Thursday, June 7, 2012
Archaic African Admixture
The team that found archaic genes in central Africans says the interbreeding was a lot more extensive than most other scientists are ready to concede...
Source
Redating Peking Man and Primeval Forest
This old article on the redating of Peking Man speaks of a primeval forest which may have bloccked the route from Indonesia to China.
Source
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Sarcasm Gene Selected Against in Neanderthal Hybrids?
Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin talked about sarcasm being selected in our evolution back in 2008. Though I doubt that people who didn't understand sarcasm were negatively selected across ALL peoples (I have a few friends whose ancestors must have SURELY selected against it), I'm thinking that it might have something to do with selective sweeps across genomes....
i.e. What genes help individuals to understand tonal languages, and what genes help us to interact in cultures where where tone is used more for sarcasm, emphasis, surprise, etc...
Of course neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin can't be blamed for getting that one bit wrong, though; she's only a neurophysiologist. Maybe if she had a real job like me singing Rolling Stones songs at the beach bars she'd know that about sarcasm...
SNARK
Should the Chinese get or not get sarcasm since they are heavy on the old forms of macrocephalin and ASPM?
Chinese Sarcasm
Monday, June 4, 2012
Homo erectus bilzingslebensis 300kbp in the middle of Europe with the biggest similarities to OH9.
OH9 and OH12 are home erectus that invaded Africa 1.2 mil and 600,000kbp.
LINK
Sunday, June 3, 2012
1.2 Million Year-old Tooth Found At Atapuerca, Spain
Here
Earliest Handaxes here:
Europe's oldest axes discovered
Sophisticated tool-making skills more widespread than previously thought.
Rex Dalton
Hand axes were made by early humans in Europe around 900,000 years ago.CHRISTIAN JEGOU PUBLIPHOTO DIFFUSION/ SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Hand axes from southern Spain have been dated to nearly a million years old, suggesting that advanced Stone Age tools were present in Europe far earlier than was previously believed.
Acheulian axes, which date to at least 1.5 million years ago, have been found in Africa, and similar tools at least 700,000 years old have been found in Israel and China. But in Europe, sophisticated tool-making was thought to stretch back only around 500,000 years.
Cave sediment levels that included the two axes also held what some archaeologists believe may be small tools made using the so-called Levallois technique of shaping stone, known to have existed in Europe only about 300,000 years ago.
"Up to now, no one imagined this level of tool-making was going on in Europe about a million years ago," says Michael Walker, an archaeologist at the University of Murcia who has studied the region near Granada where the axes were found.
Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis are all species known to be associated with Acheulian axes, which have two-sided cutting faces that were made of many types of stone for still-unconfirmed uses.
The Quípar cave hand-axe is the oldest dated in Europe.Michael Walker
The Iberian axes, reported in Nature1 today, were found at two sites dated to at least 760,000 and 900,000 years old, respectively. Gary Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California dated the sites using palaeomagnetic analysis, which uses known changes in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field over time.
Thomas Wynn, a cognitive evolutionary biologist from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, says: "This [find] tells us some things about these early humans' brains, like the development of spatial conception. But not much, as cognitive ability changes very, very slowly."
Age surprise
For co-author Luis Gibert, the report is the culmination of years of field studies in the Quipar Valley, where his late father, Josep Gibert Clols, pioneered research. "This is an amazing site," says Gibert.
The Quipar Valley has historically been home to a lake environment of marshes and shallow lagoons. The Solana del Zamborino and Estrecho del Quípar caves in the valley, where the axes were found, were first thought to be only about 200,000 years old.
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But after dates of stone flakes at a nearby location indicated they were much older, Gibert, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley centre, and Scott homed in on the caves' rich sediments.
In addition to the palaeomagnetic technique, Gibert notes that a record in rock layers of the remains of micro-mammals such as rodents, developed by Walker's team at Estrecho del Quípar, was crucial in confirming the dates. The Solana del Zamborino cave hadn't been studied in more than 30 years.
The older dates for the Spanish axes are now expected to generate new studies at other European rock shelters bearing Acheulian artefacts. But those studies may be hampered by the lack of appropriate sediments with which to identify palaeomagnetic polarity reversals, says Walker.
ReferencesHere
Saturday, June 2, 2012
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