Evidence of Modern Smarts in Stone Age Superglue Options

stoneageglue


Researchers who reverse-engineered an ancient superglue have found
that Stone Age people were smarter than we thought.


Making the glue, originally used on 70,000-year-old composite tools,
clearly required high-level cognitive powers. Anthropologists usually
use symbolic art as the benchmark for modern cognition, but making the
glue was an equally profound accomplishment.


“These artisans were exceedingly skilled; they understood the
properties of their adhesive ingredients, and they were able to
manipulate them knowingly,” wrote University of Witwatersrand
archaeologists in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.


The archaeologists took design cues from stone tools found during a
decade of excavation at South Africa’s Sibudu Cave site. The stones
were still covered with traces of an iron-rich red pigment and acacia
gum, a natural adhesive found in the bark of acacia trees.


Acacia gum was almost certainly used to attach the stones to wooden
shafts, but researchers have debated the pigment’s role. Some
suggested that it was decoration. The Witersrand team suspected a more
functional use.


Indeed, when they used Stone Age toolmaking techniques to attach
stones to wooden shafts with nothing but acacia gum, the tools soon
fell apart. When they added the pigment, the tools stuck together. But
making the glue required much more than simple mixing. It demanded
careful and sustained attention.


Keeping the fire at the right temperature required certain types of
wood, with a certain degree of moisture content. If glues were mixed
too close to the fire, they contained air bubbles. If too dry, they
weren’t cohesive; if too wet, they were weak. The Sibudu Cave’s Stone
Age inhabitants, wrote the researchers, were “competent chemists,
alchemists and pyrotechnologists.”


The Sibudu tools were about as old as the first possible evidence of
symbolic art, also found in South Africa. But some archaeologists say
that art, consisting of cross-hatched engravings on stone, may
represent absent-minded doodles rather than a cognitive leap. The
glues are a more convincing indication of modern intelligence.


“The glue maker needs to pay careful attention to the condition of
ingredients before and during the procedure and must be able to switch
attention between aspects of the methodology,” wrote the Witwatersrand
team. “To hold many courses of action in the mind involves
multitasking. This is one trait of modern human minds, notwithstanding
that even today, some people find multilevel operations difficult.”

Source

Journal of Human Evolution
Volume 53, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 406-419


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ochre to the test: replication studies of adhesives that may have been
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Abstract
Substantial frequencies of Middle Stone Age (MSA) lithics from Rose
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proximal and medial portions. Residue studies suggest that the tools
were hafted and that the ochre may be part of the adhesive used for
hafting the tools. Replication studies show that ochre is indeed a
useful loading agent for adhesive; however, there are other potential
loading agents. It is also possible to use unloaded plant resin, but
this agent is brittle and difficult to work with. It appears that
people living in the MSA had wide knowledge of ingredients suitable
for hafting tools, and that they chose different adhesive recipes
because of the required properties of the adhesive. Brittle, unloaded
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itself in an animal; robust adhesive keeps a spearhead safely in its
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Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 48, Issue 3, March 2005, Pages
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Abstract
Points and point fragments from Middle Stone Age layers (dated to
between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago) from Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal,
South Africa, were examined to establish whether they were used as
hafted spearheads for hunting. A multi-analytical approach was
followed, using macrofracture analysis, use-wear analysis, and residue
analysis. In addition to the analytical processes, an experimental
project tested the results of the macrofracture analysis on local raw
materials. The study shows that points from Sibudu Cave were indeed
hafted and used as hunting tools. It was further established that
plant twine was probably the preferred binding material to attach the
points to wooden hafts. Resin may have been used as an adhesive in
combination with the binding material. A detailed examination of the
ochre distribution on the points confirmed that ochre was also part of
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Finding resolution for the Howiesons Poort through the ...
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Marlize Lombard


Abstract
In this paper I present the results of a micro-residue analysis of
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in South Africa, with an age of more than 60 ka at Sibudu Cave,
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interpreted in terms of hafting and function. It is shown that most of
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perforations, from the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort layers of this
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analysis of the archaeological specimens based on present day
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Sibudu. If confirmed by future discoveries these shells would
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Cave, Western Cape Province, by Still Bay populations. The apparent
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contradict the scenario according to which cultural innovations
recorded at Middle Stone Age sites reflect a process of continuous
accretion and elaboration interpreted as the behavioural corollary of
the emergence of anatomically modern humans.


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Journal of Archaeological Science
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Stone Age bone tools from the Howiesons Poort layers, Sibudu Cave,
South Africa
Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 35, Issue 6, June 2008,
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Lucinda Backwell, Francesco d'Errico, Lyn Wadley


Abstract
Recently discovered bone implements from Middle Stone Age (MSA)
deposits at Sibudu Cave, South Africa, confirm the existence of a bone
tool industry for the Howiesons Poort (HP) technocomplex. Previously,
an isolated bone point from Klasies River provided inconclusive
evidence. This paper describes three bone tools: two points and the
end of a polished spatula-shaped piece, from unequivocal HP layers at
Sibudu Cave (with ages greater than not, vert, similar61 ka).
Comparative microscopic and morphometric analysis of the Sibudu
specimens together with bone tools from southern African Middle and
Later Stone Age (LSA) deposits, an Iron Age occupation, nineteenth
century Bushman hunter-gatherer toolkits, and bone tools used
experimentally in a variety of tasks, reveals that the Sibudu polished
piece has use-wear reminiscent of that on bones experimentally used to
work animal hides. A slender point is consistent with a pin or needle-
like implement, while a larger point, reminiscent of the single
specimen from Peers Cave, parallels large un-poisoned bone arrow
points from LSA, Iron Age and historical Bushman sites. Additional
support for the Sibudu point having served as an arrow tip comes from
backed lithics in the HP compatible with this use, and the recovery of
older, larger bone and lithic points from Blombos Cave, interpreted as
spear heads. If the bone point from the HP layers at Sibudu Cave is
substantiated by future discoveries, this will push back the origin of
bow and bone arrow technology by at least 20,000 years, and
corroborate arguments in favour of the hypothesis that crucial
technological innovations took place during the MSA in Africa.


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doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.05.004
How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)


Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.


The gripping nature of ochre: The association of ochre with Howiesons
Poort adhesives and Later Stone Age mastics from South Africa
Purchase the full-text article


References and further reading may be available for this article. To
view references and further reading you must purchase this article.


Marlize Lombarda, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail
The Corresponding Author


aDepartment of Human Sciences, Natal Museum, Private Bag 9070,
Pietermaritzburg 3200, South Africa


bSchool of Anthropology, Gender and Historical Studies, University of
KwaZulu-Natal, Private Bag X01, Scottsville 3209, South Africa


Received 2 June 2006;
accepted 30 May 2007.
Available online 23 July 2007.


Abstract


This contribution provides direct evidence for the use of ochre in
adhesive recipes during the Howiesons Poort of South Africa. Stone
segments from two KwaZulu-Natal sites were microscopically analyzed to
document ochre and resin microresidue occurrences. These microresidues
show a clear distribution pattern on the tool portions that are
associated with hafting. Results from a separate quartz and crystal-
quartz sample may indicate that different adhesive recipes were
applied to different raw materials. A possible functional application
for ochre in association with Later Stone Age mastics is also
explored. The evidence and suggestions presented here expand our
understanding of the versatility, use, and value of pigmentatious
materials in prehistory; it is not viewed as an alternative or
replacement hypothesis for its possible symbolic role during the late
Pleistocene.


Introduction


A brief introduction to the Howiesons Poort of South Africa
Samples and sites
Methods


Results


Sample A from Sibudu Cave
Sample B from Sibudu Cave
Sample C from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter
Sample D from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter
Raw materials and adhesive recipes


Discussion


Ochre as a component in adhesives
Investigating symbolic explanations
Ochre associated with Later Stone Age mastic


Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Source

Evidence of Modern Smarts in Stone Age Superglue Options

Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years

History
Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years


By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer


posted: 13 May 2009 01:04 pm ET


090513-figurine-02.jpg
Side and front views of the Venus of Hohle Fels. Credit: H. Jensen;
Copyright University of Tubingen
Full Size
Previous Image Next Image
1 of 1


If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new.
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic
representation of a woman — a carved ivory statue of a naked female,
dating from 35,000 years ago.


The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in
southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative
art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real
person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists
understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking,
including complicated language.


"If there's one conclusion you want to draw from this, it's that an
obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years," University of
Cambridge anthropologist Paul Mellars told LiveScience. He was not
involved in the new finding. "But if humans hadn’t been largely
obsessed with sex they wouldn’t have survived for the first 2 million
years. None of this is at all surprising."


The fixation wasn't just for naked women, though. Early carvings of
phalluses appeared in Europe at about the same time.


Little 'Venus'


The tiny statue is carved out of the tusk of a woolly mammoth and is
less than 2.5 inches (60 millimeters) long. Instead of a head, it has
a ring that scientists think meant it was worn as a pendant looped
through string. Paleoanthropologist Nicholas Conard of Germany's
Tubingen University reported the discovery in the May 14 issue of the
journal Nature.


The oldest human art dates back much further, to between 75,000 and
95,000 years ago in Africa. But that art was abstract, and consisted
of geometrical designs engraved on pieces of red iron oxide. This is
the first known art to represent a woman, and possibly the first art
to represent anything real at all. Another find, a simple drawing that
may represent a half-man, half-animal, could be a few thousand years
older, but the date on that is uncertain.


The jump from abstract art to representative art seems significant,
and might reflect a leap in the cognitive capacity of the human brain
around this time. Some experts think that the development might have
gone along with a leap in the complexity of human language.


"Language is a symbolic system — words are symbols for things. And so
is art," Mellars said. "Art is a glaring illustration of a capacity
for symbolic thinking. Since symbolic thinking lies at the core of
language, people have often tried to link the two."


Mellars pointed out that there isn't enough evidence to really
understand how complex human language was at this point, though.


Sex on the brain


The statue is notable not just for its symbolism, but for its style —
particularly its sexuality.


"The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman, with an
exaggeration of sexual characteristics (large, projecting breasts, a
greatly enlarged and explicit vulva, and bloated belly and thighs)
that by twenty-first-century standards could be seen as bordering on
the pornographic," Mellars wrote in a commentary essay in Nature.


Scientists guess that it may have represented female fertility, or
been related to shamanistic rituals and beliefs.


http://www.archaeologynews.org/story.asp?ID=438230&Title=Obsession%20...


and


http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/prehistoricpinup/


and


Letter


Nature 459, 248-252 (14 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07995; Received
24 January 2009; Accepted 17 March 2009


A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in
southwestern Germany


Nicholas J. Conard1


1. Abteilung für Ältere Urgeschichte und Quartärökologie, Institut
für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters,
Universität Tübingen, Schloss Hohentübingen, 72070 Tübingen, Germany


Correspondence to: Nicholas J. Conard1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to N.J.C. (Email: nicholas.conard@uni-
tuebingen.de).


Abstract


Despite well over 100 years of research and debate, the origins of art
remain contentious1, 2, 3. In recent years, abstract depictions have
been documented at southern African sites dating to approx75 kyr
before present (bp)4, 5, and the earliest figurative art, which is
often seen as an important proxy for advanced symbolic communication,
has been documented in Europe as dating to between 30 and 40 kyr bp2.
Here I report the discovery of a female mammoth-ivory figurine in the
basal Aurignacian deposit at Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of
southwestern Germany during excavations in 2008. This figurine was
produced at least 35,000 calendar years ago, making it one of the
oldest known examples of figurative art. This discovery predates the
well-known Venuses from the Gravettian culture by at least 5,000 years
and radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the
earliest Palaeolithic art.


1. Abteilung für Ältere Urgeschichte und Quartärökologie, Institut
für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters,
Universität Tübingen, Schloss Hohentübingen, 72070 Tübingen, Germany


Correspondence to: Nicholas J. Conard1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to N.J.C. (Email: nicholas.conard@uni-
tuebingen.de).


http://www.nature.com/nature

Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years

Indonesian 'hobbit' confirmed to be a new species

Indonesian 'hobbit' confirmed to be a new species
Half-size humans whose remains were found on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 have been confirmed to be a new species, and not modern pygmies whose brains had shrivelled with disease.

Last Updated: 10:32AM BST 07 May 2009

Photo: SPLASH NEWS
Since the discovery of Homo floresiensis - dubbed "the hobbit" due to its size - anthropologists have argued over the identity and origins of the cave-dwellers.

Measuring just three feet high and weighing 65 pounds, the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the island as recently as 8,000 years ago.


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Scientists reveal face of the first EuropeanMany scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well known in island-bound animals, could not account for the hobbit's chimp-sized brain of barely more than 400 cubic centimetres, a third the size of a modern human brain.

And how could such a being have been smart enough to craft its own stone tools?

The only plausible explanation, they insisted, was that the handful of specimens found suffered from a genetic disorder resulting in an abnormally small skull or - a more recent finding - that they suffered from "dwarf cretinism" caused by deficient thyroids.

But two new studies in the British journal Nature go a long way toward ending this debate.

A team led by William Jungers of the Stony Brook University in New York tackled the problem by analysing the hobbit's foot.

In some ways it is very human. The big toe is aligned with the others and the joints make it possible to extend the toes as the body's full weight falls on the foot, attributes not found in great apes.

But, in other respects, it is startlingly primitive: far longer than its modern human equivalent, and equipped with a very small big toe, long, curved lateral toes, and a weight-bearing structure closer to a chimpanzee's.

Recent archeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus.

So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time - an unlikely scenario - they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Prof Jungers and his colleagues, this suggests "that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented," the researchers conclude.

Companion studies, published online in the Journal of Human Evolution, bolster this theory by looking at other parts of the anatomy, and conjecture that these more ancient forebear may be the still poorly understood Homo habilis.

Either way, their status as a separate species would be confirmed.

Even this compelling new evidence, however, does not explain the hobbit's inordinately small brain.

To investigate this, Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum in London compared fossils of several species of ancient hippos found on the island of Madagascar with the mainland ancestors from which they had evolved.

They were surprised to find that insular dwarfing - driven by the need to adapt to an island environment - shank their brains far more than had previously been thought possible.

"Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H. floresiensis relative to its body size, our evidence suggests that insular dwarfing could have played a role in its evolution," they conclude.

While the new studies answer some questions, they also raise new ones sure to spark fresh debate, notes Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman in a comment, also published in Nature.

Only more fossil evidence will tell us whether the hobbits of Flores evolved from Homo erectus, whose traces have been found throughout Eurasia, or from an even more ancient lineage whose footsteps have not yet been traced outside Africa, he said.

Source

Indonesian 'hobbit' confirmed to be a new species

Scientists reveal face of the first European

Scientists reveal face of the first European
The face of the first European has been recreated from bone fragments by scientists.

By Urmee Khan, Digital and Media Correspondent
Last Updated: 8:36PM BST 04 May 2009

The first modern European Forensic artist Richard Neave reconstructed the face based on skull fragments from 35000 years ago. Photo: BBC The head was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave in the south west of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania by potholers.

Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.


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Giant lions once roamed BritainEurope was then occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had been in the region for thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens.

Modern humans first arrived in Europe from Africa.

The skull appears very like humans today, but it also displays more archaic traits, such as very large molar teeth, which led some scientists to speculate the skull may belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals – an idea discounted by other experts.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in Missouri, said the jaw was the oldest, directly-dated modern human fossil. "Taken together, the material is the first that securely documents what modern humans looked like when they spread into Europe," he said.

The model was created by Richard Neave, a forensic artist, for a BBC programme about the origins of the human race and evolution.

The Incredible Human Journey will be shown on BBC Two at 9.30pm on May 10.

Source

Scientists reveal face of the first European

Early humans 'did not kill deformed offspring'

Early humans 'did not kill deformed offspring'
The discovery of the oldest known infant born with a skull deformity hints that, contrary to popular belief, early humans might not have immediately abandoned or killed their abnormal offspring.

By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Last Updated: 8:59PM BST 31 Mar 2009

Studies on a human skull recently unearthed in Spain offer the earliest evidence that ancestors of Homo sapiens did not reject newborns with severe deformities but cared for them alongside their other children.

Scientists found the remains of several members of the early human species Homo heidelbergensis – thought to be a direct ancestor of the Neanderthals – in caves near Atapuerca, Spain, in 2001.


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Morning sickness 'increases the chance that child will have high IQ'They pieced together a 530,000-year-old fossil cranium and discovered it belonged to a child who lived to between five and 12 years old despite being born with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, in which the skull segments close too early, producing facial deformities and interfering with brain development.

The condition affects fewer than 6 out of every 200,000 children born today.

The discovery marks the earliest example of a human skeleton with signs of a physical deformity that that might have made the individual dependent on others for survival.

Most mammals, including primates, sacrifice or abandon young born with crippling deformities, the study's authors said, leading scientists to assume until now that early man had behaved the same.

That the child survived so long in the harsh hunter-gatherer society suggests early hominids were more caring than previously thought.

"The individual survived more than five years, which suggests her condition was no impediment to receiving the same attention as any other child of the Pleistocene epoch," noted Ana Gracia Tellez, a palaeoanthropologist at Complutense University in Madrid, who led the research published this week in the US science magazine, Proceedings.
Source

Early humans 'did not kill deformed offspring'

World’s Oldest Manufactured Beads Are Older Than Previously Thought

World’s Oldest Manufactured Beads Are Older Than Previously Thought


ScienceDaily (May 5, 2009) — A team of archaeologists has uncovered
some of the world’s earliest shell ornaments in a limestone cave in
Eastern Morocco. The researchers have found 47 examples of Nassarius
marine shells, most of them perforated and including examples covered
in red ochre, at the Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt.


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 shells are currently at the centre of a debate concerning the
origins of modern behaviour in early humans. Many archaeologists
regard the shell bead ornaments as proof that anatomically modern
humans had developed a sophisticated symbolic material culture. Up
until now, Blombos cave in South Africa has been leading the ‘bead
race’ with 41 Nassarius shell beads that can confidently be dated to
72,000 years ago.


Aside from this latest discovery unearthing an even greater number of
beads, the research team says the most striking aspect of the Taforalt
discoveries is that identical shell types should appear in two such
geographically distant regions. As well as Blombos, there are now at
least four other Aterian sites in Morocco with Nassarius shell beads.
The newest evidence, in a paper by the authors to be published in the
next few weeks in the Journal of Quaternary Science Reviews, shows
that the Aterian in Morocco dates back to at least 110,000 years ago.


Research team leader, Professor Nick Barton, from the Institute of
Archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘These new finds are
exciting because they show that bead manufacturing probably arose
independently in different cultures and confirms a long suspected
pattern that humans with modern symbolic behaviour were present from a
very early stage at both ends of the continent, probably as early as
110,000 years ago.’


Also leading the research team Dr Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, from the
Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine in
Morocco, said: ‘The archaeological and chronological contexts of the
Taforalt discoveries suggest a much longer tradition of bead-making
than previously suspected, making them perhaps the earliest such
ornaments in the world.’


Archaeologists widely believe that humans in Europe first started
fashioning purely symbolic objects about 40,000 years ago, but in
Africa this latest evidence shows that humans were engaged in this
activity at least 40,000 years before this.


Excavations in April 2009 also continued in the upper levels of
Taforalt to investigate a large well-preserved cemetery dating to
around 12,500 years ago. The project, co-ordinated by Dr Louise
Humphrey, from the Natural History Museum in London, has found adult
as well as infant burials at the site. The infant burials throw an
interesting light on early burial traditions as many of the infants
seem to be buried singly beneath distinctive blue stones with the
undersides smeared with red ochre. By contrast, studies by Dr Elaine
Turner of the Römisch Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz, show that the
adults’ grave pits were generally marked by the horn cores of wild
barbary sheep. Taforalt remains the largest necropolis of the Late
Stone Age period in North Africa presently under excavation.


Professor Barton said: ‘Taking our new discovery of the shell beads at
Taforalt, together with the discoveries of the decorated burials
excavated by Dr Louise Humphrey, it shows that the cave must have
retained its special interest for different groups of people over many
thousands of years. One of its unique attractions and a focal point of
interest seems to have been a freshwater spring that rises next to the
cave.’


http://www.sciencedaily
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World’s Oldest Manufactured Beads Are Older Than Previously Thought

Long Feet Offer Clues to Mystery of Small Hominid

May 7, 2009
Long Feet Offer Clues to Mystery of Small Hominid
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD


The extinct hominids commonly known as hobbits may have been small of
body and brain, but their feet were exceptionally long, and they were
flat.


Scientists, completing the first detailed analysis of the hominid’s
foot bones, say the findings bolster their controversial
interpretation that these individuals belonged to a primitive
population distinct from modern humans that lived as recently as
17,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.


The new anatomical evidence, being reported Thursday in the journal
Nature, is unlikely to solve the mystery of just where the species —
formally designated Homo floresiensis — fits in human evolution. That
fact even the researchers acknowledge, and some of their critics still
contend that the skull and bones are nothing more than remains of
modern pygmy humans deformed by genetic or pathological disorders.


The controversy erupted almost immediately after the H. floresiensis
discovery was announced in 2004. The single skull was unusually small,
indicating its brain was no bigger than a chimpanzee’s. It topped a
body little more than three feet tall.


Now the examination of lower limbs and especially an almost complete
left foot and parts of the right, the researchers reported, shows that
the species walked upright, like other known hominids. There were five
toes, as in other primates, but the big toe was stubby, more like a
chimp’s.


Stranger still was the size of the feet — more than seven and a half
inches long, out of proportion to its short lower limbs. The imbalance
evoked the physiology of some African apes, but it has never before
been seen in hominids.


And then there were those flat feet. Humans sometimes have fallen
arches and flat feet, but scientists noted that this was no human
foot. The navicular bone, which helps form the arch in the modern
foot, was especially primitive, more akin to one in great apes.
Without a strong arch — that is, flat-footed — the hominid would have
lacked the spring-like action needed for efficient running. It could
walk, but not run like humans.


Weighing the new evidence, the research team led by William L.
Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the Stony Brook Medical Center on
Long Island, concluded that “the foot of H. floresiensis exhibits a
broad array of primitive features that are not seen in modern humans
of any body size.”


The team contended that it is improbable that all of these traits from
head to toe — including small brain and primitive shoulders and
wrists, as previously reported — “were simply a consequence of ‘island
dwarfing.’ ”


Dr. Jungers and his colleagues raised the possibility that the
ancestor of the species was not Homo erectus, as had been the original
assumption. H. erectus is known as the earliest hominid to leave
Africa and make its way across Asia. At a symposium two weeks ago,
several scientists edged toward the view that the so-called hobbits
emerged from another, more primitive hominid ancestor.


In a commentary accompanying the journal report, Daniel E. Lieberman,
a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University who was not a member of
the team, noted that the initial skepticism over the hominid as a
distinct species was understandable.


“All in all, many scientists (myself included) have sat on the fence,
waiting for more evidence about the nature and form of H.
floresiensis,” Dr. Lieberman wrote. “And now we have some.”


Dr. Lieberman, who specializes in hominid locomotion studies, said the
primitive foot provided a “tantalizing model” for a nonmodern hominid
that “evolved for effective walking before selection for endurance
running occurred in human evolution.”


That might have occurred even before H. erectus, judging by footprints
in Africa of an erectus with an apparently humanlike foot. Some
scientists speculate that the ancestor of H. floresiensis evolved from
an earlier and smaller erectus, or the enigmatic Homo habilis, or even
a pre-Homo genus.


In a related report in the journal, Eleanor Weston and other
researchers at the Natural History Museum in London suggested that the
H. floresiensis skull might be that of an erectus that had become
dwarfed from living isolated on an island. They made the proposal
based on a study of extinct dwarf hippos on Madagascar, whose brains
were 30 percent smaller than would be expected by scaling down their
mainland African ancestor.


Robert E. Eckhardt, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University
who remains skeptical, said in an e-mail message that supporters of
that interpretation “have ignored, overlooked, discounted or
misrepresented the extent of normal and abnormal variation in
morphological structure and biomechanical function that exists in
members of our own species, Homo sapiens.”


William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum
of Natural History and co-author of the Nature paper, said in an
interview, “We have been very careful to consider variables within a
species and possible pathologies, but this hobbit foot is another
strong piece of evidence that they were nothing like us.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/science/07hobbit.html?pagewanted=print


"Hobbit" Foot Like No Other In Human Fossil Record


Description
An international team of paleoanthropologists, anatomists and
archeologists, led by William L. Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook
University,have published the first scientific analysis of the foot of
Homo floresiensis, the fossil found in Indonesia in 2003 and popularly
referred to as the “Hobbit.” Their findings are reported in the May 7
issue of Nature.


Image Gallery
Djuna Ivereigh/ARKENAS
Assembly of the "Hobbit" foot.
Click image to view fullsize
previous image Image 1 of 2 next image


Newswise — An international team of paleoanthropologists, anatomists
and archeologists have published the first scientific analysis of the
foot of Homo floresiensis, the fossil found in Indonesia in 2003 and
popularly referred to as the “Hobbit.” Lead author William L. Jungers,
Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and colleagues documented the
Hobbit’s unusual combination of ape-like and human-like foot features,
which clearly enabled bipedal walking, a hallmark of all humans and
their extinct relatives (hominins), despite its surprisingly primitive
design. Their findings, reported in the May 7 issue of Nature, provide
further evidence that the ancestor of this species was perhaps not
Homo erectus but instead another more primitive and remote hominin.


The authors point out that the Hobbit foot has a relative foot length
that far exceeds the upper limits for modern humans either of average
or short stature. The foot is similar in relative length to pygmy
chimpanzees, with long and curved toes, but also sports a short big
toe in line with the other toes. While the foot has an overall
structure that signals bipedal walking, it appears to have been “flat-
footed” and poorly designed for running, one of the critical pedal
features believed to characterize human ancesters since the time of
Homo erectus.


“A foot like this one has never been seen before in the human fossil
record,” says Dr. Jungers, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair
of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook. “Our analysis
offers the most complete glimpse to date of how a primitive bipedal
foot was designed and differed from that of later hominins and modern
humans.”


“Arches are the hallmark of a modern human foot,” explains co-author
Dr. William E. H. Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural
History. “This is another strong piece of the evidence that the
‘hobbit’ was not like us.”


In “The foot of Homo floresiensis,” the authors also suggest that
despite these feet being dated to the Late Pleistocene age (17,000
years ago), their features together with many other parts of the Homo
floresiensis skeleton, might represent the primitive condition for our
own genus Homo. This could imply a dispersal event out of Africa
earlier than what paleoanthropologists have long thought.


“These particular ‘hobbit’ feet may have never walked into Mordor, but
they certainly remind us how little we know about which other hominin
species walked out of Africa and the many possible places their feet
helped take them,” adds co-author Dr. Matthew Tocheri, of the
Smithsonian Institution.


Dr. Jungers points out that “if the feet and skeleton of the ‘hobbits’
are instead the result of ‘island dwarfing’ from the Southeast Asian
Homo erectus as some scientists suspect, then an amazing number of
evolutionary reversals to primitive conditions had to occur as an
unexplained and unprecedented by-product.”


Continued excavations on Flores and other parts of Indonesia, to be
led by co-author Dr. Mike Morwood, of the University of Wollongong in
Australia, in collaboration with Indonesian scientists from the
National Research and Development Centre for Archeology in Jakarta,
may unearth an answer to the competing theories on the origins and
nature of Homo floresiensis.


The research for this international study was supported by grants from
the Australian Research Council, the National Geographic Society, the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Antrhopological Research, the Wellcome
Trust and the Leakey Foundation.


In addition to Dr. Jungers, co-authors of the study include: W. E. H.
Harcout-Smith, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural
History; R.E. Wunderlich, Department of Biological Sciences, James
Madison University; M.W. Tocheri, Department of Anthropology,
Smithsonian Institution; Susan G. Larson, Department of Anatomical
Sciences, Stony Brook University Medical Center; T. Sutikna and Rhokus
Awe Due, of the National Research and Development Centre for
Archeology, Jakarta, Indonesia, and M.J. Morwood, School of Earth and
Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, New South Wales,
Australia.


The Department of Anatomical Sciences is one of 25 departments within
Stony Brook University School of Medicine. The department includes
graduate and doctoral programs in Anatomical Sciences. Fields of study
include research on human evolutionary anatomy, morphology and
vertebrate paleontology. Many faculty members in the department are
also participants in an interdepartmental graduate program in
anthropological sciences that is recognized worldwide for its faculty
and research strengths in functional morphology and human evolution.


© 2009 Newswise. All Rights Reserved.


http://www.archaeologynews.org/story.asp?ID=434763&Title=


Letter


Nature 459, 85-88 (7 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07922; Received 15
January 2008; Accepted 19 February 2009


Insular dwarfism in hippos and a model for brain size reduction in
Homo floresiensis


Eleanor M. Weston1 & Adrian M. Lister1


1. Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London SW7
5BD, UK


Correspondence to: Eleanor M. Weston1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to E.W. (Email: e.wes...@nhm.ac.uk).


Abstract


Body size reduction in mammals is usually associated with only
moderate brain size reduction, because the brain and sensory organs
complete their growth before the rest of the body during ontogeny1, 2.
On this basis, 'phyletic dwarfs' are predicted to have a greater
relative brain size than 'phyletic giants'1, 3. However, this trend
has been questioned in the special case of dwarfism of mammals on
islands4. Here we show that the endocranial capacities of extinct
dwarf species of hippopotamus from Madagascar are up to 30% smaller
than those of a mainland African ancestor scaled to equivalent body
mass. These results show that brain size reduction is much greater
than predicted from an intraspecific 'late ontogenetic' model of
dwarfism in which brain size scales to body size with an exponent of
0.35. The nature of the proportional change or grade shift2, 5
observed here indicates that selective pressures on brain size are
potentially independent of those on body size. This study demonstrates
empirically that it is mechanistically possible for dwarf mammals on
islands to evolve significantly smaller brains than would be predicted
from a model of dwarfing based on the intraspecific scaling of the
mainland ancestor. Our findings challenge current understanding of
brain–body allometric relationships in mammals and suggest that the
process of dwarfism could in principle explain small brain size, a
factor relevant to the interpretation of the small-brained hominin
found on the Island of Flores, Indonesia6.


1. Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London SW7
5BD, UK


Correspondence to: Eleanor M. Weston1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to E.W. (Email: e.wes...@nhm.ac.uk).


Letter


Nature 459, 81-84 (7 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07989; Received 14
January 2009; Accepted 17 March 2009


The foot of Homo floresiensis


W. L. Jungers1, W. E. H. Harcourt-Smith2, R. E. Wunderlich3, M. W.
Tocheri4, S. G. Larson1, T. Sutikna5, Rhokus Awe Due5 & M. J. Morwood6


1. Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University
Medical Center, Stony Brook, New York 11794-8081, USA
2. Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History,
New York, New York 10024, USA
3. Department of Biological Sciences, James Madison University,
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807, USA
4. Humans Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, National
Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
20013-7012, USA
5. National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology,
Jakarta 12001, Indonesia
6. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of
Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales 2522, Australia


Correspondence to: W. L. Jungers1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to W.L.J. (Email:
william.jung...@stonybrook.edu).


Top of page
Abstract


Homo floresiensis is an endemic hominin species that occupied Liang
Bua, a limestone cave on Flores in eastern Indonesia, during the Late
Pleistocene epoch1, 2. The skeleton of the type specimen (LB1) of H.
floresiensis includes a relatively complete left foot and parts of the
right foot3. These feet provide insights into the evolution of
bipedalism and, together with the rest of the skeleton, have
implications for hominin dispersal events into Asia. Here we show that
LB1's foot is exceptionally long relative to the femur and tibia,
proportions never before documented in hominins but seen in some
African apes. Although the metatarsal robusticity sequence is human-
like and the hallux is fully adducted, other intrinsic proportions and
pedal features are more ape-like. The postcranial anatomy of H.
floresiensis is that of a biped1, 2, 3, but the unique lower-limb
proportions and surprising combination of derived and primitive pedal
morphologies suggest kinematic and biomechanical differences from
modern human gait. Therefore, LB1 offers the most complete glimpse of
a bipedal hominin foot that lacks the full suite of derived features
characteristic of modern humans and whose mosaic design may be
primitive for the genus Homo. These new findings raise the possibility
that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead
some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast
Asia is still undocumented.


1. Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University
Medical Center, Stony Brook, New York 11794-8081, USA
2. Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History,
New York, New York 10024, USA
3. Department of Biological Sciences, James Madison University,
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807, USA
4. Humans Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, National
Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
20013-7012, USA
5. National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology,
Jakarta 12001, Indonesia
6. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of
Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales 2522, Australia


Correspondence to: W. L. Jungers1 Correspondence and requests for
materials should be addressed to W.L.J. (Email:
william.jung...@stonybrook.edu).

Long Feet Offer Clues to Mystery of Small Hominid

Home Erectus Crosses The Open Ocean

Pics at the cite, I can't tell how serious the author is but it does
offer some pretty pics and an interesting tale. References at the
cite.

Home Erectus Crosses The Open Ocean


Wed, May 6, 2009


H. erectus / Stegodon (Indonesia - Late/Middle Pleistocene elephant
Sculpture Photo - Gerbil / Museum Tautavel
Artist - Al Prandi / Two Guys Fossils


Imagine a group of Home erectus, the earliest members of our family
genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware
of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day
while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest
and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to
the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a
creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their
imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that
island, but ideas about how to do so? Could this period of creative
thought conclude with the invention of a raft large enough to hold
several people, food and water? If we can find evidence of this
situation in the dim past, in the early days of Homo erectus, then
archeologists are fixing the time and place for one of the
extraordinary events in all human history, a major advance in the
evolution of the human mind.


Elephants swimming / Africa
Photo tomas2002 / Web Shots


Elephants are by far the strongest large mammal, marine colonizers.
They are long distant swimmers and have been observed crossing large
bodies of both fresh and salt water. Herds of contemporary elephants
have swum for 48 hours across large African lakes. Elephants have swum
in the ocean to a distance of 48 km, sometimes reaching a speed of 2.7
km/h. Elephants frequently swim to offshore islands in India. When
swimming long distances, individuals sometimes tow others who need to
rest. Trunks are very well designed for the breathing challenge, and a
herd can provide a founding population with breeding potential.
Several elephant species crossed to the Indonesia islands east of
Java, and the Philippines, where they continued to evolve and dwarf
species evolved.


Tangaroa to Wallacea


Tangaroa on the Pacific
Photo – tangaroa.nettblogg


In 1947, the Norwegian adventurer Thor Hyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Expedition
sailed a large balsa raft of Andean or South American design westward
across the Pacific for 101 days. The raft was designed and built by
indigenous ship builders whose people still live around Lake Titicaca,
high in the Andes. Thor Hyderdahl’s theory about ancient South
American journeys to Polynesia was initially controversial, but the
book about the expedition was an immediate best seller and the
documentary film won an Academy Award. The world was now aware that
indigenous peoples and ancient civilizations could build large rafts
that could undertake long, purposeful, open ocean voyages. In 2006,
Thor Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav Heyerdahl, was on the crew of the
Tangaroa (named after the great Maori God of the Sea), whose journey
across the Pacific honored the great Thor Heyerdahl.


First Mariners Project / Bamboo Raft – Flores to Timor
Photo - First Mariner’s Project / National Geographic Project 2008


Millennia before the earliest dated remains of watercraft, Homo
erectus was on the move, traveling vast distances north to the
Mediterranean region and then thousands of miles to the east and Asia.
There is no direct archeological evidence that H. erectus ventured out
upon the ocean, but the circumstantial argument that they did so with
log rafts is very strong and the implications are very important. If
you wanted to reach an offshore island, then either you built a large
raft or boat, or indulged in extreme long distance swimming. Maybe
this premise is simplistic and uncontroversial, but discussing it in
detail has only recently been possible. The majority of H. erectus
sites are very difficult to date with precision, and evidence for H.
erectus in localities that have always been islands has only recently
been discovered. The capacity to cross water to the opposite shore
represents a major milestone in human history.


Wallace Line
Sahul – Sunda / Wallace Line
Map - Alberto Salguero / Wikipedia


Robert G. Bednarik and the First Mariners Project of the International
Institute of Replicative Archaeology in Australia have conducted
exceptional research to find the earliest mariners. Bednarik studies
H.erectus in Indonesia and the origins of marine navigation. He has
published widely in both peer reviewed academic journals and venues
aimed at the general public.


H.erectus has long been known in Indonesia on the island of Java, with
earliest fossils dating to 1.51-1.10 million years ago. H. erectus
could walk to Java on the Sunda Shelf, that now submerged continental
land mass that connected the Malay Peninsula, Kalimantan, Borneo,
Sumatra and Java with broad valleys. Sundaland, which is an extension
of continental Asia, and the Sunda Continental Shelf did not extend
further east than Java. When lower sea levels allowed Sunda to be dry
land over a vast area, Australia and New Guinea were also joined by a
large shallow land bridge to form the continental land mass known as
Sahul.


Wallacea / Lesser Sunda Islands
Satellite photo - NASA


Nonetheless, areas of open ocean remained between the eastern edge of
Sunda and the western edge of Australasia throughout the late Pliocene
and Pleistocene. Typical Southeast Asian wildlife does not extend
beyond the Wallace Line. The Lesser Sunda Islands had distinctive
animals that included both full size and dwarf elephants. In these
waters there are islands that were always surrounded by ocean during
the time period of H. erectus. If there is evidence for H. erectus on
these ocean islands more than 500,000 years ago, then we have found
history’s earliest mariners.


The Wallace Line marks the edge of the Asian and Sunda continental
shelf. It lies between the islands of Nusa Tenggara (Lesser Sunda
Islands) such as Borneo, Sulawesi (Celebes), Bali and Lombok. This
natural boundary was first noticed by Alfred Russel Wallace, a British
Naturalist who conceived a Theory of Evolution coincident with that of
Charles Darwin. Considering that the water distance between Bali and
Lombok is only 35 km, the ‘hardness’ of the Wallace Line is
impressive.


Wallace Line / Weber’s Line / Lydekker’s Line
The Wallace Line
Map - Teresa Zubi Karte / Dive Sites in Indonesia


Wallacea encompasses the islands between Sundaland (the Malay
Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali) and Near Oceania
(Australia and New Guinea). These islands were always surrounded by
deep water and could never be reached via a land route even when sea
levels lowered during cold/glacial periods. These are the islands that
required H. erectus to build rafts or boats in order to explore and
settle them. The line dividing Wallacea from Australia–New Guinea is
called Lydekker’s Line. Near Oceania is comprised of Australia,
Tasmania, the Aru Islands, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. At
times during the Pleistocene, sea level in this region was 130 meters
lower than at present and the component islands of New Oceania were
joined as dry land to form the continent known as Sahul.


The islands of Wallacea, however, were never joined during these
coldest intervals in the Pleistocene. Therein lies their important bio-
geographical distinctiveness and the challenge to H. erectus. The
animal life of these islands was, and still is, less diverse than
those to their west. The islands of Wallacea have few land mammals,
land birds, or freshwater fish from continental Asia because of the
barrier presented by an open ocean journey. Almost half of the
terrestrial vertebrates of Wallacea were endemic (i.e found nowhere
else). And Wallacea was originally almost completely covered in a
moist, broad leaf forest with great numbers of endemic plant species.


On the islands of Wallacea is evidence that confirmed H. erectus as
the First Mariners, a milestone in human history. We can assume that
the first potential seafarers were fascinated by islands easily
visible and just offshore. Curiosity is always present in human
consciousness. What is out there? Food? Danger? (Contact with an
island out of sight cannot be documented until the Upper Pleistocene
and human migration to Australasia.)


First Mariners Project / Bamboo Raft Construction 2008
Photo - First Mariner’s Project / National Geographic Project 2008


H. erectus builds the first raft and travels to the island of Flores
in Wallacea


Long before the breakthrough event of travel to an island, H. erectus
not only watched the occasional elephant herd swim to an offshore
island, but was likely exploring offshore fishing from small rafts.
The archeological record strongly implies that the ‘invention’ of a
larger, seaworthy raft would be an almost routine extension of the
intellectual capacities of H.erectus already in daily use.


It is very unlikely that the earliest watercraft to venture upon the
sea were dugout canoes. There is no solid evidence for domesticated
fire during the time period of earliest archeological evidence for H.
erectus on the islands of Wallacea. It is near impossible to hollow
out a tree trunk for a dugout canoe without the use of fire. The
oldest known dugout canoe comes from the Netherlands, and dates to
8,600 B.C. By Mesolithic times, modern H.sapiens had dominated the
planet for tens of thousands of years. H. erectus had evolved into our
immediate ancestors, and thereby to extinction, before the Upper
Pleistocene and the last ice age began about 110,000 BP.


We can conclude that the earliest ocean watercraft were rafts built
from logs lashed together with rope made from tough plant fibers and/
or palm fronds. Bamboo was plentiful in Wallacea at this time, and
perhaps some driftwood logs washing up on the beach were straight and
not badly rotted or cracked enough to be useful as supplemental
timbers. Well then, what is the evidence that H.erectus was the first
hominid to travel upon the sea? We do not have remnants of their ocean
craft. Rafts built from logs lashed together would be near impossible
to identify in the archeological record. Abandoned when repair is no
longer possible, or wrecked upon the sea, a raft will come apart and
soon cannot be identified as a human mediated ‘construction’. Perhaps
a finally made paddle could be so identified but none have been found
from this remote epoch.


Islands of Wallacea
Map - Teresa Zubi Karte / Dive Sites in Indonesia


The Sunda Shelf was not continuously exposed and easy-to-traverse
forested land throughout the Middle Pleistocene (0.78-0.13 mya). That
situation existed only when sea levels were at their lowest. Sumatra,
Java, Bali and Kalimantan were periodically reachable by land bridges,
and ocean voyaging was not required to settle them. Earliest H.
erectus in Indonesia was first on Java and has been dated to 1.51-1.02
million years ago. Offshore fishing stocks must have been quickly
discovered and valued, and we can surmise that brief fishing trips
were a priority.


Evolving maritime navigation ability led to the crossing of 30 km of
water and the colonization of the Island of Flores by 840,000 BP (late
Lower Pleistocene). This settlement voyage implies the earlier
colonization of Lombok and Sumbawa, the two major islands between Bali
and Flores. Even at times when the sea level was at its lowest, two
sea crossings were required to reach the island of Flores. First, the
channel between Bali and Lombok had to be crossed, then the 9 km
distance between Sumbawa and Flores had to be traversed. The crossing
of the Lombok Strait may have been the first journey in history to
cross ocean water with the objective to settle a new island or
territory.


Flores_Moni Kelimutu
Photo – Serenade / Wikipedia


The island of Flores is midway between Sunda and Sahul and it was the
first target for settlement by early H. erectus in the region. The Soa
Basin occupies a large interior region on the island of Flores. It is
about 20 km x 10 km and surrounded by mountains and active volcanoes.
Throughout much of its history it was a large lake. At times, river
outlets would form, the lake would drain and the Soa Basin became a
grassland savannah. There is one river outlet still present.
Archeologists find fossils and stone tools in tuffaceous sediments
that formed in the Soa Basin during ‘dry’ periods.


Fossil deposits in the volcanic strata of the Soa Basin of Flores have
many remains of the Stegdon elephant and there are typical Lower
Paleolithic, human made tools in the Ola Bula Formation, central
Flores. At the Mata Menge site, 19 paleomagnetic samples produced age
estimates for the sediment bearing tools of 780,000 BP. Fission track
analysis of the same sediments produced an age of ~800,000-720,000 BP.
Earlier deposits dated to 850,000 to 920,000 BP did not contain any
artifacts (Period 1). Period 3 refers to fossils and stone tools
deposited at Mata Menge and five other localities between 800,000 BP
and 700,000 BP. Case is closed! H. erectus as the First Mariner,
rafted to the Wallacea island of Flores more than 3/4 million years
ago!


Middle Pleistocene tools from Java
Photo – Retno Handini / Science Magazine


Stone tools similar to those on Flores have been found on other deep
water islands in Wallacea: central Timor, western Timor, Roti and
Sulawesi. The finds from Timor and Roti have been identified in Middle
Pleistocene deposits. Stegadons have been identified at Atambua, West
Timor in six sites of the Weaiwe Formation. A Stegodont bone fragment
found at To’os had been smashed and also had been laying in a fire,
perhaps deliberately placed there. (But then, who or what started that
fire?).


Stegodonts and H. erectus were living side by side on Timor. Although,
there is no solid evidence that humans hunted Stegadonts, they could
scavenge the occasional carcass. Stone tools have been found at at
least six Stegodont sites, but this could indicate the preparation of
carcasses, and not active hunting. Indonesian H. erectus eventually
journeyed from Alor to Timor, a distance of 60 to 100 km of open
water.


Humankind had launched itself upon the sea, long before we - ‘modern
humans’ - had appeared on Earth. The implications for the evolution of
our brain and intellectual capacity are staggering! The second article
in this series will explore the extraordinary cognitive and behavioral
capacities of the human mind that the first mariner journeys reveal to
us.


Chile to Micronesia /Mata Rangi III / Spanish Expedition 1999
Photo - Historic Tall Ship Replicas


Note about Rocks, Geological Time and Culture


‘Pleistocene’ refers to geology and age. ‘Paleolithic’ refers to
culture. There are Lower (1.8-0.78 mya), Middle (0.78-0.13 mya) and
Upper Pleistocene (0.12-0.01 mya) periods and they do not exactly
overlap with Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic culture periods.
Furthermore, each culture had a different time span on different
continents. For example, Lower Paleolithic tools, which are usually
viewed as somewhat crude and basic in design, persisted in some parts
of Asia throughout the last ice age (Upper Pleistocene geological
era). In Europe, the Lower Paleolithic approach to stone tool making
disappeared everywhere as the last ice age (Upper Pleistocene) began.
Furthermore, the persistence of Lower Paleolithic tool making into the
Upper Pleistocene in some areas does not imply the persistence of our
ancestor Homo erectus, history’s first seafarer.


Sources -
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

More and Pics at Site

Home Erectus Crosses The Open Ocean

Who Were the First Homo Sapiens Sapients in North Africa?

Who Were the First Homo Sapiens Sapients in North Africa?

It depends on where you draw the line between HSS and surving lineages of HSS, but the short answer is Afro-Asians, probably from Mesopotamia or the Levant.

There are several MtDNA studies which show that the first members of the species homo sapiens sapient to inhabit North Africa and to produce lineages which carry on in the region (and/or in the adjacent Canary Islands) until the present entered some 30-65,000 years ago and contained within their population the original portion of the haplogroup M which would later lead to the M1 subclades.
M is one of only two haplogroups which made it out of Africa in the original Homo Sapien Sapient expansion some 65-75,000 years ago and is generally associated with Asian peoples. The other of the two haplogroups is N which is generally associated with Eurasian peoples.

This expansion coincides with the region's Aterian culture, which began over 85,000 ybp and ended some 22,000 to 10,000 ybp, but which may have continued in some remote areas of northwest Africa and it's adjacent islands until historic times. Some of the earliest sites of the Aterian can be attributed to homo erectus, who inhabited the coasts from 200,000 ybp or earlier. There are differences in the eastern and western branches of the industry, and up until about 45,000 years ago some of the Aterian lithics can be attributed to Neanderthal man, whose fossils have been found in the far eastern portion of the region. Man is thought to have entered North Africa 85,000 ybp or later, and haplogroup M came with it at that time or up to 55,000 years later. however, only those peoples carrying the strand of haplogroup M, which would later mutate into M1 while in still in Africa, have continued living in the area until today. Ancestral "African M" also spread into (or was originally from) east Africa at about the same time as North Africa.

Haplogroup M was accompanied into North Africa, either at the original time of habitation or shortly thereafter, by peoples carrying haplogroup U6, a descendent of the Eurasian N lineage. We can't at present discern what male, or Y chromosomes, went into Africa with "hereditary" M1 and U6.

Common suspects for the Y culprit include E1b1b, which is still dominant among Ethiopians, Somalis, Eritreans and North African Berbers and Arabs, and E1a , which has been detected among samples obtained from Moroccan Berbers, Sahrawis, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, Senegal, Sudan, Egypt, and Calabria (including both Italian and Albanian inhabitants of the region), although E1a has only a small presence in North Africa.

Haplogroup E, the ancestor of both E1b1b and E1a, is thought to have originated in East Africa, but there are many who argue that it's dispersal points to a back migration into Africa from Asia. It's sister clade, D, is only found in Asia, though it's mother clade ED belongs to an "African" lineage.
E1a is found almost exclusively in Africa, while most non-african peoples who belong to haplogroup E belong to the E1b1b subclade.

The question partly comes down to whether the Guanches of the Canary Islands, generally agreed as the closests descendents of the Paleolithic North Africans, have or have ever had the y-Chromosome E1b1b in their population, and if so, whether they got it before or after the hostile takeover of their culture by subsequent waves of later peoples.
While E1b1b has been reported in the Guanches, the results have been questioned, and it may be attributed to Pheonician, Berber, Arab, and even Spanish influence during historical times. E1a has not been reported from indigenous Canarians, but that can likewise be attributed to hostile takeover and erradication of all original male gene lineages.

There are studies which show that at some time in the distant past the early original "M1 people" were subject to a violent takeover by peoples containing haplogroup R1*, which is a very rare subclade of R1.
With R1b1 and R1b1*(which might actually be R1*) this haplogroup is one of the only two or three subclades of R1 that seem to never have made it into Europe, at least until the common era.

R1* has two sister clades, R1a and R1b, which are the so-called "Cro-Magnon" haplogroups, and these or their common ancestor accompanied the first homo sapien sapient men into Europe somewhere between 45,000 to 25,000 years ago. The two groups make up 70% of the European male lineages, with specific countries, areas, and peoples often reaching over 90%.

At present, we can't tell if the takeover performed by R1* in this early North African population came before or after U6 and M1 spread into North Africa, but we do know that R1* was, in turn, nearly erraticated in the population at a later date....either by those very E1s who still exist in the descendent populations of Berber, Arab, and possibly Guanches today or by members of the later Capsian and Arab cultures that followed, and who carried their signature Haplogroup J along with their own E1 haplogroups.

We also don't know if R1* was already with U6 when he killed off M1's men and took the females for his own, or if, instead, M1 and U6 were already together in the original population and R1* brought no females when he came to call. But R1* is a good guess for the earliest match for U6, being that sister clades U5 and U8 are thought to have been the first into Europe, just like the brother clades of R1*.

In any case, R1* took over the clans that contained U6 and M1 either before or after they spread into North Africa 30-35,000 years ago. If it was after, it can only have been in the accompaniment of the Ibero-Maurusian culture some 18-22,000 ybp, because there is no real change in the Aterian culture from 35,000 ybp until that time.
The Ibero-Maurusians, also known as Oranians and Maghreb or Afoulu man, were a seemingly violent peoples, who knocked out two to four teeth of every male and female in the tribe as a rite of adolescence around the age of 16. They are described as "hyper-robust" and often equated with "Cro-Magnon" man in the old texts (when the term was still in wider use). The main differences between the "Afoulu" or "Oranian" group and the so called "Cro-Magnon" group were said to be that the Ibero-Maurusians were slightly shorter (but still nearly 6 feet tall, being that the two skelotons found in Dordogne at the time had suggested an average height of 6'5 for Cro-Magnon) and had a slightly more primitive skull shape, with a nasal cavity more similar to non-Cro-Magnon specimens from the Paleolithic found in Africa and eastern Europe.

But the Ibero-Maurusian clans don't seem to have been influencial enough on North Africa to have slaughtered every man in the entire region, for at that time the Aterian spread over all of North Africa and even into central and east Africa as well . In fact the Ibero-Maurusians don't seem to have traversed North Africa's entire width, barely extending the culture from the Atlas Mountains and Morrocco to Tunisia. the culture was influenced and eventually succeeded by the Capsian culture, which entered the region from the east around 12,000 ybp.

Another problem with R1* being equated with the Ibero-Maurusians is that the clade is also found all the way over in Turkey and India associated with a very ancient date, and it's "twin" sister clade R1b1* is found among the Bantu and the Cameroon. It is thought to have spread into Africa from the east shortly after it's seperation from all the other R1 clades that went into Europe, some 25,000 to 45,000 years ago. This date and locale squarely places R1*, U6, and M1 together with the Aterian culture somewhere around 35,000 ybp or more. This means that R1* must have performed it's hostile takeover of the "M1" clan before or immediately after it's spread into North Africa, and a very long time before the Ibero-Maurusian.

The best assumption is that from at least 30,000 ybp until at least 22,000 ybp, all of North Africa was near completely dominated by the Aterian culture along with haplogroups M1,U6, and R1*.

It is possible that the Ibero-Maurusians contained most of the E1b1b now found in Berbers, Arabs, and possibly Guanches, entering North Africa from the east and/or south of North Africa 8,000 years before the Capsian. But it is also possible that the Capsian and Arab cultures brought these lineages later, along with haplogroup J.
The Cro-Magnon robustness of the Ibero-Maurusians, as well as supposed lithic similarities, has been attributed by some scientists to an origin in the Iberian Penninsula, from which the culture gets it's name, and from where Cro-Magnon could have conceivably arrived at such a remote date. If this is so, then the R1b they undoubtedly carried has been wrongly attributed (in Guanches and Berbers) to colonization in historic times by Europeans, or else the Ibero-Maurusian R1b lineage was wiped out by the invading Capsians and the later Berbers themselves.

We know from a recent study on Guanches that the Basques in Iberia obtained at least one matriarchal lineage from the Aterians (or Aterian/Ibero-Maurusians) sometime around 20,000 ybp. Since the Canary Islands are thought to have been uninhabited at the time, they can only have gotten the haplogroup from North Africa. This implies one of four possibilities; that there was either a human trade or matrimonial connection between the Ibero-Maurusians and Basques at the time, that the Ibero-Maurusians represent an extinct African branch of the ancestral Basque populations which maintained trade and communication across the Straight of Gibralter with it's mother population, that the Basques raided North Africa for women independent of the Ibero-Maurusians at roughly the same time as the latter's appearance in the region, or that Aterian/Ibero-Maurusian tribes entered Iberia and were there absorbed by the Basque population alone.

As there is no evidence of a distinctly Ibero-Maurusian or Aterian presence in Iberia itself at this time, the invasion from North Africa into Iberia seems unlikely.

The fact that the "robustness"comparisons of Cro-Magnon to Ibero-Maurusians were made before modern dating techniques and assumed that the North African samples were of the same age as the early "Cro-Magnon," which was comparably robust but is actually over 10,000 years older, is problematic at best for the Iberian "Cro-Magnon" origin model; by 20,000 years ago most Europeans had scaled down their hyper-robustness, even the ones that descended from the original Rb1.

If the Ubero-Maurusians were part of an ancestral Iberian population, then that Population could only have descended from the anomolous cro-magnoid "hybrids" found in the caves of northern Portugal and dated to 24,500 ybp, who were the only known Iberians robust enough at the time to fit the Ibero-Maurusian bill.

But the date of 20,000 for the Basque/Guanches shared lineage marker coinciding with the beginning of the Ibero-Maurusian in North Africa makes an independent voyage to the region by Basques coincidental, if possible.

Of course, not all of these possibilities explain who the Ibero-Maurusians actually were. A hyper-robust people arriving mysteriously out of some other part of Africa is not impossible, and could explain the E1b1b and E1a in Berbers quite nicely. And since other cultures in Africa practice tooth-knocking it would provide a cultural context.

If the neanderthal hybrids became the Ibero-Maurusians, then their culture changed between 24,500 and 21,500 while crossing to Africa, which is not surprising when two cultures collide. Their robustness and primitive features can be attributed to the so-called Portuguese "hybrids" and full blooded neanderthals around the Rock of Gibralter which were evident in the area only a few thousand years earlier. It is not surprising that there is a gap between the Neanderthals and hybrids of 24,500 years ago and the Ibero-Maurusians of 21,500 years ago if they are indeed a continuation of the same race, as the shorelines between them have shrunk and only a small portion of artifacts and fossils deposited at such a remote date survive. Furthermore, the absense of the Gravettian lithic and cave painting in southern Iberia during this period lends strength to the idea of neanderthal/hybrid occupation throughout. And 3000 years is plenty of time for the Ibero-Maurusians to have developed the practice of "tooth-knocking," which is otherwise unknown in Europe.

Turning back to haplogroup U6, we can see that it's subcalde u6a is the most common, whereas U6b is only (or mostly) found in Basques(where it has the most diversity) and Guanches, whereas subclade U6c is only found in Berbers and Guanches. A variation of U6b called U6b1 is found in guanches, but not in Basques. This shows that U6b and U6c had to have been seperate populations when the Basques and Berbers aquired them, and sometime afterwards rejoined.

Despite the coincidence in dates, it seems most probable that the Ibero-Maurusian lineage was U6c, and the Aterian U6b, because the Ibero-Maurusians would have been more adjacent to the invading Capsians and Berbers (who obtained only the U6c lineage) whereas the last bastion of Aterian culture was by that time pushed south of the Atlas mountains, or elsewise already heading to the Canaries (although the latter is unlikely since first signs of habitation are dated to no more than 5000 ybp).

If this is the case, then either the Ibero-Maurusians delivered only females to the Basques from Aterian clans that they did not yet fully control, or the Basques sailed around the lands held by Ibero-Maurusians when they came to collect their ladies. This is not to absolutely rule out the possibility that they brought some men back too, but the small amount of E1b1b in Basques is generally agreed to be from the much later Moorish invasions of the Iberian Penninsula, and R1* and/or R1b1* is unknown. R1b makes up around 90% of the Basques lineages, and the remaining 10% is diverse.


The Aterian Culture

From Wikipedia:

The Aterian industry is a name given by archaeologists to a type of stone tool manufacturing dating to the Middle Stone Age (or Middle Palaeolithic) in the region around the Atlas Mountains and the northern Sahara.
The industry was probably created by modern humans (Homo sapiens), albeit of an early type, as shown by the few skeletal remains known so far from sites on the Moroccan Atlantic coast.
Bifacially-worked leaf shaped and tanged projectile points are a common artefact type and so are racloirs and Levallois flakes. Items of personal adornment (pierced and ochred Nassarius shell beads) are known from at least one Aterian site, with an age of 82,000 years.

The Aterian culture gets a bad rap because it is seen as being comtemporaneous with the Aurignacion Culture, which didn't begin until about 45,000 ybp and only happened in Europe proper. The Homo Sapiens in the Levant of 82,000 years ago had not yet gotten an upper hand on the neanderthals of the region, who had experienced both overlapping campsites and cultures there since 95,000 ybp, and who would continue doing so for the next 7,000 years or so. The Aterian tradition was the first to have used Bows and Arrows, pushing that date from a mere 15,000 ybp to 75,000 ybp or more. The neighboring Levant was slow to take on Aurignacion culture when it form in Europe 45,000 years ago, and always received the innovations from Europe last over the next 25,000 years. But the Aterian culture did not participate in the Aurignacion or succeeding cultures at all, and instead continued with the Mousterian traditions. The use of the Levalloise technique sometimes seperates Upper Paleolithic from Middle Paleolithic for researches, so North Africa is often not given an Upper paleolithic date until 15,000 ybp. This is unfortunate because here the Mousterian techniques are taken to their final fruition, resulting in thousands of beautiful arrowheads, spearheads, and other weapons and tools. The Aterians were the first to use desert glass, and have early cave paintings that rival similar dates in Europe. They are the guys on the Discovery Channel storing water in austritch eggs for later trips across the 800 miles of Sahara desert to and from Tunisia, though I doubt they looked anything like they were portrayed. One of the earliest, if not THE earliest, mines is attributed to the Aterian Culture, from where chert was transported to the Tunisian coasts 20,000 years ago. Through much of the Aterian era, the Sahara was greatly diminished, and North Africa was covered with forest and savannah along the coasts, with abundant game to boot, and even the first true fishhooks are claimed for the culture.
But. many archies don't assign Upper Paleolithic staus to North Africa until the Capsian period starting 10-12,000 ybp because of the blade techniques, which mistakenly implies that both the Aterian and Ibero-Maurusian were both "Old Stone Age" cultures.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJS-45F4X3...


http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/berber-and-...


http://www.springerlink.com/content/5677p31651255155/fulltext.pdf


http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/the-asian-o...


http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~donegalstrongs/u6b....


http://carnby.altervista.org/troe/02-08.htm


http://www.oldstoneage.com/smugglers/aterian.htm

Who Were the First Homo Sapiens Sapients in North Africa?

Living Neanderthal Descendents Debate

A Question from Santa Claus



Question:

I wanted to ask about the possibility that Stonehenge (and many other Neolithic sites) were constructed by the Neanderthals.


Among the reasons I think this should be viewed as a possibility is that the Neanderthal culture has been seen as being just as advanced as that of the other humans of the time period.


Furthermore the tools found at the sites do not strictly speaking lend support to any specific tools construction methods. The muscularity of the Neanderthals would have made it possible to erect the megalithic constructions using alternative processes.


As part of this I wanted to suggest about the possibility that these Neolithic sites were constructed at the end of Holocene time period, just before the last ice age.


I know that the age calculations may not support these but the age calculations are not an absolute truth anyway but more like an estimate derived from different factors.

Answer:

Sure... in the sense that the people who built Stonehenge may have carried within them a DNA inheritance from the Neanderthals.

But the last of the Neanderthals died out about 30 thousand years ago, and theyoungest modern-Neanderthal hybrid remains are about 25 thousand years old.


Stonehenge just plain isn't old enough.
-JTEM

Reply:
Actually, they've got full-blooded trolls in Gibraltar now until 25,000 ybp, still rockin' out Mousterian style. Seems the hybrids were up in Portugal at the same time, playin' that Aurignacio-Gravettian noise.

Still a long way in distance and time from megalithic England though, heh.
-Joe


Reply:
Yeah....but the last neanderthal was 25,000 ybp in Gibraltar...last hybrid 25,000 in Portugal. Genetic studies and cultural studies show that indeed the "Celts" do have a relationship to the Portugese of around 10,000 ybp and to the Basques, who are still right near there.

But nor the portugese of 10,000 ybp or the Basques are neanderthals, or even neanderthal hybrids. The neanderthals had been gone 10,000 years at least by the time the celts built stone henge, regardless of whether or not celts have a dash of neanderthal in their family tree.
_Joe

Reply:

Basque is linguistically so different from any other language that it has been postulated (see e.g. Cavalli-Sforza*) that it is a relict language of the original Cro-Magnon Europeans preceding the Indo- European speakers .

By the way "hybrid" is a long way from being a universally accepted explanation of the Lagar Velho child. The skeleton was badly crushed by a bulldozer prior to its discovery in a quarry, making its reconstruction problematic and controversial. Also it is dated a couple of millenia younger than the last known neanderthal (about 28
KYA in southern Iberia...)


Ross Macfarlane



Reply:

Studies of Neandertal DNA shows that there is no trace of Neandertal DNA in modern humans. It may have existed at one point in time. We can be sure there was more than one woman alive at the time of Mitochondrial Eve, yet the mtDNA from those women no longer exists. Those lines are all extinct. Likewise, there might have been Neandertal/Human hybrids at one time, but no such individual exists today as far as anyone knows.
-Imipak
Reply:

Reply:
But it allows for the possibility of up to 5% admixture from archaic populations.
Neanderthals are Type O negative blood type....meaning they would have trouble bearing human children (at least the second time) whereas modern humans would have no trouble bearing neanderthal offspring. In other words, there would have been alot more neanderthal fathers of hybrids than neanderthal mothers of hybrids, and fathers don't pass on their mtdna, just their y chromosome and blood type. Incidentally, Basque have the highest rate of Type O negative blood in the world at 37%, way higher than anyone else. Now, the highest rate of haplogroup R1B, which is one of the "Cro- Magnon" Haplogroups along with Haplogroup N, is in Basques (90%) and Celts (87%), but the rest of europe isn't far behind...most populations being at 60% to 75%. Basques might be the closests to so - called "Cro-Magnons," but they also may be the only population left with a significant neanderthal legacy.

Note: Basques is actually 89%, European Atlantic coast population 90-91%, and Irish93%.

-Joe

Reply:

imipak wrote:
> Studies of Neandertal DNA shows that there is no trace
> of Neandertal DNA in modern humans.


This is simply not true. For starters, if they came across a modern sequence while studying Neanderthal DNA they wouldn't even look at it. What they would do -- what they have been doing -- is throwing it away, assuming that any match has to be contamination.

Secondly, all the studies performed are not capable of making the determinations claimed.


I'll give you a simple way of seeing this yourself...


Giving a best-case scenario, what kind of testing would YOU want to perform, in order to determine if moderns and Neanderthals interbred?


Me? I'd want to start with one of these so-called "Moderns" before they made contact with Neanderthals. Next, I'd want a sample from the Neanderthals before they came into contact with the moderns. And, finally, I'd like to compare both of those sample with people today.


Instead, we look at Neanderthal DNA tens of thousands of years AFTER they started crossing paths with moderns, and then compare those results with us today.


What they're doing as far as testing goes is NOTHING like what wee need to do to answer the question.



> We can be sure there was more than one woman alive
> at the time of Mitochondrial Eve, yet the mtDNA from
> those women no longer exists.


Damn. The mtDNA evidence is even worse... MUCH worse.

-JTEM

Reply:

According to numerous documentaries of the lives of Neanderthals, I don't think they had the time nor the resources to erect anything nearly as large as Stonehenge.
They were mostly cave dwelling nomads, armed with primitive spears (no bows and arrows), in competition for food with 4-legged carnivores, who sometimes had Neanderthals for lunch. Since they had no agriculture and their prey was seasonal, they were forced to re-locate several times during the year.
-Hagar

Reply:
AFAIK, you are correct on everything but the spears. Neandertals had better wood and stone technology than Cro Magnon or other early humans. Far from being the most primitive, they were surprisingly advanced. However, "advanced" is relative. The ability to make a stone knife or axe is a VERY different problem to cutting down 100' oak trees and then placing them in the ground upside-down. (Archaeologists
studying post holes claim that this is the size of tree being seated in the ground in neolithic Salisbury, based on width and effects of compression.)

It is highly surprising even the humans of 10,000 years ago had the capability to do something like that. But it's more the mental capacity. By that time (8,000 BCE), they certainly had all the technology the needed.

One of the things that really eliminates the Neanderthal hypothesis - beyond the dates and the technology - is the design. Stonehenge isn't the only stone circle in the world. In my opinion, it's not even the most interesting. Similar stone circles exist throughout Britain and mainland Europe. Many show considerable skill. The two links above to the stones in the Orkneys show stone circles of almost wafer-thin rocks that stand up to 19' tall in the Stenness case. This is not a tale of brute-force - you'd break the stones if you tried applying force at one single point - but one of strategy and long-term planning

Although Avebury has been badly damaged by people purposely destroying the stones to get rocks or to fight against ancient paganism, the above photograph gives you an idea of the scale of this giant. Three- quarters of a mile across, I believe it to be the largest stone circle anywhere in the world. This was no short-term hobby.

Last, but not least, the construction workers' village was found. This clinches it. The buildings were indisputably made for a neolithic homo sapien, not neandertal.



-Imipak

Reply:

No that date is 24,500 to 28,000 at the rock of Gibralter, the same as the hybrids in Portugal....who had a different culture than the rest of Europe. There are more caves in Iberia proper, but none with cave paintings as articulate as those in the Franco-Cantabrian region during that time. And this is interesting because there WERE comparable Cave Paintings in Italy and Sicily from the Paleolithic.

Despite the traditioonal view that the Basques have always inhabited Basque Country, their DNA and skull type fon't show up there until 5000 BC at the earliest in that area. Their DNA is different from other Atlantic HSS descendents in that Haplogroup V comes from a mother gene that had seperated from the rest of them at least 45,000 years ago, but only diverged from it's mother gene 12,000 to 17,000 years ago, and is only found in descendents of basque mothers. Also,
they sailed out from wherever they lived on the coast of europe sometime between 24,500 years ago and 5000 years ago and stole a bunch of women from either the Canary Islands or North Africa. At this time, the Guanches were seperated into two groups in North africa, one with U6b and another with U6c haplogroup. The Basques got women from the U6b clan. Later, the berbers got some women from the U6c clan. I am not sure if U6b (not present in berbers) and U6c(not present in Basque except in association with Berber/Moorish influence) ever got back together among the Guanches, because some islands may be culturally isolate, but they both still exist in the Canaries, along with a new gene U6b1 which is not present in Basques or Berbers.


This doesn't rule out the possibility that Basques absorbed some neanderthals or hybrids into their gene pool, as JTEM has shown, but it does explain most of their gene divurgence. Their women stayed isolated from the rest of Cro-Magnon from 45,000 bce to at least 17,500 bce, and they borrowed other women from an asian peoples who
had also been isolated from the rest of their kin for at least 25,000 years.
I believe these guys were the Aterians, as their sister genes have a backtrack schemes across Africa, as if absorbed into the North African Maghreb man ( formerly known as a North African strain of Cro-Magnon) expansion into Tunisia and further.


However, these things don't explain the Basques' high rate of O negative, unless pure Rb1 and Pure U6b has a tendency to create this anomoly, or in the case that Haplogroup V has been shown to be linked with this). It also doesn't explain why the Basques have a language isolate, seperate from all other Rb1 predominate races in Europe, especially when we consider that the Basques are closest to the Irish in DNA tests among other predominantly Rb Europeans, along witht he fact that all predominantly Rb haplogroups share a language of Gaelic/ Celtic Origin. The situation gets worse when we see that the Irish are the highest Rb population in Europe at 93% and have one of the oldest Celtic/Gaelic languages in Europe(basques at 89% and English, Welch, Scottish, Dutch, etc at 90%-91%).


The Irish and Basques had to have split AFTER they split with all the other Cro-magnon Rbs. And yet Celtic is akin is very close to the language of all the other Rbs, and Basque is a language Isolate. If the Irish learned celtic after the Ice age and discarded Euskara, then why is it so old and what race did it come from? And why would the least genically influenced Cro-Magnons change their language when no other Cro-Magnons did?
-Joe
Reply:

Living Neanderthal Descendents Debate

First Humans Out of Africa?

Persian Gulf (UAE) emirates a focus for the migration from Africa of
the first humans.

Archaeologists discover 85,000 yr old villages in Sharjah
April 23rd, 2009 - 2:24 pm ICT


Sharjah, April 23 (ANI): Archaeologists have discovered villages
dating back to 85,000 years in Sharjah’s Jebel Fayah, which show that
human settlements existed in the area during that time.


Excavation work was carried out as part of a joint programme between
the Directorate of Antiquities at the Culture and Information
Department in Sharjah and the Institute of Prehistoric Studies and
Research at the German University of Tubengin.


The two-month excavation showed the existence of a deeper layer at the
depth of four meters below the surface, which dates back to at least
100,000 years.


This coincides with the time when man left Africa and reached
Australia around 50,000 years ago.


It had been assumed for hereditary reasons that man moved from East
Africa to the south of the Arabian Peninsula and then to the northern
coasts of the Indian ocean and South Asia.


During times when the sea level was low, people crossed to the islands
now known as Indonesia, which proves that they had some knowledge of
navigation that allowed them to sail to Australia.


It can be assumed that some of the ancestors of Australia’s first
residents stayed in the rocky shelters on the foot of Jebel Fayah
mountain.


The latest discoveries prove that the UAE has a long and rich history.


Considering the international significance of the new discoveries, the
international science community put the site under the spotlight, with
many scientists and specialists flocking the area to find out more
about the archeological discoveries. (ANI)
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Source

First Humans Out of Africa?

All Hail the American King!

I'm not sure what took me so long to begin reading "Song of Ice and Fire."
I had been looking for something to satiate my lust for great literary fantasy since "The Lord of the Rings" was read to me as a child, to little avail.
Oh, Robert E. Howard became a love and addiction for a while, and still is. Stephen R. Donaldson captured my attention for a spell with his brilliance and originality, despite the ridiculous names. (I might add that his lesser series, beginning with The Mirror of Her Dreams, is devoid of the stupid names and is a great choice for those waiting on Martin's next book, as it is very much like these books for it's non-quest plot, mystery, and political intrigue).
Jordan, the three Terrys, and a slew of others could only serve as a fantasy fix for a book or two. Though they are all good, imaginative writers, their worlds seemed only almost complete, and usually heavilly dependent on Tolkien.
I heard from many fans that Martin was different, and some even had the gall to put him above Tolkien. This was probably one reason why I neglected these books- the sacrilege seemed disrespectful. Another reason might have been the fact that I'd heard the series was based on The War of the Roses, and that seemed un-unique to me, and a little too much like Alternative History. Too, the series was by a new author, not an elder sage....and it wasn't even finished. I don't like to start reading books (or longer books that some call "series") that aren't finished, and what's more I have never been able to see the point in taking more than a trilogy to get through a single plot. It always seemed to me that most long fantasies are just a means of riding the gravy train for far too long. I put Martin on the backburner despite the recommendations, and only after a decade finally picked up the books.
I was entirely surprised to find out that Martin deserves the title of "The American Tolkien" hands down. This is a new king of fantasy, and one book of only a handful in the genre who actually makes it rise above mediocrity in the literary world.
Here is a world that may be as well thought out as even Middle Earth. It isn't based on the War of the Roses, but rather inspired by it, as the myths of the Celts and the Norse inspired Tolkien. It is as black and dark as Howard(or in some cases even darker) and as realistic and witty as Dickens. What's more, Martin is able to speak from many a character's perspective in a convincing and engaging way, be it child, man, cripple, or knave. His dialogue is true to human nature, and his heroes and villians change and evolve as people do only in the real world. What's more, he doesn't pull any punches; no one survives just because Martin has grown attached to them, or fears that his audience has. Events happen that WOULD happen in reality, rather than portraying only events that will get the reader from point A to point B. There are no ex-machinas, and despite Sansa's protests this is no fairy tale.
All and all, this is definitely the best author of fantasy since Tolkien.
Besides a handful like the aforementioned Donaldson and Howard, there are none others who even come close.
It has been years since valor and sacrifice in a book have welled tears in my eyes like they did during the reading of LOTR, and the returning emotions are much welcomed. I thank you, Mr. Martin....and will be beginning the second in this series the moment I'm finished writing this review. Let's hope I can break free of it long enough to get some work done in the next week.

All Hail the American King!