Clues found for early Europeans

[ramonmercado]

Clues found for early Europeans

The researchers looked bone and ivory artefacts found at Kostenki
An archaeological find in Russia has shed light on the migration of modern humans into Europe.
Artefacts uncovered at the Kostenki site, south of Moscow, suggest modern humans were at this spot about 45,000 years ago.

The first moderns may have entered Europe through a different route than was previously thought, the international team reports.

The research is published in the journal Science.

"Until now, it appeared as though the earliest presence of modern humans in Europe was in south central Europe, in places like Bulgaria and Greece," explained John Hoffecker, author on the paper and a research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US.

"This reflects an entry from the Levant (eastern shores of the Mediterranean) just before 44,000 years ago."

Missing Neanderthals

But team believes it has now found an alternate and possibly earlier entry route into the continent.

The researchers examined tools, personal ornaments and carved ivory discovered under a layer of ancient volcanic ash at the site, which lies along the Don River.

The artefacts most likely belonged to modern humans and dated to about as early as 45,000 years ago, said Professor Hoffecker. However they were dissimilar to artefacts found at the other European sites, he added.



"This suggests we have a not very closely related group of people at Kostenki, suggesting at the very least that we have an alternate route for modern humans into Europe - perhaps this being the earliest one," he told the BBC News website.

Professor Hoffecker said he was surprised to have found such early evidence of modern humans at Kostenki.

"It is arguably the coolest and driest part of mid-latitude Europe. It is the last place we would expect to see them first," he added.

A possible reason to migrate to these harsher conditions may have been the lack of Neanderthals present in this area at this time.

"The absence of Neanderthals meant there were no competitors to deal with for resources," Professor Hoffecker said.

Possible routes

Fossil records suggest modern humans emerged in sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago, but their dispersal is thought to have begun between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The earliest evidence of modern humans appears in Australia, dating to about 50,000 years ago.

Professor Hoffecker said it was difficult to say exactly where the modern humans found in Kostenki would have come from.

One possible route, some researchers believe, is from western Asia via the Caucasus Mountains, that lie between the Caspian and Black Seas.


A skull found in South Africa has been linked to modern humans

He added that modern humans might have migrated into central Asia, but then turned back on themselves to make the move into Europe.

Another paper, published in the same journal, reveals that a skull found in South Africa appears to represent an ancestor of the modern humans that eventually migrated to Europe and Asia.

Professor Chris Stringer of the department of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, London, said: "These papers are interesting from an anthropological and archaeological point of view, and confirm some of the things we have thought on this subject.

"I think we will see increasing evidence of these ancestral modern people and their behaviour in western Asia, and at an even earlier date, in Africa."


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6253121.stm

 

[Hanslune]

Latest version of out-of-Africa theory:

http://www.hallofmaat.com/read.php?1,436903

By Bernard at the Hall of Ma'at

Modern humans develop East Africa (80,000- 60,000 years ago). First exodus Arabia, India, Australia (60-40 KYA). Humans remain in West Asia (Middle East) get U6 and M1 mtDNA mutations and migrate from there to East Africa and Europe 50-45 KYA. Migration modern humans from East Africa to other parts of Africa (45-35 KYA)

From:

Ted Goebel. 2007. “The Missing Years for Modern Humans,” Science 315: 194-196

Fossil, archaelogical, and DNA evidence of three separate research teams provide insight into the period between the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa and their appearance in Europe.

Supporting papers:

F. E. Grine et al. 2007 “Late Pleistocene Human Skull from Hofmeyr, South Africa, and Modern Human Origins,” Science
315: 226-229

The lack of Late Pleistocene human fossils from sub-Saharan Africa has limited paleontological testing of competing models of recent human evolution. We have dated a skull from Hofmeyr, South Africa, to 36.2 ± 3.3 thousand years ago through a combination of optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-series dating methods. The skull is morphologically modern overall but displays some archaic features. Its strongest morphometric affinities are with Upper Paleolithic (UP) Eurasians rather than recent, geographically proximate people. The Hofmeyr cranium is consistent with the hypothesis that UP Eurasians descended from a population that emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa in the Late Pleistocene.
%%%%%
M. V. Anikovich, et al. 2007. “Early Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe and Implications for the Dispersal of Modern Humans,” Science 315: 223-226

Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating and magnetic stratigraphy indicate Upper Paleolithic occupation—probably representing modern humans—at archaeological sites on the Don River in Russia 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. The oldest levels at Kostenki underlie a volcanic ash horizon identified as the Campanian Ignimbrite Y5 tephra that is dated elsewhere to about 40,000 years ago. The occupation layers contain bone and ivory artifacts, including possible figurative art, and fossil shells imported more than 500 kilometers. Thus, modern humans appeared on the central plain of Eastern Europe as early as anywhere else in northern Eurasia.
%%%%%
Anna Olivieri, et al.2006. “The mtDNA Legacy of the Levantine
Early Upper Palaeolithic in Africa,” Science 314: 1767-1770

Sequencing of 81 entire human mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) belonging to haplogroups M1 and U6 reveals that these predominantly North African clades arose in southwestern Asia and moved together to Africa about 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. Their arrival temporally overlaps with the event(s) that led to the peopling of Europe by modern humans and was most likely the result of the same change in climate conditions that allowed humans to enter the Levant, opening the way to the colonization of both Europe and North Africa. Thus, the early Upper Palaeolithic population(s) carrying M1 and U6 did not return to Africa along the southern coastal route of the “out of Africa” exit, but from the Mediterranean area; and the North African Dabban and European Aurignacian industries derived from a common Levantine source.

 

[boynamedsue]

Damn immigants. There all ethnics what talk funny and only come for the free mammoth.

 

[ramonmercado]

Damn immigants. There all ethnics what talk funny and only come for the free mammoth.

I'm with ye. The bloody Celts came over here and dispossessed us Fir Bolg. We want our land back!

 

[rynner2]

Teeth and jaw are from 'earliest Europeans'
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Worn ancient teeth and a jaw fragment unearthed in the UK and Italy have something revealing to say about how modern humans conquered the globe.
The finds in Kents Cavern, Devon, and Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, have been confirmed as the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Careful dating suggests they are more than 41,000 years old, and perhaps as much as 45,000 years old in the case of the Italian "baby teeth".
The details are in the journal Nature.

The results fit with stone tool discoveries that had suggested modern people were in Europe more than 40,000 years ago. Now, scientists have the direct physical remains of Homo sapiens to prove it.
It confirms also that modern people overlapped in Europe with their evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, for an extended period. These humans went extinct shortly afterwards, and the latest discoveries will raise once again the questions over Homo sapiens' possible role in their relatives' demise.

"What's significant about this work is that it increases the overlap and contemporaneity with Neanderthals," explained Dr Tom Higham, from Oxford University, who led the study on the British specimen found at Kents Cavern, Torquay.
"We estimate that probably three to five thousand years of time is the amount of the overlap between moderns and Neanderthals in this part of the world."

Both the teeth and the jaw fragment have been known about for decades.
In the case of the jaw from Kents Cavern, this was first identified in 1927.
Finding suggest humans were living in England as long as 44,000 years ago
The two Italian baby teeth were found in the Grotta del Cavallo in southern Italy in 1964.

Scientists have long pondered the specimens' age and origin. Many thought they were more likely to be Neanderthal remains.
It is only with the application of the very latest analytical techniques that the specimens' true status can be established.

Because of their concerns about modern contamination in the jaw, Higham and colleagues went back to animal fossils found above and below the object in the Torquay cave and re-dated those with greater precision.
This produced a likely age for the human remains of between 41,500 and 44,200 years ago.

The team also re-examined the shape of the teeth, including their internal structure, to remove doubts that the jaw could be Neanderthal.
"We've done a new reconstruction, and we've actually found that one of the teeth was in the wrong place. That's for starters," said co-author Prof Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum.

"But we've also done a really detailed comparison, right down to the shape of the roots and internal pulp cavities. We've gone to microscopic details to show this really is a modern human. You would never find a Neanderthal fossil that had this many modern human features."

Likewise for the Italian baby teeth, Dr Stefano Benazzi and colleagues performed a morphological analysis, comparing the features of their specimens with a wide database of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal remains. Again, this approach indicated the Grotta del Cavallo specimens were from a modern person.

The Benazzi team also resorted to advanced radio-carbon dating technology to reassess the age. This was applied to ornamental shell beads found in the same layer as the teeth.
"The new dating shows that the teeth must be between 43,000 and 45,000 years ago," said Dr Benazzi from the University of Vienna, Austria.
"That makes them the oldest European modern-human currently known," he told BBC News.

The re-assessments have further importance because palaeoanthropologists can now put modern humans in the caves at the same time as the stone and bone tool technologies discovered there.

There has been some doubt over who created the so-called Aurignacian artefacts at Kents Cavern and the slightly older Uluzzian technologies at Grotta del Cavallo. It could have been Neanderthals, but there is now an obvious association in time with Homo sapiens.

No-one really knows why Neanderthals went extinct or what part - if any - modern humans played in their disappearance. Scientists say it is not necessarily the case that there was conflict between the two groups; it could just have been that Homo sapiens was better equipped to deal with the harsh challenges of the time.

"I think it's still very much an open question because climate is also a part of the story," commented Prof Stringer.
"The fact is that while these populations were overlapping, the climate of Europe was very unstable. Populations were expanding and shrinking and being pushed around by very rapid changes in environment.
"I think it's going to be a combination of factors, with both Neanderthals and modern humans being stressed but the moderns being perhaps a bit better adapted to the changes and being able to get through them. The Neanderthals on the other hand weren't, and they went extinct."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15540464

 

[ramonmercado]

Doubts cast on the ageing of the jawone.

The Mysterious Affair at Kents Cavern
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
by Michael Balter on 3 August 2012, 2:05 PM | 8 Comments

Sloppy dig, uncertain date? Archaeologists have raised questions about the reliability of excavations conducted by Arthur Ogilvie (right, with white beard) at Kents Cavern, which could compromise radiocarbon dating of a human jawbone found there.

Credit: (photo) Courtesy of Torquay Museum; (teeth, inset) Natural History
Museum of London/Torquay Museum/University of Hull, Dept. of Engineering
The twee town of Torquay, on England’s Devon coast, has two major claims to fame: It was the birthplace and longtime home of mystery writer Agatha Christie, and it’s the home of Kents Cavern, one of the United Kingdom’s most important archaeological sites. Last year, researchers reported that an upper jaw found in the cave could be the oldest modern human fossil in Europe. But a new study questions that claim, arguing that the date of the jawbone may never be known with certainty. The controversy has an important bearing on debates about the spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa.

"One bad date can rewrite the entire prehistory of our species in Europe," says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and co-author of the new study, which is in press at the European Journal of Archaeology. But members of the original team, who published their dating results last year in Nature, have responded sharply to the criticisms. The new study's conclusions, says Thomas Higham, a radiocarbon dating expert at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the Nature paper, "expose a breathtaking ignorance of the [new] developments in scientific approaches to the past."

Kents Cavern has been excavated numerous times since the 1820s by some of the United Kingdom’s most famous archaeologists. In 1927, Arthur Ogilvie, then curator of the Torquay Museum, discovered the partial jawbone, which includes three teeth. Over the years, researchers have debated whether the fossil was that of a modern human or a Neandertal, as well as how old it was. In 1989, scientists at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit attempted to directly date the bone and came up with an age of approximately 35,000 years. (All dates in this story are calibrated to account for fluctuations in atmospheric radiocarbon over time.)

This date for the jawbone was consistent with then-current views that modern humans had entered Europe about 40,000 years ago and then spread from east to west. But it was suspect because the fossil bore traces of animal-based glue that earlier researchers had used to rejoin the bone and teeth, which were found separately. Modern carbon in the glue could make the bone appear younger than it really is.

In last year's Nature study, Higham and his colleagues tried to get around this problem by dating animal bones found above and below the fossil, and then subjecting those dates to mathematical treatment to get the best fit. The result was surprising: The jawbone clocked in at between 41,500 and 44,000 years. And a study of the teeth by the team’s anthropologists concluded that it was most probably a modern human rather than a Neandertal.

A Weekly Chat on the Hottest Topics in Science Thursdays 3 p.m. EDT
In the new paper, which will be published later this month, Pettitt and archaeologist Mark White of Durham University in the United Kingdom blast away at these dating results on the grounds that it’s unclear exactly where the jawbone was found. Pettitt and White, who have been conducting renewed excavations in Kents Cavern since 2009, delved into the old excavation records for the site, including those for Ogilvie's years of digging. The pair argues that both Ogilvie's excavations and his record-keeping were sloppy, even by the standards of the day. As a result, White and Pettitt contend, it’s impossible to determine the exact location of the fossil or of the animal bones above and below it. To make things worse, they argue, there is evidence that sediments in the cave may have moved around over the millennia since the fossil was deposited there.

"Sadly," the pair writes in the last sentence of their paper, the jawbone "may just [as] well have stayed in the ground for all its value to modern Paleoanthropology."

Both sides of the debate agree that there is a lot riding on the outcome. "What is at stake is the entire [prehistory] of Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe," Pettitt says. Apart from the Kents Cavern fossil and some 43,000- to 45,000-year-old teeth from Italy whose status as modern human or Neandertal is currently also debated, the oldest undisputed human fossils in Europe are about only 40,000 years old and come from a site in Romania. If modern humans really made it all the way to northwest Europe by 41,500 years ago or even earlier, it would mean that they entered Europe much earlier than once thought and also spread across the continent very rapidly. It would also increase the overlap between modern humans and the Neandertals, who already lived in Europe, and who went extinct sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. What’s more, such an overlap could make it more likely that Neandertals, who made sophisticated ornaments and tools in their last years, copied these techniques from modern humans rather than inventing them on their own.

But Higham and his colleagues reject the White-Pettitt critique. They take particular umbrage at the suggestion that they misunderstood the cave's stratigraphy. The mathematical model they used to fine-tune the dates was based on a study of the cave by deceased archaeologist Roger Jacobi of the British Museum who "knew the site … better than anyone," Higham says. He adds that "we are not naïve enough to think that nothing has moved" in the cave, but that even when he and his colleagues assumed such movement in its model they still came out with dates of at least 41,000 years.

Another member of Higham's team, Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, disputes White’s and Pettitt's suggestion that the jawbone might belong to a Neandertal rather than a modern human. "We can say with confidence that no Neandertal fossil known to us shows anything like the number of modern features that we observed," he says.

Higham hopes his team can try to directly radiocarbon date the jawbone again one day, although he is reluctant to do it now because there is very little bone left. In the meantime, the exact age of the fossil and who it belonged to might remain a mystery worthy of Christie, who made Kents Cavern a central part of the plot in one of her many books.

 

[rynner2]

Hunter-gatherer European had blue eyes and dark skin
By Rebecca Morelle, Science reporter, BBC World Service

Scientists have shed light on what ancient Europeans looked like.
Genetic tests reveal that a hunter-gatherer who lived 7,000 years ago had the unusual combination of dark skin and hair and blue eyes.
It has surprised scientists, who thought that the early inhabitants of Europe were fair.

The research, led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, is published in the journal Nature.
The lead author, Dr Carles Lalueza-Fox, said: "One explanation is that the lighter skin colour evolved much later than was previously assumed."

Two hunter-gatherer skeletons were discovered in a cave in the mountains of north-west Spain in 2006.
The cool, dark conditions meant the remains (called La Brana 1 and 2) were remarkably well preserved. Scientists were able to extract DNA from a tooth of one of the ancient men and sequence his genome.
The team found that the early European was most closely genetically related to people in Sweden and Finland.

But while his eyes were blue, his genes reveal that his hair was black or brown and his skin was dark.
"This was a result that was unexpected," said Dr Lalueza-Fox.

Scientists had thought the first Europeans became fair soon after they left Africa and moved to the continent about 45,000 years ago.
"It has been assumed that it is something that happens in response to going from Africa to higher latitudes where the UV radiation is very low and you need to synthesise vitamin D in your skin. Your skin becomes lighter quite soon," explained Dr Lalueza-Fox.
"It is obvious that this is not the case, because this guy has been in Europe for 40,000 years and he still has dark skin."

The hunter-gatherer's genome also gave the team an insight into how humans had changed as they moved from foraging to farming.
The early European would have subsisted on a diet of mainly protein, and his DNA reveals that he was lactose-intolerant and unable to digest starch. These are traits that came after agriculture was adopted and people changed what they ate.

Commenting on the research, David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in the US, said: "The significance of this paper is that it reports the oldest European genome sequence reported to date - the first European genome sequence that predates the appearance of agriculture.

"The dark skin is a very interesting finding, as light skin is nearly universal across Europe today. These results suggest that the light skin seen across Europe today is a development of the last at least 7,000 years."
He added: "It will be very interesting to see how general this result is across ancient pre-agricultural Europe once additional genome sequences become available."

Early results of research that Prof Reich has been involved with were recently published on the biology preprint website bioRxiv.org and a paper has been submitted to a journal.

He has looked at the genomes of several hunter-gatherers and early farmers in Europe. This work suggests that present-day Europeans derive from three ancient populations of early inhabitants of the continent.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25885519