So did the hobbits and the giant storks live in peaceful harmony, or did they try to kill each other?
On the island of Flores, the same place where controversial evidence of the tiny ancient hominid Homo floresiensis turned up in 2003, scientists found large leg bones in a cave. A new analysis of those bones published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society indicates that they belong to giant storks taller than any alive today, capable of towering over the Homo floresiensis “hobbits.”
“From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork,” said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The carnivorous giant (Leptoptilos robustus) was a hitherto unknown species of marabou stork, among the largest birds alive on the planet. [MSNBC]
At about 6 feet in height, the great stork would have stood nearly twice the height of H. floresiensis individuals, who reached just about three and a half feet tall. And like many other over-sized birds, the stork likely wasn’t the flying type. Says Meijer:
“Fly? Not very well, I think. They wouldn’t have gone very far if they could even get off the ground. But I don’t think they needed to fly. They were the top predator of that ecosystem.” [Toronto Star]
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Neanderthals, it would appear, grew up in a big hurry. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, Harvard anthropologists who studied Neanderthal teeth samples say that the evidence captured in those teeth show the rate at which they developed. Compared with human children, Neanderthal kids raced though their developing years and into adulthood, the researchers say.
Tanya Smith and colleagues used advanced X-ray scans of the tooth fossils of Neanderthals and the humans who lived concurrently with them to discover the layers therein. She says such scans reveal “growth lines” that serve the same purpose as tree rings–they allow researchers to measure the individual’s development year by year, and to determine his or her exact age at death.
Even when compared to some of the earliest human teeth, taken from remains of humans who left Africa 90,000 to 100,00 years ago, the differences were clear. Human teeth grew more slowly, pointing to more leisurely periods of youth. “This indicates that the elongation of childhood has been a relatively recent development,” the study said. [AFP]
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Back in August, a study in Nature attempted to push back the date of human ancestors’ first known tool use by 800,000 years—from 2.6 million years ago to 3.4 million years ago. The evidence was a set of scratches on animal bones, which—according to the scientists behind the study—show evidence that the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis used cutting tools.
Not so fast, some anthropologists say. At the time of the Nature paper, researchers including the scientists behind the 2.6-million-year-old find said the newly found markings could have been caused by other means, including trampling by other animals. Now, in a study (in press) for today’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of anthropologists makes a full case that the 3.4-million-year-old scratches are not evidence of tool use.
From DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong:
They argue that similar cuts can be produced when bones are gnawed by animals, trampled into rough ground, or even eroded by plants and fungi. Their conclusion: the marks on the Dikika bones were probably created by trampling and their age is uncertain. To them, the best evidence for butchery by human ancestors comes from stone tools recovered in Gona, Ethiopia, which are just 2.6 million years old.
Check out the rest of this post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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Image: PNAS
When you were born, your brain was more elongated than it is now; it rounded out into its more globular shape as you grew up and crammed it full of knowledge. Neanderthals, it appears, were born with brains in that same elongated shape. But in their case it never changed: Adult Neanderthals’ brains didn’t move to the more rounded shape like ours, according to a study now out in Current Biology.
Scientists have long known that Neanderthals had brains that were about as big as our own, but this study may help explain how their cognitive abilities differed.
[The researchers used CT scans] to study nine fossil Neandertals, including a newborn, a year—old baby, and three children. Because the brain does not fossilize, they studied endocasts, imprints of the brain left in the skull. They found that at birth, both Neandertal and modern human infants had elongated braincases that were similar in shape, although Neandertal faces were already larger. But by age 1 or so, modern humans had grown globular brains, whereas Neandertal babies had not. [ScienceNOW]
Neanderthals, in keeping the same basic brain shape throughout life, maintain the pattern of brain development seen in chimpanzees. In contrast, modern humans have evolved a unique pattern, says lead researcher Philipp Gunz:
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In anthropology departments, the debate has long simmered: Was it an improvement in manual dexterity or intelligence that allowed our human ancestors to begin making sophisticated stone tools?
According to one group of scientists, figuring out the answer required only a pair of high-tech gloves and a trained craftsman who could make both simple stone knives and more complicated hand axes. The craftsman wore gloves studded with electronic sensors that tracked his his hand movements. Lead researcher Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London found that simple and complex tools required the same amount of dexterity to produce.
“From these results, dexterity can be ruled out, and we can infer it has something to do with the complexity of the task,” says Faisal. Axes are made in several stages, which requires switching between tasks, suggesting that a higher level of complexity is required in the brain. [New Scientist]
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A bountiful archaeological site in South Africa has given up another discovery showing humans becoming sophisticated tool users. According to a study out in the journal Science, 75,000-year-old artifacts in the Blombos Cave appear to show signs of pressure flaking, a process of finely shaping hard material. Before this, study author Paola Villa says, the oldest evidence of humans using the technique was dated to just 20,000 years ago.
Pressure flaking consists of trimming the edges of a finished tool by pressing with a bone point hard enough to remove thin slices of rock. This process creates the narrow, evenly spaced grooves found on flint tools from Europe’s 20,000-year-old Solutrean culture and prehistoric Native American groups. Wider, more irregular grooves characterize 36 pressure-flaked Blombos tools, which were made from silcrete, Villa says. This rock, a silica-rich material, is of lower quality than flint and requires heating to ready it for pressure flaking. [Science News]
It’s not easy to tell from these artifacts whether their makers simply hammered them into shape or used the more sophisticated flaking method to polish them off. So the team, led by Vincent Mourre, found silcrete around the cave site and tried to make their own.
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You know the “out of Africa” story: how our ancestors left the savannas where humanity grew up and trekked outward to other continents. Today in Nature, however, a new study of 40 million-year-old fossils argues that an “into Africa” story predates the other narrative: that the animals that would eventually evolve into apes like us and monkeys came from Asia into Africa.
These fossil teeth found in Libya belong to early anthropoids, according to the scientists. The team found several different species in this location.
The new fossils are about 38 to 39 million years old, and none of the animals would have weighed more than 500 grams [just more than 1 pound], conclude a team led by Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a palaeontologist at the University of Poiters, France. Their diminutive size fits in with previous research suggesting that early anthropoids started small and eventually evolved ever bigger bodies. [Nature]
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Over the past few years, studies have chipped away at the old-fashioned stereotype of dense and dumb Neanderthals. Archaeological excavations suggested the hominids made tools and weapons, fashioned jewelry, or possessed other mental faculties some presumed only early humans to have.
The Neanderthal renaissance may be in danger. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, radiocarbon dating expert Thomas Higham tested one of the most important Neanderthal sites in the world—Grotte du Renne in France—and found that all is not well in dating the artifacts that some archaeologists have connected to Neanderthals.
The key finding is that as you dig down through the layers of sediment in the Grotte du Renne, the age of the remains does not increase as you would expect. Instead, the ages of the different objects are all over the place, suggesting that remains from different eras have got mixed up together. [New Scientist]
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Humans didn’t begin major agriculture until about 10,000 years ago. But 20,000 years before that they were grinding their own flour, a new study (in press) suggests, adding more proof that our forebears were eating the beginnings of a more balanced diet while still roving as hunter-gatherers.
Anna Revedin’s team says in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they found traces evidence of flour still stuck in 30,000-year-old stones the team found in Russia, Italy, and the Czech Republic.
The flour, likely suitable for making flatbread or cakes, didn’t just give stone age people some dinnertime variety. Because it could be stored in dried form, flour would have given them greater independence from environmental and seasonal circumstance. [Wired.com]
The stones themselves appear to have been shaped for grinding, like an archaic mortar and pestle.
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Beer: Some people think it’s proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Others value it as a great source of antibiotics—of course, those people lived nearly 1,700 years ago.
For much of the last three decades, anthropologist George Armelagos has been trying to explain how mummies that date from an ancient kingdom in Nubia—the area south of Egypt that’s located in present-day Sudan—got so much of the antibiotic tetracycline in their bones. Since scientists didn’t synthesize antibiotics like that one until the 20th century (and these bones date back to between 350 to 550 A.D.), finding a buildup in ancient bones screams out “contamination.”
Armelagos and his colleagues longed to prove that it wasn’t, and in a study out in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the team argues that the find is no fluke. Nubians got antibiotics into their systems by drinking beer, and lots of it, and from an early age.
How? Thanks to the help of a kind of bacteria called Streptomyces.
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When it comes to explaining why the woolly mammoths died out, “death from above” could be down for the count.
Nearly 13,000 years ago, North American megafauna like the mammoths and giant sloths—and even human groups like the people of the Clovis culture—disappeared as the climate entered a cold snap. As DISCOVER has noted before, there’s been a controversial hypothesis bubbling up saying that a comet impact caused it all, but other scientists have been shooting holes in that idea of the last couple years. In a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Tyrone Daulton pooh-poohs what may be the last major evidence that supports the impact idea.
That evidence takes the shape of nano-diamonds in ancient sediment layers, a material said to form during impacts only.
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People come together for ceremonial feasts. They do it now, they did it a hundred years ago, they did it a thousand years ago, and they may have done it even 12,000 years ago, archaeologists argue in a new study.
But the question is: If ancient humans devour tortoises in a cave and there are no scientists there to see it, is it a ceremonial occasion, or just a big meal?
The ancient eaters belonged to a culture called the Natufian, according to Natalie Munro and Leore Grosman, who authored the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In a burial cave in Israel, the researchers turned up a slew of tortoises shells and bones of cattle, and the remains suggest the Natufians butchered and cooked them.
According to Munro, a feast of so many animals could have fed 35 people.
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During the Pleistocene epoch animals thought big: It was the age of the megafauna, when creatures like the mammoth, an 8-foot-long beaver, and a hippopotamus-sized wombat walked the Earth. But these giants vanished one by one, and scientists have long wondered why.
Debate over what caused the megafauna to die out has raged for 150 years, since Darwin first spotted the remains of giant ground sloths in Chile. Possible causes have ranged from human influence to climate change in the past, even to a cataclysmic meteor strike. [BBC]
Now, a discovery on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu seems to have answered the question for at least one species. Researchers have turned up the bones of a giant land turtle in a dump used by the people who settled on the islands 3,000 years ago, and lead researcher Trevor Worthy says the evidence strongly suggests that the turtles were hunted into extinction.
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Stop patting yourself on the back. You’re not so special. Orangutans, a new study suggests, also use complex gestures or pantomimes to communicate.
Looking through twenty years worth of orangutan observations, researchers believe they have found 18 examples of pantomimes. The study, which appeared today in Biology Letters, supports the claim that we’re not unique when it comes to abstract communication and lends credence to other observations of great ape gesturing, according to lead researcher Anne Russon.
[Orangutans and chimpanzees were already known] to throw an object when angry, for example. But that is a far cry from displaying actions that are intentionally symbolic and referential–the behaviour known as pantomiming. “Pantomime is considered uniquely human,” says Anne Russon from York University in Toronto, Canada. “It is based on imitation, recreating behaviours you have seen somewhere else, which can be considered complex and beyond the grasp of most non-human species.” [New Scientist]
Of the eighteen observed orangutan pantomimes, four took place between orangutans and 14 between a human and an orangutan. If you ever find yourself in the Indonesian jungles, here are some examples of messages that you might expect:
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Was Lucy a tool user and a meat eater?
Quite possibly, argues a new study in Nature. Archaeologist Shannon McPherron turned up animal bones at an Ethiopian site that he says show markings of stone tool cutting dating back nearly 3.4 million years. That would be a big jump in the record: Right now the oldest known evidence of tool use among our ancestral species dates back about 2.6 million years.
McPherron’s date falls in the time of Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy find belongs. But thus far he’s found only the markings on bones—not the tools themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, at least one scientist behind the 2.6 million-year-old find says the new study is not convincing evidence that tool use dates back all the way to 3.4 million years ago.
For plenty more about the find—and the differing opinions—check out DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong’s post.
Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Human Ancestors Carved Meat with Stone Tools Almost a Million Years Earlier Than Expected
80beats: Lucy’s New Relative, “Big Man,” May Push Back the Origin of Walking
DISCOVER: How Loyal Was Lucy?
Image: Dikika Research Project
