Humans skilled anglers 42,000 years ago

Fish hooks and fishbones dating back 42,000 years found in a cave in East Timor suggest that humans were capable of skilled, deep-sea fishing 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, researchers in Australia and Japan said on Friday.

The artefacts — nearly 39,000 fishbones and three fish hooks — were found in a limestone cave in Jerimalai in East Timor, 50 metres (165 feet) above sea level, said Sue O’Connor from the Australian National University’s department of archaeology and natural history.

“There was never any hint of (what) maritime technology people might have had in terms of fishing gear 40,000 years ago,” O’Connor, the study’s lead author, told Reuters by telephone from Canberra.

“(This study showed) you got ability to make hooks, you are using lines on those hooks. If you can make fibre lines, you can make nets, you are probably using those fibres on your boats.”

“It gives us a lot of information on how people subsisted on these very small islands on their way to Australia,” she said.

Modern humans were capable of long-distance sea travel 50,000 years ago as they colonised Australia, but evidence of advanced maritime fishing has been rare.

Researchers until now have only been able to find evidence of open-ocean fishing up to 12,000 years ago.

HOOKS MADE FROM SHELL

O’Connor and her colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found the bones and hooks in a 1 sq metre “test pit” in the cave, 300 metres (985 feet) from the coast.

“All the bones we got inside were just the result of human meals, 40,000 years ago,” said O’Connor.

“They were living in that shelter and we are fortunate that all the materials are preserved so well in that limestone cave, which preserves bone and shell really well,” she said.

The fish hooks were apparently made from the shells of the Trochus, a large sea snail.

“They are very strong shell … we think they just put bait on and dropped the hook in the water from a boat (at the) edge of a reef,” O’Connor said.

The fish bones were traced to 23 species of fish, including tuna, unicornfish, parrotfish, trevallies, triggerfish, snappers, emperors and groupers.

“Parrotfish and unicorn were probably caught on baited hooks … but tuna are deepwater, fast-moving fish. Tuna and trevallies were probably caught by lure fishing,” O’Connor said.

http://www.discoveryon.info/2012/01/humans-skilled-anglers-42000-years-ago.html

Prehistoric bear skulls found underwater in Mexico

The ancient remains of four prehistoric bears have been uncovered by archaeologists diving in underwater caves in Mexico.

Scientists think the extinct species lived in the caves in the ice age before they became filled with water.

Human remains were also found.

David Cuen reports.

Watch video at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16632419

Modern humans interbred with archaic humans in East Asia

It is well-known today that some of the ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, a closely-related human species or sub-species that lived 130,000 to 30,000 years ago in Eurasia. Less known is a new study by researchers at Uppsala University, indicating that the modern human ancestors of East Asians interbred with archaic humans known as Denisovans about 20,000 years ago.

The existence of Denisovans came to light in March 2010 when it was announced that a finger bone fragment of a juvenile that lived about 41,000 years ago had been discovered in Denisova Cave (Altai Krai, Russia), an area inhabited at the same time by modern humans and Neanderthals. The discovery of a tooth and toe bone from two other individuals of the same population added to the evidence.

Based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, researchers determined that the bone finds belonged to a new species of humans.

Mattias Jakobsson, who conducted the new study along with Pontus Skoglund, says, "Hybridisation took place at several points in evolution, and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world. We'll probably be uncovering more events like these."

Previous studies indicated the occurrence of two separate hybridisation points between archaic humans, who are genetically and morphologically different from modern humans, and modern human ancestors after leaving Africa. One occurred between Neanderthals and modern humans, and the other between Denisovans and ancestors of Oceanians, but the latest study indicates that hybridisation also occurred in East Asia.

"We found that individuals from mainly Southeast Asia have a higher proportion of Denisova-related genetic variants than people from other parts of the world," says Jakobsson. But, adds co-researcher Pontus Skoglund, "we still know very little about the history of these groups and when their contacts with modern humans occurred."

Edited from Popular Archaeology (31 October 2011), The Telegraph (1 November 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/6eedn4l

Teeth and jaw are from 'earliest Europeans' (via Dawn Holloway)

Two baby teeth and a jaw fragment unearthed in Italy and the UK have something revealing to say about how modern humans conquered the globe.

The finds in the Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, and Kents Cavern, Devon, have been confirmed as the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Careful dating suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, and perhaps as much as 45,000 years old in the case of the Italian "baby teeth".

The details are in the journal Nature.

The results fit with stone tool discoveries that had suggested modern people were in Europe more than 40,000 years ago. Now, scientists have the direct physical remains of Homo sapiens to prove it.

It confirms also that modern people overlapped in Europe with their evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, for an extended period.
These humans went extinct shortly afterwards, and the latest discoveries will raise once again the questions over Homo sapiens' possible role in their relatives' demise.

"What's significant about this work is that it increases the overlap and contemporaneity with Neanderthals," explained Dr Tom Higham, from Oxford University, who led the study on the British specimen found at Kents Cavern, Torquay.

"We estimate that probably three to five thousand years of time is the amount of the overlap between moderns and Neanderthals in this part of the world," he told the BBC Science in Action programme.

The new results indicate, too, that modern humans swept across Europe via a number of different routes, as they populated the world after leaving Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Read on ...
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Mastodons were hunted in North America 800 years earlier than thought

Humans were killing large mammals in North America long before 'Clovis culture', study of mastodon remains suggests
Humans were hunting large mammals in North America about 800 years earlier than previously thought, new analysis of a controversial mastodon specimen – with what appears to be a spear tip in its rib – seems to confirm.

The find suggests humans were hunting mastodons using tools made from bone about a thousand years before the start of the "Clovis culture", reputedly the first human culture in North America. Other evidence points to mammoth hunting using stone tools around this time, but the notion of pre-Clovis hunting has remained highly controversial.

The mastodon was found in 1977 by a farmer called Emanuel Manis. He contacted archaeologist Carl Gustafson, who excavated the skeleton and noticed a pointed object embedded in its rib. Gustafson took a fuzzy x-ray and interpreted the object as a projectile point made of bone or antler.

By dating organic matter around the fossil, he estimated that it was about 14,000 years old. Other archaeologists challenged Gustafson's dates and his interpretation of the fragment as a man-made point.

Decades later Professor Michael Waters from Texas A&M University contacted him about re-examining the specimen using modern technology. His analysis was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Waters placed the mastodon in an industrial-grade CT scanner at the University of Texas. "It's more powerful than a hospital one. They're taking slices every 0.06mm, half the thickness of a piece of paper," he says. "The 3D rendering clearly showed that the object was sharpened to a tip. It was clearly the end of a bone projectile point."

Waters analysed collagen protein from the mastodon's rib and tusks to confirm that the animal died about 13,800 years ago, almost exactly as Gustafson predicted.

He also extracted DNA from the rib and the spear point. Analysis showed that both belonged to a mastodon, suggesting the animal had been killed with a weapon fashioned from the remains of its own kind.

"It should certainly be considered as evidence of hunting. You're bending over backwards to explain it as something else," said Prof Daniel Fisher from the University of Michigan.

Two other sites in Wisconsin appear to show people were hunting woolly mammoths and using stone tools between 14,200 and 14,800 years ago. The Manis specimen suggests they also hunted mastodons and used bone tools.

Together, the three sites provide strong evidence for pre-Clovis hunting. "They're incontrovertible," said Waters. "Clearly, people were hunting mammoths and mastodons again and again, playing a part in their ultimate demise."

He believes the beasts probably succumbed to gradual hunting pressure from humans, rather than a quick "Clovis blitzkrieg".

Despite Waters's efforts, the fragment in the Manis mastodon's rib is still stoking debate. "It's not definitely proven that it is a projectile point," said Prof Gary Haynes from the University of Nevada, Reno. "Elephants today push each other all the time and break each other's ribs so it could be a bone splinter that the animal just rolled on.".

Waters does not credit this alternative hypothesis. "Ludicrous what-if stories are being made up to explain something people don't want to believe," he said. "We took the specimen to a bone pathologist, showed him the CT scans, and asked if there was any way it could be an internal injury. He said absolutely not."

Waters added: "If you break a bone, a splinter isn't going to magically rotate its way through a muscle and inject itself into your rib bone. Something needed to come at this thing with a lot of force to get it into the rib."

The spear thrower must have had a powerful arm, because the fragment would have punctured hair, skin and up to 30cm of mastodon muscle. "A bone projectile point is a really lethal weapon," said Waters. "It's sharpened to a needle point and little greater than the diameter of a pencil. It's like a bullet. It's designed to get deep into the elephant and hit a vital organ … I've seen these thrown through old cars."

What would it take to finally convince the sceptics? "I'm not going to dig my heels in and stonewall it," said Haynes. "If they yanked it out and showed that there are scraping marks and it's been polished and shaped, that would convince me."

Waters said he would not tamper with such an extraordinary specimen. "That would destroy it. I would be a pariah. It's unnecessary with modern technology. I could take 3D printers and recreate the object itself."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/20/mastodon-hunted-north-america

The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They've found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original "proto-human language" might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from "Star Wars."

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence "I like you." Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in "I you like." In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering ("I you like").

"This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else," Ruhlen told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world. For example, all the Romance languages (Italian, Rumanian, French, Spanish) derive from Latin, which was spoken in Rome 2,000 years ago; that Latin family is itself a branch of an even larger tree, whose other branches include Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and others. Together, all those languages make up the Indo-European language family, which fits like a puzzle piece with all the other language families in the world. [What's the Hardest Language to Learn?]

"These families — all families — are identified by finding words in a set of languages that are similar to each other but not found elsewhere," Ruhlen explained in an email.

In the language family tree, Ruhlen and Gell-Mann discovered a distinct pattern in how word orders change as languages branch off from their mother tongues. "What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. … Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear," Ruhlen said.
Out of the 2,000 modern languages that fit in the family tree, the researchers found that more than half are SOV languages. The ones that are SVO, OVS and OSV all derive directly from SOV languages — never the other way around. For example, French, which is SVO, derives from Latin, which is SOV.
Furthermore, languages that are VSO and VOS always derive from SVO languages. Thus, all languages descend from an original SOV word order – "which leads to the conclusion that the word order in the language from which all modern languages derive must have been SOV," Ruhlen wrote.
Was it just an accident that the mother of all mother tongues was probably SOV, rather than one of the other five possibilities? The researchers think not. Predating Ruhlen's and Gell-Mann's work, Tom Givon, a linguist at the University of Oregon, argued that SOV had to have been the first word order, based on how children learn language. He found that the SOV word ordering seems to come most naturally to humans. [Why Are 'Mama' and 'Dada' a Baby's First Words?]

And if that's the case, it seems strange that languages switch word orders as they evolve. Indeed, no one really knows why word orders would switch. "We have found that word changes in very precise ways," Ruhlen said. "But the fact remains that half of the world's languages still have SOV word order because, in Murray's and my opinion, they have not changed word order at all. [Our data] shows how word order changes … but it is unpredictable if word order will change, and I really don't know why."

http://www.livescience.com/16541-original-human-language-yoda-sounded.html

20-million-year-old skull discovery

Scientists in Paris have unveiled a 20-million-year-old skull they hope will help with the study of human ancestry.

The Ugandapithecus was found in Uganda in the layers of sediment under the volcanoes of the Karamoja region.

The discovery of the skull represents the culmination of more than 25 years of work and it is the most complete skull of this type to ever be found.

Martin Pickford, one of the paleontologists who discovered the skull, said: "It's the first time we've got a real good sample of Ugandapithecus Major.

"Before that, it was known by jaw fragments, isolated teeth, a few postcranial bones. But here, we really have a good idea for the first time of what the whole skull might have looked like."

The British paleontologist said the discovery would allow scientists to fill a gap in the lineage of primates but said the Ugandapithecus could very well have become extinct without leading to the birth of man.

http://news.uk.msn.com/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=159215627

Call of the Thylacine: Protect the Wild

KAKADU NATIONAL PARK, Australia -- Eleven thousand miles from my home in Wisconsin, this national park is one of my favorite places on the planet -- a vast area of wetlands, woodlands and rock formations that is home to a fantastic array of wildlife.

Kakadu (pronounced KACK-a-doo), one of Unesco's World Heritage sites, has almost 300 bird species (more than a third of Australia's birds), more than 60 mammals and more than 120 reptiles, including large saltwater crocodiles, monitor lizards and, oh yes, lots of snakes, the object of one of my earliest boyhood fascinations.

In addition to seeing some of its dangerous residents -- from a respectful distance -- I am hoping to rediscover the image of a magnificent marsupial, the thylacine, that I first saw on a visit more than 20 years ago. The image is still etched in my memory — not because I saw it in the flesh, but because it was painted on a rock.

http://ow.ly/5T3Ub

World's oldest ritual discovered

A startling archaeological discovery that may have gone un-noticed changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that man's first rituals were carried out over 40,000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place.
Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, has shown that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind's oldest known ritual.


The archaeologist made the surprising discovery several years ago while she was studying the origin of the San people. A group of the San live in the sparsely inhabited area of north-western Botswana known as Ngamiland.

Coulson made the discovery while searching for artifacts from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills present for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert is known as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having the largest concentration of rock paintings in the world.

The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the San, who call them the Mountains of the Gods and the Rock that Whispers. The python is one of the San's most important animals. According to their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.

Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area had a specific ritual location associated with the python. The ritual was held in a little cave on the northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is so secluded and access to it is so difficult that it was not even discovered by archaeologists until the 1990s.

When Coulson entered the cave in the summer of 2007 with her three master's students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python. On the six-meter long by two-meter tall rock, they found three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.

"You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving".

They found no evidence that work had recently been done on the rock. In fact, much of the rock's surface was extensively eroded. When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the archaeologists wondered about more than when the work had been done. They also began thinking about what the cave had been used for and how long people had been going there. With these questions in mind, they decided to dig a test pit directly in front of the python stone.

At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that had been used to make the indentations. Together with these tools, some of which were more than 70,000 years old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen off during the work.

In the course of their excavation, they found more than 13,000 artifacts. All of the objects were spearheads and articles that could be connected with ritual use, as well as tools used in carving the stone. They found nothing else.

As if that were not enough, the stones that the spearheads were made from are not from the Tsodilo region but must have been brought from hundreds of kilometers away.

The spearheads are better crafted and more colorful than other spearheads from the same time and area. Surprisingly enough, it was only the red spearheads that had been burned.

"Stone age people took these colorful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organized and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape." says Sheila Coulson.

Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many people had passed through it over the years.

"The shaman, who is still a very important person in San culture, could have kept himself hidden in that secret chamber. He would have had a good view of the inside of the cave while remaining hidden himself. When he spoke from his hiding place, it could have seemed as if the voice came from the snake itself. The shaman would have been able to control everything. It was perfect."

The shaman could also have disappeared from the chamber by crawling out onto the hillside through a small shaft. While large cave and wall paintings are numerous throughout the Tsodilo Hills, there are only two small paintings in this cave: an elephant and a giraffe. These images were rendered, surprisingly, exactly where water runs down the wall.

Sheila Coulson thinks that an explanation for this might come from San mythology.

In one San story, the python falls into a body of water and cannot get out by itself. The python is pulled from the water by a giraffe. The elephant, with its long trunk, is often used as a metaphor for the python.

"In the cave, we find only the San people's three most important animals: the python, the elephant, and the giraffe. That is unusual. This would appear to be a very special place. They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual." concludes Sheila Coulson.

It was a major archaeological find years ago that made it possible for Sheila Coulson to date the finds in this little cave in Botswana. Up until the turn of the century, archaeologists believed that human civilization developed in Europe after our ancestors migrated from Africa. This theory was crushed by Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood when he published his find of traces from a Middle Stone Age dwelling in the Blombos Cave in Southern Cape, South Africa.

Author: Lori Henshey
Source: Examiner [July 11, 2011]
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2011/07/worlds-oldest-ritual-discovered.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+(The+Archaeology+News+Network)