Neanderthal fossils discovered in a cave in Greece

Neanderthal fossils including bones of children and adults, have been discovered in a cave in Greece, hinting the area may have been a key crossroad for ancient humans, researchers say.

The timing of the fossils suggests Neanderthals and humans may have at least had the opportunity to interact, or cross paths, there, the researchers added.

Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, apparently even occasionally interbreeding with our ancestors. Neanderthals entered Europe before modern humans did, and may have lasted there until about 35,000 years ago, although recent findings have called this date into question.

To learn more about the history of ancient humans, scientists have recently focused on Greece.

"Greece lies directly on the most likely route of dispersals of early modern humans and earlier hominins into Europe from Africa via the Near East," paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany told LiveScience. "It also lies at the heart of one of the three Mediterranean peninsulae of Europe, which acted as refugia for plant and animal species, including human populations, during glacial times — that is, areas where species and populations were able to survive during the worst climatic deteriorations."

"Until recently, very little was known about deep prehistory in Greece, chiefly because the archaeological research focus in the country has been on classical and other more recent periods," Harvati added.

Harvati and colleagues from Greece and France analyzed remains from a site known as Kalamakia, a cave stretching about 65 feet (20 meters) deep into limestone cliffs on the western coast of the Mani Peninsula on the mainland of Greece. They excavated the cave over the course of 13 years. [Amazing Caves: Photos Reveal Earth's Innards]

The archaeological deposits of the cave date back to between about 39,000 and 100,000 years ago to the Middle Paleolithic period. During the height of the ice age, the area still possessed a mild climate and supported a wide range of wildlife, including deer, wild boar, rabbits, elephants, weasels, foxes, wolves, leopards, bears, falcons, toads, vipers and tortoises.

In the cave, the researchers found tools such as scrapers made of flint, quartz and seashells. The stone tools were all shaped, or knapped, in a way typical of Neanderthal artifacts.

Now, the scientists reveal they discovered 14 specimens of child and adult human remains in the cave, including teeth, a small fragment of skull, a vertebra, and leg and foot bones with bite and gnaw marks on them. The teeth strongly appear to be Neanderthal, and judging by marks on the teeth, the ancient people apparently had a diet of meat and diverse plants.

"Kalamakia, together with the single human tooth from the nearby cave site of Lakonis, are the first Neanderthal remains to be identified from Greece," Harvati said. The discoveries are "confirmation of a thriving and long-standing Neanderthal population in the region."

These findings suggest "the fossil record from Greece potentially holds answers about the earliest dispersal of modern humans and earlier hominins into Europe, about possible late survival of Neanderthals and about one of the first instances where the two might have had the opportunity to interact," Harvati said.

In the future, Harvati and her colleagues will conduct new fieldwork in other areas in Greece to address mysteries such as potential coexistence and interactions between Neanderthals and modern humans, the spread of modern and extinct humans into Europe and possible seafaring capabilities of ancient humans.

"We look forward to exciting discoveries in the coming years," Harvati said.
The scientists detailed their findings online March 13 in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: Live Science

DNA shows ancient humans related to Asians and Native Americans

Early DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in an area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans.

An international team of researchers including Svante Paabo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China.

Analyses of this individual’s DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans.

In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays.

Humans with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The genetic relationships between these early modern humans and present-day human populations had not yet been established. Qiaomei Fu, Matthias Meyer and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000 year old leg bone found in 2003 at the Tianyuan Cave site located outside Beijing.

For their study the researchers were using new techniques that can identify ancient genetic material from an archaeological find even when large quantities of DNA from soil bacteria are present.

The researchers then reconstructed a genetic profile of the leg’s owner.

“This individual lived during an important evolutionary transition when early modern humans, who shared certain features with earlier forms such as Neanderthals, were replacing Neanderthals and Denisovans, who later became extinct,” study leader Svante Paabo said.

The genetic profile reveals that this early modern human was related to the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans but had already diverged genetically from the ancestors of present-day Europeans.

In addition, the Tianyuan individual did not carry a larger proportion of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA than present-day people in the region.

“More analyses of additional early modern humans across Eurasia will further refine our understanding of when and how modern humans spread across Europe and Asia,” Svante Paabo added.

Source: DNA India

Oldest Ivory Workshop in the World Discovered in Saxony-Anhalt

Excavations at the mammoth hunting site of Breitenbach near Zeitz have uncovered a 35,000-year-old ivory workshop.

In an international co-operation project, archaeologists from the Monrepos Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for the Evolution of Hominin Behaviour, part of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, (RGZM) and the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege and Archäologie in Saxony-Anhalt are excavating the 35,000 year old site of Breitenbach, close to Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt. Other co-operation partners are the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Leiden (NL), the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (ArchPro) in Vienna, the Institute of Geoinformatics i3mainz of the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz as well as the Institutes of Geosciences at the universities of Mainz, Tübingen and Cologne.

During this year's campaign, site directors Dr. Olaf Jöris and Tim Matthies and their team found the oldest evidence for clearly distinct working areas which are interpreted as standardized workshops for working mammoth ivory. It was possible to identify a zone where pieces of ivory were split into lamella, as well as a second area where the pieces had been carved and their waste had been discarded. Some ivory beads and rough outs of unfinished products were also found amongst this debris, alongside several other ivory objects, including a decorated rod and fragments of a three-dimensionally modified object, very likely an object of art. The manufacturers were early modern humans similar to ourselves, who obtained mammoth ivory which had probably lain around at this site for some time, either from the carcasses of mammoths which had died here naturally or from the bodies of the victims of expert hunters. In the case of the latter scenario, the mammoths could have been hunted by modern humans or even by Neanderthals, since Neanderthals had only become extinct a few thousand years before the site was occupied by modern humans.

The clear spatial deposition of the finds in different working areas allows us to draw conclusions about the use of space at around 35,000 years ago, a concept apparently still unknown to Neanderthals.
The settlement at Breitenbach covers an area of at least 6,000 m2 and perhaps as much as 20,000 m2, making it one of the largest sites of the younger Palaeolithic period (Upper Palaeolithic) known to date. The first archaeological excavations were carried out in the 1920's; the more recent campaigns have investigated some 70 m2 of the site. Many students from 25 countries have helped to excavate the site. Close to 3,000 finds have been recovered so far in this year alone.

Finds comparable in age to the ones from Breitenbach are most commonly found in caves, where the utilisation of space was governed by the natural formation of the cave walls. This led to restrictions on, and compromises by, the cave inhabitants. In addition, the same areas of caves were repeatedly inhabited over a long period of time, superimposed over and often blurring details of earlier settlement remains. In the open, as at Breitenbach, humans had the possibility to organise their space more or less free of restrictions or preconditions and establish structures which allow us to reconstruct the daily life of this period at the highest resolution.

Field work at Breitenbach has provided new insights into the spatial activities of people at the beginning of the younger Old Stone Age (Upper Palaeolithic), especially into the spatial organisation of settlement sites and thus of daily life during the Aurignacian at around 40,000-34,000 years ago. This is ultimately of great importance for our understanding of the roots of modern human behaviour itself, since indications for "organizing oneself"in a well-defined and regulated manner which we are accustomed to today, are recognized for the first time worldwide through the new features discovered at the site of Breitenbach.

Due to the unparalleled large size of the settlement area, the Breitenbach site offers a unique opportunity to undertake a detailed investigation of an open site of the Aurignacian period. This will enable us to gain new insights into the complexity and spatial organisation of an early Upper Palaeolithic settlement site, where evidence of personal adornment, art, music or even burials, which are to date hardly known from this period, can also be expected.

Was Mating With Neanderthals Good For Human Health?

It's an argument that's been going on for years. Did humans intermingle with Neanderthals? Is there really any evidence to suggest this? Peter Parham, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, seems to think so.



Peter Parham recently presented evidence to the Royal Society in London that Europeans gained many of the genes for human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) from neanderthals. Comparisons of the human and Neanderthal genomes were conducted by Parham to locate similarities and differences in the DNA of modern human populations and Neanderthals.

Read the Story: Mating with Neanderthals Good for Human Health @ Discovery News

Anthropologists Debate: Neanderthal and Human Brains No Longer Similar

I was watching a movie today in an Anthropology class called Neanderthal The Rebirth featured on BBC. Two individual sets of bones were fused together to form an almost complete skeleton of a Neanderthal.

The legs, of course, were a bit shorter, the rib cage flares at the bottom, an indication of the lung capacity and the ability to survive cold climates.

The cranial capacity, however, was compared very closely to modern humans. A endocast was created to study the indentations or imprints left by the brain to study cognitive abilities. There was barely any debate in the mental processing abilities of both modern humans and neanderthals.

Imagine my surprise and disbelief after finding a video today stating neanderthal and human brains are not as similar as once thought.

This video explains the development and research by Svante Paabo of the neanderthal genome at the Max Plank Institution of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Among humans, however, the internal organization of the brain is more important for cognitive abilities than its absolute size is. The brain's internal organization depends on the tempo and mode of brain development.

Website of the Neandertal Genome project

The Neolithic Religion

I previously discussed the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon religions, which were identified archaeologically as the Stone Age. However, the Neolithic or late Stone Age that followed was reaped in innovation including new weaponry and a developing agricultural system.



Geographically, this was a very important time for people looking to settle in one place, however the weather would never allow it. When people realized that they could plant seeds, harvest the crops, and store them, their lives changed incredibly. They were able to settle in one place, thus setting up permanent dwellings. This directly resulted in a huge population growth in which, people started to work together to grow and harvest food. Consequently in Egypt, land surveying started to take place using science and mathematics to establish the boundaries of land ownership.

People now had the ability to sit back and allow the crops to grow, leaving them more time to delve into other subjects such as religion and astronomy. In fact, most of what they started to learn was based upon nature including the changing of the seasons, the tides, the phases of the moon,and the movements of the stars  This is initially where religions based upon the stars, sun, moon, and seasons started to evolve.

What do we know about the Neolithic People?

The Neolithic people are greatly associated with the use of Megaliths, the two best examples being Stonehenge and Brittany in France. Brimming with speculation, the megaliths have been rumored to be associated with a cult of the dead and ancestor veneration, however due to the lack of written records no one really knows the truth. It does seem quite odd that these massive stones were transported to certain locations from a quarry, many times at a great distance from the original location. There must have been a real purpose behind it.

Also, archaeologists have turned up bones of man, woman, and child, along with ornaments and tools from large burial sites, thus indicating that the chieftain would be served in the next life.

What are your opinions? Please comment below and tell me what you think the megaliths were used for and why.

Pictures Sources: Mane Braz

The Cro Magnon Religion and People

The Cro Magnon people left no written records about themselves, however they replaced the Neanderthals over 30,000 years ago. So what do we know about this prehistoric forerunner to the Homo- sapiens?

Similar to the Neanderthals, they buried tools, weapons, and ornaments with their dead. This is all according to finds documented by the research of archaeologists. Consequently, the graves also furnished some bizarre, yet interesting artifacts including bones painted red. This was, of course, interpreted as a concern for the afterlife. Read more about the Cro Magnon on Factoidz.

This article was previously published by myself. On occasion, some of my short snippet posts will be of this nature since I work with other writing sites.