Anthropology.net

As another week flies by, I realise that another Four Stone Hearth is imminent, and this time round, the Blog Carnival is slated to be hosted by Amanda at Sherd Nerd, a blog which focuses its attention on ‘things Egyptological’.

So if you have material you’d like to submit, either your own writing, or one or more articles you’ve come across elsewhere, and feel would be appropriate, please send them either to: submit@fourstonehearth.net. or better still, directly to Amanda herself at flopearedmule@gmail.com.

Good luck to Amanda hosting, and thanks to everyone else for their imminent contributions; see you all Wednesday. (TJ)

image: Druid’s Writing Desk, Brimham Rocks

Not everything in life works out as we might hope – for instance, the crowds lining the route of today’s Stage 7 in the Tour de France were hoping for a French stage winner to coincide with Bastille Day, but in the end it was German rider Linus Gerdemann of the T-Mobile team who powered away from the chasing peloton to win the stage, taking over both the white jersey (best young rider) and yellow jersey (overall race leader) in one prolonged burst of exceptional riding through this gruelling day, that gave him his first stage win since the Tour de Suisse in 2005 – in other words a great result for him and his team, but not the one the partisan crowds were hoping for, even though they sportingly cheered the winner of this first mountain stage to the echo, as he sped past them.

“As in professional cycling, so in palaeoanthropology”, is probably a saying unattributable to anyone ever, but the point I want to make is that despite the hype predicting the discovery of a missing link in hominid evolution, I’d be surprised if that was the result, although we might instead discover more unexpected details from the fossils, which in the end might be just as valuable as a putative missing link.

National Geographic have more on the recent finds from Woranso-Mille in the Afar region of Ethiopia, not a million miles for where Kambiz is at this moment, and although there are no new developments to report, this picture of a complete mandible warrants a quick post in its own right. First, an excerpt from the linked article … Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an abstract from the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences reflecting on the headline above – it would appear that the spread of Neolithic people in Europe was prompted from two main areas, the Near East and the Iberian Peninsular…

The peopling of Europe is a complex process. One of the most dramatic demographic events, the Neolithic agricultural revolution, took place in the Near East roughly 10000 years ago and then spread through the European continent. Nevertheless, the nature of this process (either cultural or demographic) is still a matter of debate among scientists. We have retrieved HVRI mitochondrial DNA sequences from 11 Neolithic remains from Granollers (Catalonia, northeast Spain) dated to 5500 years BP. We followed the proposed authenticity criteria, and we were also able, for the first time, to track down the pre-laboratory-derived contaminant sequences and consequently eliminate them from the generated cloning dataset.

Phylogeographic analysis shows that the haplogroup composition of the Neolithic population is very similar to that found in modern populations from the Iberian Peninsula, suggesting a long-time genetic continuity, at least since Neolithic times. This result contrasts with that recently found in a Neolithic population from Central Europe and, therefore, raises new questions on the heterogeneity of the Neolithic dispersals into Europe. We propose here a dual model of Neolithic spread: acculturation in Central Europe and demic diffusion in southern Europe.

Looks like an interesting paper, which at the moment is residing behind a paywall, but confirms the idea that many modern inhabitants of the Iberian peninsular can trace their ancestry directly back to the Neolithic, and quite possibly before then as well. (TJ)

image from here