Anthropology.net

It has been almost two years since Lee Berger and I shared a few words on Anthropology.net about his small people of Palau. Since then, a TKO paper, published in the summer of 2008, basically thwarting Berger’s claims. Thankfully, we haven’t heard much of his sensationalist research since…

But his documentary is still floating around. It recently aired on Australia’s public broadcaster channel ABC. ABC journalist and presenter Jonathan Holmes wasn’t too pleased his network aired this less than admirable documentary. On his show, Media Watch, he explains why. Check out the entertaining excerpt or watch the scathing clip here.

For all you aspiring paleoanthropologists and scientists out there, take this tragic case into heart and don’t make the same mistakes. You’ll leave only behind a legacy of fail.

Toba folks, I know this is not a very credible source, in fact some of the facts they present are inconsistent and confusing. Furthermore, I’ve never heard of the Malaysian National News Agency, Bernama. But either way there’s a news article they are running that may interest you.

“Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago…

…has uncovered what it calls ‘Pompeii-like excavations’ beneath the Toba ash… Though we are still searching for human fossils to definitively prove the case, we are encouraged by the technological similarities…

The fact that the Middle Palaeolithic tools of similar styles are found right before and after the Toba super-eruption, suggests that the people who survived the eruption were the same populations, using the same kinds of tools…

The research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba.”

This work is a continuous of Michael Petraglia‘s research. I really don’t know what is meant by Pompeii-life excavations. Calling it such is clearly a misnomer when there aren’t any human remains found. At the least, it seems like some more definitive stone tools have been unearthed, cores and flakes from the Middle Palaeolithic — similar to those made by modern humans in Africa.

Just caught news of this temple from Newsweek and thought I’d share. I don’t know much about it, in fact this is the first time I read about it. But I am asking my friend and colleague in Turkey about it… so I’ll fill you in with any additional details as they come. The Newsweek article portrays this as a newly discovered finding but in fact research and excavations started in 1994.

Bottom line, it is 11,500 years old. g  That’s 7,000 years before the Pyramids of Giza and 6,000 years before Stonehenge. I’ve posted before how some of the first evidence of animal domestication and pottery occurred in Turkey, but these sophisticated pillars were assembled before those prehistorical landmarks… in fact they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture.

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt comments on the significance of the site,

“definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island…

…Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city….

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.”

Check out the site on Google Maps if you wanna poke around and do some exploring on your own. Have you ever heard of the site before? If so tell me what you know, I’m curious to find out more…

Hi all, this is Kambiz. I’m resurfacing to share with you a new Peopling of the America’s research that peeked my interests. The Nature paper is titled, “Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo.” The preserved nuclear DNA of a 4,000-year-old man’s tuft of hair, found out of Greenland’s permafrost, has been sequenced and many new pieces about his phenotype and ancestry are published in the current paper..

Aside from his brown eyes, brown skin and facial hair, there are similarities (that I don’t know of because I haven’t read the full paper) which most closely resemble those found in indigenous inhabitants of eastern Siberia… Possibly the Saqqaq. The findings support the implications of the team’s mitochondrial DNA analysis of the hair previously published in Science in 2008. We’ve covered that paper before, here and here. The previous study also showed patterns of Siberian origin, and a distinct break between the Dorset culture and the ancestors of modern Inuit people.