Beyond bones & stones
Based on the following three recently published Science studies, in order to survive the climate chances 320,000 ago, early humans in East Africa created complex tools, traded and maybe even developed symbolic language. Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest... Continue Reading →
Nature Communications published an article in May, 2013 that just now caught my eye. The paper's title, "Development of Middle Stone Age innovation linked to rapid climate change," lays down a solid understanding of what the authors found... The one line summary of the article is: the authors observed that very abrupt changes in rainfall... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow's issue of Science hosts lots of interesting papers, one of which is titled, "A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record," and reports on the analysis of a 1.2-meter-long stalagmite from Wanxiang Cave in northern China. The analysis tells us that the rock holds records of waning Asian... Continue Reading →
Eugène Morin of Trent University has just published this paper in PNAS, "Evidence for declines in human population densities during the early Upper Paleolithic in western Europe." He studied the fluctuations in the zooarchaeological record from the Saint-Césaire site in France. And he found remains of rodents that live in the tundra species which indicate... Continue Reading →
PNAS finally published one of the two sets of ecological explanations for the Out-of-Africa theory in "East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousand years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins." The second publication "Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa" also came out earlier this week. If you didn't catch... Continue Reading →
