm
Monday, June 4, 2012
Homo erectus bilzingslebensis 300kbp in the middle of Europe with the biggest similarities to OH9.
OH9 and OH12 are home erectus that invaded Africa 1.2 mil and 600,000kbp.
LINK
Sunday, June 3, 2012
1.2 Million Year-old Tooth Found At Atapuerca, Spain
Here
Earliest Handaxes here:
Europe's oldest axes discovered
Sophisticated tool-making skills more widespread than previously thought.
Rex Dalton
Hand axes were made by early humans in Europe around 900,000 years ago.CHRISTIAN JEGOU PUBLIPHOTO DIFFUSION/ SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Hand axes from southern Spain have been dated to nearly a million years old, suggesting that advanced Stone Age tools were present in Europe far earlier than was previously believed.
Acheulian axes, which date to at least 1.5 million years ago, have been found in Africa, and similar tools at least 700,000 years old have been found in Israel and China. But in Europe, sophisticated tool-making was thought to stretch back only around 500,000 years.
Cave sediment levels that included the two axes also held what some archaeologists believe may be small tools made using the so-called Levallois technique of shaping stone, known to have existed in Europe only about 300,000 years ago.
"Up to now, no one imagined this level of tool-making was going on in Europe about a million years ago," says Michael Walker, an archaeologist at the University of Murcia who has studied the region near Granada where the axes were found.
Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis are all species known to be associated with Acheulian axes, which have two-sided cutting faces that were made of many types of stone for still-unconfirmed uses.
The Quípar cave hand-axe is the oldest dated in Europe.Michael Walker
The Iberian axes, reported in Nature1 today, were found at two sites dated to at least 760,000 and 900,000 years old, respectively. Gary Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California dated the sites using palaeomagnetic analysis, which uses known changes in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field over time.
Thomas Wynn, a cognitive evolutionary biologist from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, says: "This [find] tells us some things about these early humans' brains, like the development of spatial conception. But not much, as cognitive ability changes very, very slowly."
Age surprise
For co-author Luis Gibert, the report is the culmination of years of field studies in the Quipar Valley, where his late father, Josep Gibert Clols, pioneered research. "This is an amazing site," says Gibert.
The Quipar Valley has historically been home to a lake environment of marshes and shallow lagoons. The Solana del Zamborino and Estrecho del Quípar caves in the valley, where the axes were found, were first thought to be only about 200,000 years old.
ADVERTISEMENT
But after dates of stone flakes at a nearby location indicated they were much older, Gibert, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley centre, and Scott homed in on the caves' rich sediments.
In addition to the palaeomagnetic technique, Gibert notes that a record in rock layers of the remains of micro-mammals such as rodents, developed by Walker's team at Estrecho del Quípar, was crucial in confirming the dates. The Solana del Zamborino cave hadn't been studied in more than 30 years.
The older dates for the Spanish axes are now expected to generate new studies at other European rock shelters bearing Acheulian artefacts. But those studies may be hampered by the lack of appropriate sediments with which to identify palaeomagnetic polarity reversals, says Walker.
ReferencesHere
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)