Blogs / 80beats

About 4,600 years ago in Germany’s fertile farm country a group of stone age people met a violent end, but the arrangement of their skeletons in four graves tells a story of love and family bonds. One particularly well-preserved grave holds what researchers say is the first known nuclear family, with an adult male and female cradling the bodies of their two sons. A DNA analysis of the skeletons’ bones and teeth confirmed their blood ties: “The two kids have her mitochondrial DNA, and his Y chromosome - that’s a nuclear family,” says molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp [New Scientist].

The group of 13 individuals includes adults aged 25 to 60 and children under the age of 9, and researchers believe that they were massacred. Says study coauthor Alistair Pike: “They were definitely murdered, there are big holes in their heads, fingers and wrists are broken.” At least five of the individuals show the effects of a violent attack, one even had the tip of a stone weapon embedded in a vertebra [BBC News].

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The fossilized pelvis of a Homo erectus woman who lived 1.2 million years ago on the banks of an Ethiopian river has been discovered, and while researchers say it casts new light on human evolution, some of their conclusions are challenging previous theories about these early human ancestors. The pelvis reveals a short, squat woman who wasn’t built for long-distance running, but also a woman with a wide birth canal to accommodate big-brained infants.

Study coauthor Scott Simpson says the pelvis’s wide birth canal indicates that hominds’ increasing brain size was a driving factor in human evolution. Getting through the birth canal is “the most gymnastic thing we ever do,” he says. To accommodate big-brained babies, humans must have developed larger and wider birth canals over time, but with few pelvic fossils, researchers had little idea when these changes began. The Busidima pelvis shows that a wide birth canal was already in place 1.2 million years ago [New Scientist].

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In a dusty cave in Israel, archaeologists have unearthed a 12,000-year-old grave that they say may be the resting spot of one of the earliest known shamans. The grave contains the artfully arranged bones of a roughly 45-year-old woman as well as a collection of animal and human body parts, including a complete human foot, 50 tortoise shells, and bones from a wild boar, an eagle, and a leopard.

“What was unusual here was there were so many different parts of different animals that were unusual, that were clearly put there on purpose,” said researcher Natalie Munro…. This care along with the animal parts point to the grave belonging to both an important member of the society and possibly a healer called a shaman…. Such healers mediate between the human and spirit worlds, often summoning the help of animal spirits along their quests, according to the researchers [LiveScience].

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Researchers have long debated whether human migration out of Africa was spurred by climate changes that forced the early humans to move along or by technological innovation that let them take advantage of new possibilities; now a new analysis of stone tools from southern Africa is lending support to the latter camp. Researchers determined that two types of tools were developed during the crucial age from 60,000 to 80,000 years ago when modern humans began to move towards new regions of the globe.

Researchers examined tools from nine sites in South Africa, Namibia, and Lesotho. The sophisticated Still Bay tools were made from hard, fine-grained rock called silcrete, and were fashioned between 71,000 and 71,900 years ago. The Howieson’s Poort implements were made between 59,500 and 64,800 years ago, and were composed of chipped silcrete rock attached to wood shafts to form weapons. Comparing these dates with palaeoenvironmental records failed to turn up a close correlation between the industries and dramatic climatic changes, [lead researcher Zenobia] Jacobs says. “We see no consistent pattern between the timing of these industries and major climatic changes” [Nature News].

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The first migration of Homo sapiens, when they left the East African landscapes where they evolved and began a long trek across the Sahara, may have followed a different route than previously believed. A new study shows that prehistoric river channels fed by monsoons once traced a path north through the desert and argues that the modern humans may have followed those channels, going from oasis to oasis until they reached the sea.

The Sahara has had several periods of increased rainfall that made it a wetter and greener place, including one interlude between 130,000 to 170,000 years ago when the researchers believe these river channels flowed with water. Now only visible with satellite radar, the channels flowed intermittently from present-day Libya and Chad to the Mediterranean Sea, says [lead researcher] Anne Osborne…. Up to five kilometres wide, the channels would have provided a lush route from East Africa – where modern humans first evolved – to the Middle East, a likely second stop on Homo sapiens‘ world tour [New Scientist].

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Neanderthals living in coastal caves in Gibraltar hunted and feasted on seafood, researchers say, adding another piece of evidence to the argument that Neanderthals weren’t outmatched and driven to extinction by more skilled and sophisticated Homo sapiens. “I don’t think that the success of one or the other had to do with subsistence, with the way they hunted or fed,” [researcher Clive] Finlayson said. “There may be other factors coming into this, or it may just have been a question of luck” [National Geographic News].

The discovery of seal, dolphin and fish remains in the caves dating from 60,000 to 30,000 years ago provides the first evidence that Neanderthals ate sea mammals as well as land grub. Archaeologists found the mammals’ remains among Neanderthal hearth sites in Vanguard and Gorham’s Caves on the Rock of Gibraltar. The bones of some of the animals have cut marks that were likely made by Neanderthals using flint knives, also found on site, to cut the meat off [LiveScience].

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A new analysis of the skulls of three Neanderthal babies shows that the cranium of a newborn Neanderthal was about the same size as that of a newborn Homo sapiens, and that the Neanderthal children grew faster than modern humans in the first few years of life. The report on the young skeletons, which date from between 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, adds fuel to the debate over how similar Neanderthal culture was to that of our early Homo sapiens ancestors.

A big-headed infant skeleton found in Russia suggests that childbirth was no easy task for for Neanderthal women. Neanderthal mothers had slightly larger birth canals, but the prominent face of Neanderthal babies made it just as hard to push out as a modern human. This suggests that both groups had the social structures needed to help with childbirth [New Scientist].

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Archaeologists have recreated the stone tools made by Neanderthals, and found them to be as useful and efficient as those made by the earliest Homo sapiens, who survived while the Neanderthal line died off. The new research is one of many recent studies claiming that Neanderthals weren’t just dumb brutes that were out-competed by early humans. Says lead researcher Metin Eren: “When we think of Neanderthals we need to stop thinking in terms of ’stupid’ or ‘less advanced’ and more in terms of ‘different’” [Guardian].

Other recent studies have argued that Neanderthals hunted and communicated as well as the early Homo sapiens who arrived in Europe, where the Neanderthals already lived, about 45,000 years ago. But some archaeologists still believed that Homo sapiens had a technological advantage, because they used long stone tools called blades, as opposed to the Neanderthals’ disk-shaped flakes. In the new study, Eren’s team spent spent three years recreating blades and flakes, then measured their cutting power, durability and the amount of effort needed to produce them [Wired News]. In the end, Eren determined that the Neanderthals’ tools may have even had a slight edge over Homo sapiens tools.

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In an arid and lifeless stretch of the Sahara, archaeologists have discovered a massive graveyard and remnants of early settlements that hark back to Stone Age days when the desert was wet, green, and habitable. Researchers say the find is a striking reminder that climates and environments can shift drastically over the geologically short time period of 10,000 years.

In an area of Sahara that’s known to nomads as the “desert within a desert,” researchers found evidence of thriving prehistoric cultures and rich ecosystems on the edge of a lake. There were also hundreds of animal bones. In addition to antelope and giraffe, [lead researcher Paul] Sereno quickly recognized the remains of water-adapted creatures like crocodiles and hippos, then turtles, fish, and clams. “Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,” said Sereno. “I realized we were in the Green Sahara” [National Geographic].

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Cro-Magnon people and Neanderthals may have shared their European habitat from 45,000 to 30,000 years ago, but new evidence suggests that they didn’t get more intimate than that. Italian researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from Cro-Magnon bones dating from 28,000 years ago and found no trace of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that the two early hominids did not interbreed to create modern humans.

The fate of the Neanderthals, who vanish from the fossil record around 30,000 years ago, has been fiercely debated. One theory, known as the Out of Africa hypothesis, holds that modern humans, whose ancestors had recently migrated from Africa, drove the Neandertals extinct, possibly through warfare, disease, or cognitive advantage. But the competing multiregional hypothesis argues that Neandertals and modern humans interbred and that Neandertals were absorbed into our gene pool [ScienceNow Daily News].

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Neanderthals don’t have the best reputation. In the public mind, the heavy-browed hominids are thought of as a stupid species that couldn’t compete with brighter Homo sapiens, as the also-rans that therefore went extinct. But a newly discovered trove of Neanderthal tools in Sussex, England may help rehabilitate their image. The tools, which date from the end of the Neanderthal era at around 30,000 B.C., show surprising sophistication, archaeologists say.

“The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species,” said [University College London]’s Matthew Pope. “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe,” he added. “The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology — not a people on the edge of extinction” [Discovery News].

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Woolly mammoths may all look the same in your average natural history museum display — the extinct animals are always depicted with the same curly tusks, shaggy hair, and lumbering feet. But researchers have just discovered that they were not all the same, that two genetically distinct groups of mammoths roamed the Siberian plains many millennia ago, and that one group avoided extinction for an extra 30,000 years.

Researchers first went in search of tufts of mammoth hair that had been frozen in the permafrost. They then used a new technique that allowed them to read the complete DNA sequence of an animal’s mitochondria (an energy-producing organelle within a cell) from a single hair. The DNA in mitochondria is passed only through the mother’s line, and doesn’t give information about changes in gene function, as nuclear DNA can. But it is useful because it doesn’t change from parent to offspring, making it easy to show when different animal groups are present [Nature News].

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