Beyond bones & stones
Hugo Zeberg, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Karolinska Institutet, published an interesting study with colleagues Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo on Neandertal admixture and its impact on modern day fertility. Diverging from a common human lineage over 600,000 years ago, Neandertals and modern humans began an exchange of genetic material... Continue Reading →
Rice is the main food source for about half the population of the Earth, and it is arguably one of the most important foods for human beings. The origins of rice, as well as it spread is a key point of study for many biologists and archaeologists. With advances in archaeobotany and molecular biology, we... Continue Reading →
Russian archaeologists in 1976 excavating the Ust’-Kyakhta-3 site on the banks of the Selenga River A. P. Okladnikov During the 1970's, a site called Ust-Kyakhta found between the Mongolian borders and the southern banks of the Lake Baikal, was excavated. The Russian team unearthed many stone and bone tools as well as ceramics, and reindeer... Continue Reading →
This volcano in East Africa, called Ol Doinyo Lengai, erupted long ago and produced a mudflow that preserved the biggest collection of ancient human footprints (some shown in the foreground) found in Africa so far. Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce Just south of Lake Natron, in northern Tanzania is the Engare Sero site which was was originally discovered... Continue Reading →
Excavations at Bacho Kiro Cave, in Bulgaria Last week Jean-Jacques Hublin, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Helen Fewlass who is also at MPI, and their colleagues published in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution reports of their findings in the Bacho Kiro cave site in Bulgaria. They have... Continue Reading →
Last week, in Nature, University of Iowa anthropologist Russell Ciochon and colleagues published new dates on fossils and sediment layers from a site called Ngandong that originally yielded a dozen or so Homo erectus skulls in the 1930's. Using uranium-series dating on some newly excavated mammalian remains from the same sediment layer as the Homo erectus skulls,... Continue Reading →
Theis Jensen, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues, published a report in Nature Communications about a the finding of a South Danish Neolithic woman’s complete genome and oral microbiome from a piece of birch tar she chewed. This isn't the first time this was line of evidence was used, nor the oldest,... Continue Reading →
Archaeologist Maxime Aubert, from Griffith University and his colleagues have published, in Nature, the discovery of the oldest depicted hunting story. The cave painting is thought to be 43,900 years old. It was made by prehistoric people on the island of Sulawesi. The painting is about 4.5 meter or 14.8 feet in length and about... Continue Reading →
Since 2012, Jeremy Duveau of France's National Museum of Natural History and his colleagues have been excavating the Le Rozel site in Normandy. They have diligently unearthed a total of 257 Neanderthal footprints, along with eight handprints, from a layer of fine, dark sand deposited approximately 80,000 years ago. They published their work in PNAS.... Continue Reading →
