Human bones from Pestera Muierii have been redated by Trinkaus
Six human bones found in 1952 from the Pestera Muierii cave in Romania have been reassessed to be 30,000 years old. This comes by way of BBC News, reporting about a PNAS publication that I can’t find! Here’s what has been published in the news article,
“Only a handful of modern human remains older than 28,000 years old are known from Europe.
Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis and colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates directly from the fossils and analysed their anatomical form.
The results showed that the fossils were 30,000 years old and had the diagnostic features of modern humans (Homo sapiens).
But Professor Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features that were characteristic of our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).”
I’ll be keeping an eye out for the paper, but I’ve checked the October 31st 2006 issue and its not listed there either…. strange.
UPDATE 5:46pm Nature News posted a similar review article to BBC’s, “Did Neanderthals and modern humans get it together?” As of right now the DOI link to the article does not resolve, meaning to me that it is not published yet.
[...] don’t know what to think of all of this. Trinkaus has been at this for sometime, last year he published on this hypothesis of his right about the time the sequence data from the Neandertal [...]
More on Neandertal interbreeding, this time analyzing the Cioclovina crania « Anthropology.net
August 3, 2007 at 12:16 pm