Energy Use by Eem Neanderthals
A paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Bent Sørensen of the University of Roskilde in Denmark, discusses how European Neanderthals living in the Eemian interglacial, dated to around 125,000 years bp might have conserved much needed energy by drying and storing meat, wearing fitted clothing, and sleeping beneath blankets [...]
Entries from June 2009
June 26, 2009
Neanderthals Dried Fresh Meat, Wore Tailored Clothing – Energy Study
June 22, 2009
Homo floresiensis ‘Descended From H. erectus’,
A new paper published in Anthropological Science claims that comparative skull analyses between the hobbit skull and various others from H. sapiens and a plethora of archaic others, indicates to the authors of this study that the diminutive humans, whose remains were discovered on the island of Flores descended from Asian Homo erectus.
The paper is [...]
June 22, 2009
Open Anthropology Cooperative
There’s a new online resource for anthropologists, or anyone with an interest in the field, which allows members to set up or join groups that relate to their own sphere, communicate with one another, announce events, write blogs and post to forums, add media content, and so on – all under the umbrella of the [...]
June 19, 2009
Ancient Bones Suggest Older First Americans and Younger British Mammoths
Two items of news that have appeared over the last day or two, and which I’d otherwise have definitely submitted to the recent edition of Four Stone Hearth, concern analyses of mastodon and mammoth bones, the first of which leads a researcher to suggest he has good evidence that humans were inhabiting the Americas as [...]
June 18, 2009
Longgupo – The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia – Russell Ciochon
Appearing as an essay in Nature, this linked article describes how in 1995, Russell Ciochon, who had described a 1.9 million year-old fossil jaw found in the Sichuan province of China as belonging to Homo habilis, with the implication that later Homo erectus in Asia was a direct descendant, has changed his mind, instead attributing [...]
June 15, 2009
First Neanderthal Fossil Dredged From North Sea
A fragment of a Neanderthal skull, dated to between 40,000 and 60,000 years has been recovered from the bottom of the North Sea, marking the first ever occasion such a find has been made, according to researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, in collaboration with the University of Leiden. According [...]
June 12, 2009
100,000 Year-Old Incised Ochre Found At Blombos Cave
In a paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Christopher Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico and Ian Watts report on their recent findings at Blombos, following on from the 2002 excavations which revealed what were then the earliest known example of humans having deliberately incised patterns into chunks of red ochre, some time around 77,000 years [...]
June 12, 2009
Functional And Genetic Evidence That The Mal/TIRAP Allele Variant 180L Has Been Selected By Providing Protection Against Septic Shock
Here’s the abstract of a recent paper at PNAS, in which the authors propose that a mutation on the TIRAP gene amongst our earliest European ancestors may have enabled them to tweak their immune systems to the extent they were better equipped to fight illnesses such as malaria and tuberculosis.
Adequate responses by our innate immune [...]
