Steak Dinners Go Back 2.5 Million Years Options

Pic of the skull at the citation. Looks a little "longhorny"


Steak Dinners Go Back 2.5 Million Years
A new fossil skull of a bull confirms that beef has been "what's
for dinner" since the dawn of humans.


By Larry O'Hanlon | Tue Feb 9, 2010 04:05 AM ET


bull skull


The reconstructed skull of the newly found species of early bull from
Eritrea is shown with researchers Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro (left)
and Francisco Landucci.
Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro


THE GIST:


* A new early bull species shows that cattle and humans evolved
side-by-side.
* The fossil skull is a missing link between modern cattle and
their African ancestors.
* Early humans didn't herd cattle, but they most definitely hunted
them and ate them.


The discovery of a new "missing link" species of bull dating to a
million years ago in Eritrea pushes back the beef steak dinner to the
very dawn of humans and cattle.


Although there is no evidence that early humans were actually herding
early cattle 2.5 million years ago, the early humans and early cattle
certainly shared the same landscape and beef was definitely on the
menu all along, say researchers.


The telltale fossil is a skull with enormous horns that belongs to the
cattle genus Bos. It has been reassembled from over a hundred shards
found at a dig that also contains early human remains, said
paleontologist Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i
Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. Martinez is the lead author of a paper
reporting the discovery in the February issue of the journal
Quaternary International.


"This means that the humans have been eating Bos since the beginnings
of the genus Homo," said Martinez, referring to the genus to which
humans belong.


http://news.discovery.com/animals/earliest-bull-beef-fossil.html


Quaternary International
Volume 212, Issue 2, 1 February 2010, Pages 169-175
Quaternary Changes of Mammalian Communities Across and Between
Continents
doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2009.09.003 | How to Cite or Link Using DOI
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA All rights reserved. Cited
By in Scopus (0)
Permissions & Reprints


A new species of bull from the Early Pleistocene paleoanthropological
site of Buia (Eritrea): Parallelism on the dispersal of the genus Bos
and the Acheulian culture
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.


Bienvenido Martínez-Navarroa, Corresponding Author Contact
Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Lorenzo Rookb, E-mail
The Corresponding Author, Mauro Papinib, E-mail The Corresponding
Author and Yosief Libsekalc, E-mail The Corresponding Author


a ICREA, Institut Catala de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social,
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43005 Tarragona, Spain


b Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di Firenze, 50121
Firenze, Italy


c National Museum of Eritrea, P.O. Box 5284, Asmara, Eritrea


Available online 18 September 2009.


Abstract


The origin of the genus Bos is a debated issue. It has traditionally
been linked with that of the genera Leptobos and Bison, two Eurasian
forms. The oldest record of Bos, B. primigenius, in Eurasia is at
Venosa-Notarchirico, Italy (not, vert, similar0.5 to 0.6 Ma). However,
the oldest published evidence of modern Bos is a skull fragment from
Asbole, Lower Awash Valley, Ethiopia (not, vert, similar0.6 to 0.8
Ma). This paper describes a new species, Bos buiaensis, from Buia,
Eritrea (1.0 Ma). B. buiaensis shows a combination of primitive
characters of the African Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene form
Pelorovis sensu stricto and derived characters of B. primigenius. This
new finding demonstrates that Bos has been part of the human
ecological landscape since the beginning of the genus Homo in the
African Late Pliocene.
Article Outline


1. Introduction
2. Description of the new species
3. Anatomical description of the holotype and comparison with other
species of the lineage of Bos, including Pelorovis sensu strictu, B.
acutifrons, B. planifrons and B. primigenius


3.1. Holotype specimen cranium DAN-244


4. Description of the other specimens
5. Discussion
Acknowledgements
References


Thumbnail image


Fig. 1. Map and generalized sections. Top right: satellite imagery
showing the location of the Buia study area. Left: generalized
stratigraphic section of the Buia basin succession and its
magnetostratigraphy. Right bottom: measured stratigraphic section of
the upper portion of Aalat Formation as outcropping at A094 site
showing the placement of Acheulean artefacts and Bos buiaensis n. sp.
type specimen.


View Within Article


Thumbnail image


Fig. 2. Type specimen of Bos buiaensis n. sp., skull DAN-244. (A)
Upper view; (B) left lateral view; (C) basal view; (D) right lateral
view; (E) posterior view; (F) augmented upper view; (G) augmented
posterior view; and (H) augmented view of the palate.


View Within Article
Source

Steak Dinners Go Back 2.5 Million Years Options

Sea levels erratic during latest ice age
Cave research finds new evidence of surprising rise 81,000 years ago


By Sid Perkins
Web edition : Thursday, February 11th, 2010


Pic at the citation
HIGH-RISE EVIDENCEThe mineral crusts on high-and-dry formations in
coastal caves of Majorca indicate that during the latest ice age, sea
level briefly and inexplicably rose more than one meter higher than
today’s level.© B.P.


Cave formations along the coast of an island in the Mediterranean Sea
hold evidence that sea level can rise and fall abruptly during an ice
age, a finding that casts some doubt on current notions about how
those lengthy cold spells develop and progress.


At the height of an ice age, immense volumes of water are locked up in
land-based ice sheets, and ocean levels can be as much as 130 meters
below where they are today. By contrast, when that ice melts during
warm periods, sea level can be a few meters higher than the modern-day
standard, says Jeffrey Dorale, a paleoclimatologist at the University
of Iowa in Iowa City. Now, Dorale and his colleagues report in the
Feb. 12 Science that during a brief interval well within the most
recent ice age, sea level suddenly and inexplicably rose to a height
more than one meter above today’s.


Evidence supporting that conclusion comes from cave formations on the
Spanish island of Majorca, the researchers say. As sea levels rose and
fell, waters sloshing into coastal caves left crusts of minerals on
their walls and floors as well as on existing cave formations, Dorale
says.


Radioisotope dating of mineral crusts in one cave along Majorca’s
southern coast indicates that sea level sat about 2.6 meters higher
than today between 121,000 and 116,000 years ago, during the last warm
spell between ice ages. That level is consistent with sea level data
gathered at other sites worldwide, Dorale notes.


But three samples from other crusts in the same cave — samples
deposited about 1.5 meters above modern-day sea level — yielded
surprising results. Those crusts formed around 81,000 years ago, well
after the most recent ice age — which lasted from roughly 110,000
until 10,000 years ago — had begun, Dorale says. Similar analyses of
samples from nearby caves show that between 80,000 and 82,000 years
ago, sea level ranged between 1.25 and 1.6 meters above today’s
standard.


“The [team’s] results are strong but not absolutely watertight,”
comments R. Lawrence Edwards, a paleoclimatologist at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis. One possible confounding factor, for
instance, could be the rebound of Earth’s crust in the region since
the end of the most recent ice age. After the ice mass smothering
Northern Europe melted and ran to the sea, pressure from viscous
material at the top of Earth’s mantle would have lifted the area,
thereby influencing apparent sea level.


But Dorale and his colleagues contend that tectonic uplift hasn’t
affected their data. He cites similar analyses of now-submerged
mineral crusts in Majorcan caves indicating sea level was about 20
meters below today’s level about 85,000 years ago and about 15 meters
below the modern standard about 79,000 years ago — readings that match
most data gleaned elsewhere at those times.


Studies at a handful of sites worldwide have noted that sea level
reached an exceedingly brief and similarly enigmatic high point around
81,000 years ago, says Dorale. Those results have been controversial
and, for the most part, have been “politely ignored because they don’t
fit the presumed pattern” of how ice ages develop and progress, he
says.


Scientists have long noted erratic dips and jumps in sea level during
Earth’s ice ages, but debate has typically focused on the magnitude of
those swings, says Dorale. The new findings are somewhat disturbing
because they suggest that at some points during an ice age, sea level
can rise as much as 2 meters over the course of a century. “It’s tough
to explain how to melt that much ice that fast,” he admits.

SOURCE

On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners

The New York Times prints their version of the homonid mariners to
Crete. Pics of stone tools at the citation.

February 16, 2010
On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD


Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been
going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.


That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two
summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there,
archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is
considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the
Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of
prehuman cultures.


Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning
that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push
the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years,
specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact
discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek
islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years
ago.


The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-
crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia,
beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle
of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian
island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water
to new habitats.


Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete
noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up
to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the
tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean,
which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.


More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were
collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of
Plakias, by a team led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou.
She is with the Greek Ministry of Culture and he is an associate
professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They
were assisted by Greek and American geologists and archaeologists,
including Curtis Runnels of Boston University.


Dr. Strasser described the discovery last month at a meeting of the
Archaeological Institute of America. A formal report has been accepted
for publication in Hesparia, the journal of the American School of
Classical Studies in Athens, a supporter of the fieldwork.


The Plakias survey team went in looking for material remains of more
recent artisans, nothing older than 11,000 years. Such artifacts would
have been blades, spear points and arrowheads typical of Mesolithic
and Neolithic periods.


“We found those, then we found the hand axes,” Dr. Strasser said last
week in an interview, and that sent the team into deeper time.


“We were flummoxed,” Dr. Runnels said in an interview. “These things
were just not supposed to be there.”


Word of the find is circulating among the ranks of Stone Age scholars.
The few who have seen the data and some pictures — most of the tools
reside in Athens — said they were excited and cautiously impressed.
The research, if confirmed by further study, scrambles timetables of
technological development and textbook accounts of human and prehuman
mobility.


Ofer Bar-Yosef, an authority on Stone Age archaeology at Harvard, said
the significance of the find would depend on the dating of the site.
“Once the investigators provide the dates,” he said in an e-mail
message, “we will have a better understanding of the importance of the
discovery.”


Dr. Bar-Yosef said he had seen only a few photographs of the Cretan
tools. The forms can only indicate a possible age, he said, but
“handling the artifacts may provide a different impression.” And
dating, he said, would tell the tale.


Dr. Runnels, who has 30 years’ experience in Stone Age research, said
that an analysis by him and three geologists “left not much doubt of
the age of the site, and the tools must be even older.”


The cliffs and caves above the shore, the researchers said, have been
uplifted by tectonic forces where the African plate goes under and
pushes up the European plate. The exposed uplifted layers represent
the sequence of geologic periods that have been well studied and
dated, in some cases correlated to established dates of glacial and
interglacial periods of the most recent ice age. In addition, the team
analyzed the layer bearing the tools and determined that the soil had
been on the surface 130,000 to 190,000 years ago.


Dr. Runnels said he considered this a minimum age for the tools
themselves. They include not only quartz hand axes, but also cleavers
and scrapers, all of which are in the Acheulean style. The tools could
have been made millenniums before they became, as it were, frozen in
time in the Cretan cliffs, the archaeologists said.


Dr. Runnels suggested that the tools could be at least twice as old as
the geologic layers. Dr. Strasser said they could be as much as
700,000 years old. Further explorations are planned this summer.


The 130,000-year date would put the discovery in a time when Homo
sapiens had already evolved in Africa, sometime after 200,000 years
ago. Their presence in Europe did not become apparent until about
50,000 years ago.


Archaeologists can only speculate about who the toolmakers were. One
hundred and thirty thousand years ago, modern humans shared the world
with other hominids, like Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis. The
Acheulean culture is thought to have started with Homo erectus.


The standard hypothesis had been that Acheulean toolmakers reached
Europe and Asia via the Middle East, passing mainly through what is
now Turkey into the Balkans. The new finds suggest that their
dispersals were not confined to land routes. They may lend credibility
to proposals of migrations from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar
to Spain. Crete’s southern shore where the tools were found is 200
miles from North Africa.


“We can’t say the toolmakers came 200 miles from Libya,” Dr. Strasser
said. “If you’re on a raft, that’s a long voyage, but they might have
come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through
Greek islands.”


But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the
discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners
had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have
had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water
crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable
populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.
SOURCE

On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners

Big Freeze Plunged Europe Into Ice Age in Months

Big Freeze Plunged Europe Into Ice Age in Months


ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2009) — In the film The Day After Tomorrow, the
world enters the icy grip of a new glacial period within the space of
just a few weeks. Now new research shows that this scenario may not be
so far from the truth after all.


William Patterson, from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and
his colleagues have shown that switching off the North Atlantic
circulation can force the Northern hemisphere into a mini 'ice age' in
a matter of months. Previous work has indicated that this process
would take tens of years.


Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by a mini ice-
age, known by scientists as the Younger Dryas, and nicknamed the 'Big
Freeze', which lasted around 1300 years. Geological evidence shows
that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of
freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its
banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. This vast
pulse, a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes
combined, diluted the North Atlantic conveyor belt and brought it to a
halt.


Without the warming influence of this ocean circulation temperatures
across the Northern hemisphere plummeted, ice sheets grew and human
civilisation fell apart.


Previous evidence from Greenland ice cores has indicated that this
sudden change in climate occurred over the space of a decade or so.
Now new data shows that the change was amazingly abrupt, taking place
over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most.


Patterson and his colleagues have created the highest resolution
record of the 'Big Freeze' event to date, from a mud core taken from
an ancient lake, Lough Monreach, in Ireland. Using a scalpel layers
were sliced from the core, just 0.5mm thick, representing a time
period of one to three months.


Carbon isotopes in each slice reveal how productive the lake was,
while oxygen isotopes give a picture of temperature and rainfall. At
the start of the 'Big Freeze' their new record shows that temperatures
plummeted and lake productivity stopped over the course of just a few
years. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to
Svalbard, creating icy conditions in a very short period of time,"
says Patterson, who presented the findings at the European Science
Foundation BOREAS conference on humans in the Arctic, in Rovaniemi,
Finland.


Meanwhile, their isotope record from the end of the Big Freeze shows
that it took around two centuries for the lake and climate to recover,
rather than the abrupt decade or so that ice cores indicate. "This
makes sense because it would take time for the ocean and atmospheric
circulation to turn on again," says Patterson.


Looking ahead to the future Patterson says there is no reason why a
'Big Freeze' shouldn't happen again. "If the Greenland ice sheet
melted suddenly it would be catastrophic," he says.


This study was part of a broad network of 38 individual research teams
from Europe, Russia, Canada and the USA forming the European Science
Foundation EUROCORES programme 'Histories from the North --
environments, movements, narratives' (BOREAS). This highly
interdisciplinary initiative brought together scientists from a wide
range of disciplines including humanities, social, medical,
environmental and climate sciences.
Source

Big Freeze Plunged Europe Into Ice Age in Months

Noah's Ark? We got a round tuit.

They were written on a tablet, which dates to around 1,700BC and was found in the Middle East during the 1940s by Leonard Simmons, who subsequently passed it on to his son Douglas.

Douglas took it to Irving Finkel, an expert at the British Museum, who "took one look at it an nearly fell off his chair". He then translated the 60 lines of script, and believes it is one of the first tablets to describe the shape of the famous ark.


Related Articles
Babylon at the British Museum - review
Review: Ararat by Frank Westerman"In all the images ever made people assumed the ark was, in effect, an ocean-going boat, with a pointed stem and stern for riding the waves – so that is how they portrayed it," Mr Finkel, Assistant Keeper Ancient Mesopotamian script, said. "But the ark didn't have to go anywhere, it just had to float, and the instructions are for a type of craft which they knew very well. It's still sometimes used in Iran and Iraq today, a type of round coracle which they would have known exactly how to use to transport animals across a river or floods."

The tablet describes the Mesopotamian story, which became the account in the Old Testament of Noah's Ark in the Book of Genesis.

In Mr Finkel's translation, the god speaks to Atram-Hasis, a Sumerian king who is the Noah figure in early versions of the ark story.

The tablet's translation says: "Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall! Atram-Hasis, pay heed to my advice, that you may live forever! Destroy your house, build a boat; despise possessions And save life! Draw out the boat that you will built with a circular design; Let its length and breadth be the same."

Mr Finkel, the curator of the recent British exhibition on ancient Babylon, believes it was during the Babylonian captivity that the exiled Jews learned of the story of Noah and incorporated it into the Old Testament.

"It is the most extraordinary thing," Douglas told The Guardian. "You hold it in your hand, and you instantly get a feeling that you are directly connected to a very ancient past – and it gives you a shiver down your spine."

Source

Noah's Ark? We got a round tuit.

100,000 year old protofarmers

ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought, according to a University of Calgary archaeologist who has found the oldest example of extensive reliance on cereal and root staples in the diet of early Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago.

Julio Mercader, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Tropical Archaeology in the U of C's Department of Archaeology, recovered dozens of stone tools from a deep cave in Mozambique showing that wild sorghum, the ancestor of the chief cereal consumed today in sub-Saharan Africa for flours, breads, porridges and alcoholic beverages, was in Homo sapiens' pantry along with the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges and the African "potato." This is the earliest direct evidence of humans using pre-domesticated cereals anywhere in the world. Mercader's findings are published in the December 18 issue of the research journal Science.

"This broadens the timeline for the use of grass seeds by our species, and is proof of an expanded and sophisticated diet much earlier than we believed," Mercader said. "This happened during the Middle Stone Age, a time when the collecting of wild grains has conventionally been perceived as an irrelevant activity and not as important as that of roots, fruits and nuts."

In 2007, Mercader and colleagues from Mozambique's University of Eduardo Mondlane excavated a limestone cave near Lake Niassa that was used intermittently by ancient foragers over the course of more than 60,000 years. Deep in this cave, they uncovered dozens of stone tools, animal bones and plant remains indicative of prehistoric dietary practices. The discovery of several thousand starch grains on the excavated plant grinders and scrapers showed that wild sorghum was being brought to the cave and processed systematically.

"It has been hypothesized that starch use represents a critical step in human evolution by improving the quality of the diet in the African savannas and woodlands where the modern human line first evolved. This could be considered one of the earliest examples of this dietary transformation," Mercader said. "The inclusion of cereals in our diet is considered an important step in human evolution because of the technical complexity and the culinary manipulation that are required to turn grains into staples."

Mercader said the evidence is on par with grass seed use by hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world during the closing stages of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago. In this case, the trend dates back to the beginnings of the Ice Age, some 90,000 years earlier.

Mercader's work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs program, Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the U of C's Faculty of Social Science and the National Geographic Society.Source

100,000 year old protofarmers

Stone tools on Crete suggest Paleolithic sailors Options

From The Times
January 18, 2010
Tools point to early Cretan arrivals
Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent


Evidence for the world’s earliest seafaring has emerged from an
archaeological survey in Crete. Tools of Lower Palaeolithic type, at
least 130,000 years old, have been found on the Greek island, which
has been isolated by the Mediterranean Sea for at least the past five
million years, so that any human ancestors must have arrived by boat.
At this date, they would have been of a pre-modern species: the
earliest Neanderthalers or even Homo heidelbergensis, the species to
which Boxgrove Man belonged, are among possible contenders, but no
such remains have so far been found on Crete.


“The early inhabitants of Crete reached the island using sea craft
capable of open-sea navigation and multiple journeys — a finding that
pushes the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than
100,000 years and has implications for the dispersal of early humans,”
Professor Curtis Runnels said. The oldest uncontested marine crossing
until recently was from Indonesia to Australia, dating to perhaps
60,000 years ago and made by anatomically modern humans of our own
species, Homo sapiens, although we now know that earlier settlement on
the island of Flores in Indonesia also necessitated a sea-crossing.


Professor Runnels, the Palaeolithic expert in the survey team, said
that the investigation was carried out along the southwestern coast of
Crete near the town of Plakias, facing Libya more than 200 miles to
the south. These first Cretans may have crossed the Libyan Sea rather
than island-hopping through the Cyclades from mainland Greece. Recent
finds of what are claimed to be Palaeolithic tools from the island of
Gavdos, off the south coast of Crete, would support this southern
approach.


The survey has focused on the area from Plakias to Ayios Pavlos,
including the Preveli Gorge, and has recovered more than 2,000 stone
artefacts from 28 sites; the early tools were found at nine of these,
eight in the area between Plakias and Preveli. “The existence of Lower
Palaeolithic artefacts in association with datable geological contexts
was a complete surprise: until now there has been no certain evidence
of Lower Palaeolithic seafaring in the Mediterranean,” Professor
Runnels said.


Early human penetration of Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar at a
much earlier Palaeolithic date has been proposed, on the basis of
occupation at Atapuerca, near Burgos, dating to at least 1.3 million
years ago. These first Europeans could also have come along the north
side of the Mediterranean from Anatolia, via Greece and the Balkans,
however. The impact of this Cretan evidence is to show that a sea-
crossing by pre-modern humans from Morocco to Spain cannot be ruled
out.


The Plakias survey team, headed by Dr Thomas Strasser, of Providence
College in Rhode Island, and Dr Eleni Panagopoulou, of the Greek
Ministry of Culture, and funded partly by the National Geographic
Society, sought caves and rock shelters near the mouths of freshwater
perennial streams and rivers emptying into the Libyan Sea and within
five kilometres of the present coast. Because erosion has cut back
many of these, the team sought artefacts on the slopes in front of
their present entrances. Much of the material was found on old marine
terraces up to 92 metres above modern sea level.


Up to 300 pieces were found at each of the early sites, and at five
sites the geological context allowed an approximate date to be
assigned. Professor Runnels considers his estimate of 130,000 years to
be a minimum and cautions that the artefacts could be much older. The
tools included handaxes, cleavers and scrapers, and the quartz rocks
used were sufficiently abundant for tools to be discarded after only
short periods of use.


What sort of water-craft might have been used remains a matter of
speculation, but it seems that our forebears were forging their way
across Homer’s “wine-dark sea” tens of millennia earlier than anybody
had supposed.
Source Article

Stone tools on Crete suggest Paleolithic sailors Options

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Prehistoric site found near UK's Stonehenge

from Comcast News:

Prehistoric site found near UK's Stonehenge




LONDON — Archaeologists have discovered a smaller prehistoric site near Britain's famous circle of standing stones at Stonehenge.

Researchers have dubbed the site "Bluehenge," after the color of the 27 Welsh stones that were laid to make up a path. The stones have disappeared, but the path of holes remains.

The new circle, unearthed over the summer by researchers from Sheffield University, represents an important find, researchers said Saturday. The site is about a mile (2 kilometers) away from Stonehenge.

Bluehenge, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of London, is believed to date back 5,000 years.

Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University says he believes the path and Stonehenge itself were linked to rituals of life and death.

Prehistoric site found near UK's Stonehenge

Prehistoric man 'used crude sat nav'

Prehistoric man 'used crude sat nav'
Prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version
of sat nav based on stone circle markers, historians have claimed.


Published: 7:00AM BST 15 Sep 2009
Prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version
of 'sat nav' based on stone circle markers, historians have claimed.
Silbury Hill, Wiltshire which may have been part of an ancient
navigational aid for prehistoric man Photo: SWNS


They were able to travel between settlements with pinpoint accuracy
thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.


These covered much of southern England and Wales and included now
famous landmarks such as Stonehenge and The Mount.


New research suggests that they were built on a connecting grid of
isosceles triangles that 'point' to the next site.


Many are 100 miles or more away, but GPS co-ordinates show all are
accurate to within 100 metres.


This provided a simple way for ancient Britons to navigate
successfully from A to B without the need for maps.


According to historian and writer Tom Brooks, the findings show that
Britain's Stone Age ancestors were ''sophisticated engineers'' and far
from a barbaric race.


Mr Brooks, from Honiton, Devon, studied all known prehistoric sites as
part of his research.


He said: ''To create these triangles with such accuracy would have
required a complex understanding of geometry.


''The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across on each
side and yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You
cannot do that by chance.


''So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying
now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of
our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received
some form of external guidance.


''Is sat-nav as recent as we believe; did they discover it first?''


Mr Brooks analysed 1,500 sites stretching from Norfolk to north Wales.
These included standing stones, hilltop forts, stone circles and hill
camps.


Each was built within eyeshot of the next.


Using GPS co-ordinates, he plotted a course between the monuments and
noted their positions to each other.


He found that they all lie on a vast geometric grid made up of
isosceles 'triangles'. Each triangle has two sides of the same length
and 'point' to the next settlement.


Thus, anyone standing on the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire could
have navigated their way to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.


Mr Brooks believes many of the Stone Age sites were created 5,000
years ago by an expanding population recovering from the trauma of the
Ice Age.


Lower ground and valleys would have been reduced to bog and marshes,
and people would have naturally sought higher ground to settle.


He said: ''After the Ice Age, the territory would have been pretty
daunting for everyone. There was an expanding population and people
were beginning to explore.


''They would have sought sanctuary on high ground and these positions
would also have given clear vantage points across the land with clear
visibility untarnished by pollution.


''The triangle navigation system may have been used for trading routes
among the expanding population and also been used by workers to create
social paths back to their families while they were working on these
new sites.''


Mr Brooks now hopes his findings will inspire further research into
the navigation methods of ancient Britons.


He said: ''Created more than 2,000 years before the Greeks were
supposed to have discovered such geometry, it remains one of the
world's biggest civil engineering projects.


''It was a breathtaking and complex undertaking by a people of
profound industry and vision. We must revise our thinking of what's
gone before.''


'Prehistoric Geometry in Britain: the Discoveries of Tom Brooks' is
now on sale priced £13.90.
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Prehistoric man 'used crude sat nav'

Ardie

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 1, 2009 10:33 AM


Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago in the woodlands of East Africa. She
spent most of her time in the trees. She stood about four feet tall,
weighed 110 pounds, and had long arms, short legs, and a grasping big
toe that was perfect for clambering branch to branch. She ate in the
trees, raised her offspring in the trees, slept in the trees.


But sometimes she came down to the ground, and stood upright. She
could walk on two legs. She was, in a sense, taking baby steps on a
journey that would change the world.


"Ardi" is the nickname given to a remarkable, shattered skeleton that
an international team of scientists believes is a major breakthrough
in the study of human origins. The skeletal remains were painstakingly
recovered from the Ethiopian desert along with bones from at least 35
other members of a species scientists call Ardipithecus ramidus. The
15-year investigation of Ardipithecus culminated Thursday in the
publication of a raft of papers in the online edition of the journal
Science, as well as dual press conferences in Washington and Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia.


"This is huge. This is the biggest discovery really since the 'Lucy'
skeleton of the 1970s," said Carol Ward, a University of Missouri
paleoanthropologist who was not involved with the research but had
been given a preview so that she could offer an independent
assessment.


Human origins is a field with high stakes and small bones, and the
elaborate roll-out of the Ardipithecus research probably will trigger
debate about the message contained in fossils so fragile they had to
be excavated with dental picks and porcupine quills. If the scientists
who found Ardi are correct, she represents a transitional figure,
almost a hybrid -- a tree creature who could carry food in her arms as
she explored the woodland floor on two legs.


Ardi lived more than a million years before Lucy, the name given to a
3.2 million-year-old skeleton found in 1974 that is the best example
of Australopithecus afarensis, a small-brained primate that had fully
adapted to a bipedal life and had expanded its habitat beyond the
forest into the savannah of Africa.


Unlike Ardi, she lacked the grasping big toe that extends laterally
from the foot. Lucy's big toe pointed forward, aligned with the other
toes, and was used for propulsion. Ardi and Lucy had different teeth,
with Lucy's enlarged molars more adapted to a wide-ranging diet on the
savannah. But Ardi and Lucy had rather similar faces, skulls, hands,
and pelvises.


The scientists who found Ardi do not contend that Ardi necessarily
evolved into Lucy, or that Ardipithecus ramidus was necessarily a
direct human ancestor. The human family of primates could have
splintered into multiple species along the way, with some winding up
as genetic dead ends. If that were the case, Ardi would be more of a
distant cousin to human beings rather than a direct forebear.


"The individual, Ardi, that female individual, is she our ancestor?"
said Tim White, a University of California at Berkeley
paleoanthropologist who led the research team. "And the answer is,
probably not. If she didn't have any kids, tough luck, she's nobody's
ancestor."


The Ardi team, however, does make the case that the genus
Ardipithecus, which could have encompassed a number of species, is
ancestral to the genus Australopithecus. Thus the general body plan of
Ardi would evolve into the general body plan of Lucy, and on down the
line until the genus Homo appears.


"The Ardipithecus genus gave rise to Australiopithecus even though we
can't say exactly what species did. Maybe ramidus did. But certainly
something like ramidus did," White said.


White and colleagues found the first signs of Ardipithecus in 1994 in
what is known as the Middle Awash, a treeless desert that 4 million
years ago would have been much wetter, teeming with birds, reptiles,
primates and thickly covered with fig and palm trees. A key moment
came Nov. 5, 1994, when a Berkeley graduate student, Yohannes Haile-
Selassie of Ethiopia, found fragments of two finger bones. Further
digging turned up scraps of a pelvis, feet, hands, chips from a skull.
By January 1995 the scientists realized they'd found a paleontological
treasure, a partial skeleton, broken up and ravaged by time. This was
Ardi.


The scientists found scores of other specimens, from both males and
females, though the bones were for the most part scattered and
isolated. Although Ardipithecus quickly entered the paleontology
lexicon in the mid-1990s, and scientists knew that this was
potentially a major discovery, it was not until Thursday -- and after
some complaints by fellow scientists over how long the process was
taking -- that White and his colleagues produced a detailed
description of the species.


"Ardi tells us twice as much as Lucy did. We have hands and feet, a
more complete environment, a more complete skeleton, it's older, it's
more primitive, it shows us the process of transformation from common
ancestor to hominid," said C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent
State University who was part of the Ardi team.


The origin of the human species via evolution from earlier primates is
beyond scientific dispute. Even when the fossil record of Africa was
virtually nonexistent, Charles Darwin argued that human beings
probably evolved from African primates. Field work over the past
century confirmed Darwin's hypothesis, which was bolstered further by
laboratory analysis of the genetic codes of humans, chimpanzees and
other primates. The fine details of human origin, however, has become
sketchier, and more subject to interpretation and debate, as the
researchers dig deeper into the past and the fossils become scarcer,
more fragmentary and in many cases more enigmatic.


Scientists continue to search for the "Last Common Ancestor,"
sometimes abbreviated as the LCA. This is the creature to which both
modern humans and modern chimpanzees can trace their ancestry. Many
scientists believe the common ancestor lived about 7 million years
ago. The new research on Ardi suggests that this ancestor didn't look
nearly as much like a modern chimpanzee as had been previously
suspected. Rather, the ancestor would have looked more like
Ardipithecus. This suggests that chimpanzees, far from being time
machines for visiting the distant past, have themselves evolved
significantly, including developing such skills as suspending from
branches and knuckle-walking.


"The common ancestor looked like Ardi. It's the chimp and gorilla that
have evolved enormously, not hominids. Hominids have concentrated
their evolution in two things -- upright walking and brain. Everything
else is pretty primitive," Lovejoy said.


In the Ardipithecus genus, the males are not significantly different
in size from the females. The males also lack the dagger-like teeth
that male chimps use to fight one another for access to ovulating
females. Lovejoy argues that this is a sign of a different social
organization. The males, he argues, pair-bonded with females, and
supplied them with food. The upright walking would have made food
transport easier. Lovejoy sees male parental investment in the
survival of offspring as a hallmark of the human lineage.


"The road to becoming human didn't start with a big brain. The road to
becoming human began with setting the social conditions that would
allow for the expansion of the big brain," Lovejoy said, reiterating a
hypothesis he developed long before the discovery of Ardi.


Andrew Hill, a Yale anthropologist, said he didn't think there was
enough evidence to support Lovejoy's conclusions about the domestic
relations of male and female Ardipithecines. But he said the newly
described hominid is a "very satisfactory animal" that "reinforces the
accumulating evidence that these things probably evolved and really
lived in woodland conditions rather than savannahs."


David Pilbeam, a Harvard paleontologist, noted that there has been
some impatience in the scientific community as White and his team
conducted the Ardipithecus analysis, but he suggested that the wait
was worth it: "This is an extraordinary achievement, of discovery,
recovery, reconstitution, description and analysis, which will keep
many others busy for at least another 15 years."


Ardi did not look like a human by any stretch. She had a small head
relative to her body size. There is no way to read her mind and
measure her sense of self, her awareness of her place in the universe.
But if the scientists are correct, her path in life proved to be
fruitful over time, and the planet witnessed the rise of a new animal
that could run on two legs, invent tools, tame fire, and perhaps
eventually -- with much digging and scraping -- decipher its own
origin.
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Ardie