Beyond bones & stones
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, approximately 12.5 million people were violently deported from their homes in Africa to the Americas by slavers. As current events have shown, the destruction of communities, cultures and families have had everlasting ramifications which are felt a century and half later. Some of the less tangible pains is the... Continue Reading →
We've had some ideas that prehistoric Polynesian expansions made contact with Native Americans before European contact. For example, the sweet potato, a staple of Polynesian diets for hundreds of years, made its way to Andean culture where it was domesticated. And we've identified that some current Rapa Nui people have Native American DNA dating back... Continue Reading →
Several days ago, Carl Zimmer, wrote a piece on a curious segment of the human genome, spanning 6 genes on Chromosome 3. This segment is unique in that 63% of Bangladeshi's carry at least one copy, and about 1/3 of of South Asians carry this variant. In Europe, only 8% of people carry this segment,... Continue Reading →
A study published a couple days ago in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows us that ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans had more genetic similarities than polar bears and brown bears do. In other words, the genetic distance between our ancient relatives and us was smaller than between pairs of species that are... Continue Reading →
Without a doubt, the Near East has been a linguistic, cultural and religious crossroad for many thousands of years. This area has had many different rulers, including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christian European Crusaders, Arabs, and Ottomans. Many of these groups instilled everlasting cultural changes on the local population, including changes to... Continue Reading →
About 12,000 years ago in the Near East, the emergency of farming, animal domestication and subsequent changes to prehistoric human lifestyles emerged. This is known as the Neolithic revolution. This culture spread through Europe, along the Danube and the Mediterranean coasts by 5,000 to 4,500 years ago. Little was known about how the carriers of... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
In the 1970's, the Apidima Cave site in Greece was excavated by archaeologists. Lodged within a chunk of rock was the Apidima 1 specimen. It was found adjacent to a distorted 170,000 year old Neanderthal skull called Apidima 2. In the image below you can see how close in proximity the two specimens were discovered.... Continue Reading →
