Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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The Genome of a Human From an Unknown Population Has Been Recovered From Cave Dirt
13 JULY 2021

A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human.

Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, before the last Ice Age; and, although we don't know much about her, she represents a significant scientific achievement: the feasibility of identifying ancient human populations even when there are no bones to recover.

The sample also yielded DNA from wolf and bison species, which an international team of scientists were able to place in the context of their population histories.

"Our results," they wrote in their paper, "provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships."

The recovery of ancient DNA has typically relied rather a lot on bones, and luck. First, you need the bones to have survived, and survived intact enough to preserve DNA over many thousands of years.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-human-ge ... -cave-dirt
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Morocco team hails stone age tool site dating back 1.3m years
Wed 28 Jul 2021

Image

Archaeologists in Morocco have announced the discovery of north Africa’s oldest stone age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3m years, an international team has reported.

The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the start date in north Africa of the Acheulian stone-tool industry, associated with the human ancestor Homo erectus, researchers told journalists in Rabat on Wednesday.

The discovery was made during excavations at a quarry on the outskirts of Morocco’s economic capital, Casablanca.

This “contributes to enriching the debate on the emergence of the Acheulian in Africa,” said Abderrahim Mohib, the co-director of the Franco-Moroccan prehistory of Casablanca programme.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... -13m-years
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Remains of ancient dogs found among early human ancestral remains in Georgia
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-ancient-d ... stral.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A team of researchers from Italy, Spain and Georgia has found the remains of ancient hunting dogs at a dig site in what is now modern Georgia. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes the fossils they found, their attempts to classify them and the possibility of the dogs interacting with early human ancestors.

Prior research has shown that a type of ancient hunting dog evolved millions of years ago in parts of Asia and then migrated into parts of Europe and Africa. Prior evidence also has shown that the dogs were quite large and likely engaged in social behaviors such as pack hunting. Prior research has also led to the discovery of the remains of ancient human ancestors near the Georgian village of Dmanisi—the oldest ever found outside of Africa. In this new study, the researchers found evidence of the hunting dogs living in the vicinity of the human ancestors at Dmanisi approximately 1.8 million years ago.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Mapping the Biography of an Ancient Wooly Mammoth
by Tessa Koumoundouros
August 12, 2021

[https://www.sciencealert.com/researcher ... oth-s-tusk][/url]

Extract:
(Science Alert) Like rings of a tree, each tusk layer records another page of the mammoth's life, written in the language of atoms.

To decipher this diary, University of Alaska paleoecologist Matthew Wooller, Druckenmiller, and colleagues used ~340,000 measurements of strontium isotopes that the ancient mammoth incorporated into its tusks from food and the environment.

Unique ratios between the isotopes of strontium (87Sr/86Sr) provide fingerprints of locations that change little across the millennia, the researchers explain. Alaskan isotope location data has been mapped from the teeth of rodents that generally stay in one location their entire life.

Comparing the mammoth's strontium and oxygen isotope data to this map, the researchers were able to obtain information on the mammoth's movements, down to the incredible resolution of a week.

The mammoth seems to have frequented different areas during different stages of its life. The 10 cm (approx. 4 inch) tusk tip shows it spent the first year of its life in the Yukon River basin in interior Alaska, moving very little.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Ancient woman's DNA challenges scientists' long-held theories about early humans
Friday 27 August 2021

Archaeologists have analysed DNA found in the remains of a woman who died 7,200 years ago in Indonesia - challenging previous theories around the migration of early humans.

The remains of the teenager, nicknamed Besse, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on Sulawesi in 2015.

It is believed to be the first time ancient human DNA has been discovered in Wallacea, a group of islands between mainland Asia and Australia.
Archaeologists excavate at Leang Panninge cave on Sulawesi. Pic: Leang Panninge Research Project

Scientists previously thought a group called Austronesians had spread East Asian genes through Wallacea around 3,500 years ago.

But the discovery of Besse suggests people with East Asian genes may have been there long before that.
https://news.sky.com/story/ancient-woma ... s-12391892
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Scientists find evidence of humans making clothes 120,000 years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -years-ago
Last modified on Thu 16 Sep 2021 12.18 EDT
From the medieval fashion for pointy shoes to Victorian waist-squeezing corsets and modern furry onesies, what we wear is a window to our past.

Now researchers say they have found some of the earliest evidence of humans using clothing in a cave in Morocco, with the discovery of bone tools and bones from skinned animals suggesting the practice dates back at least 120,000 years.

Dr Emily Hallett, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the first author of the study, said the work reinforced the view that early humans in Africa were innovative and resourceful.
An exhibit shows the life of a neanderthal family in the Neanderthal Museum in Krapina, Croatia
Who invented clothes? A Palaeolithic archaeologist answers
Read more

“Our study adds another piece to the long list of hallmark human behaviours that begin to appear in the archaeological record of Africa around 100,000 years ago,” she said.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Newly Reviewed Evidence Suggests Humans Were in North America 21,000 Years Ago
by David Wells
September 23, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/new-evid ... years-ago/

Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — New research on fossil footprint evidence suggests that humans were present in North America earlier than previously believed.

Researchers led by Matthew Bennett, a geographer at England’s Bournemouth University, studied a series of human fossil footprints found in an ancient lakebed in White Sands National Park, located in New Mexico. Their findings will be released in an article to be published Friday in the peer-reviewed academic journal Science. An advance copy provided to Courthouse News detailed the evidence that humans were in North America during the last ice age.

The footprints are roughly 21,000 to 23,000 years old and show that human arrival in southern North America predates the time before glacial advances of the last ice age shut off travel between Asia and North America via the Bering land bridge, which connected Alaska and Siberia.
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Fossil footprints found in White Sands National Park in New Mexico.
National Park Service, USGS and Bournemouth University
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Humans Domesticated Dangerous Cassowary Bird Thousands of Years Before Chickens, Study Finds
by Jon Parton
September 27, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/humans-d ... udy-finds/

Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — Long before humans domesticated chickens, they had tamed the much larger and dangerous cassowary bird, according to new research released Monday.

"This behavior that we are seeing is coming thousands of years before domestication of the chicken," said Kristina Douglass, assistant professor of anthropology and African studies at Penn State, in a statement. "And this is not some small fowl, it is a huge, ornery, flightless bird that can eviscerate you. Most likely the dwarf variety that weighs 20 kilos (44 pounds)."

In the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international research team estimates humans in New Guinea domesticated the birds starting around 18,000 years ago. The scientists relied on ancient cassowary eggshells to estimate the developmental stage of the embryos when the eggs were cracked open.

“The data presented here may represent the earliest indication of human management of the breeding of an avian taxon anywhere in the world, preceding the early domestication of chicken and geese by several millennia," the study states.

The researchers said cassowaries “bear more resemblance to velociraptors than most domesticated birds.”
Image
A modern day cassowary chick.
Credit: Andy Mack
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Israeli archaeologists discover ancient winemaking complex
Source: AP
By TSAFRIR ABAYOV

YAVNE, Israel (AP) — Israeli archaeologists on Monday said they have unearthed a massive ancient winemaking complex dating back some 1,500 years.

The complex, discovered in the central town of Yavne, includes five wine presses, warehouses, kilns for producing clay storage vessels and tens of thousands of fragments and jars, they said.

Israel’s Antiquities Authority said the discovery shows that Yavne was a wine-making powerhouse during the Byzantine period. Researchers estimate the facility could produce some 2 million liters (over 520,000 gallons) of wine a year.

Jon Seligman, one of the directors of the excavation, said the wine made in the area was known as “Gaza” wine and exported across the region. The researchers believe the Yavne location was the main production facility for the label.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/science-busi ... b1e13ba184
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Archeologists Discover Early Use of Tobacco
by Tara Yarlagadda
October 11, 2021

https://www.inverse.com/science/ancient ... overy-utah

Introduction:
(INVERSE) TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, a group of hunter-gatherers huddled around a hearth on a rare patch of dry space within what is today the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah, seeking rest and refuge.

They carried with them the seeds of a plant that would go on to become one of the most profitable — and deadliest — drugs in human history: tobacco.

According to new research, where these individuals gathered — now known as the Wishbone hearth site — is the site of the earliest known use of tobacco. Its existence also suggests the use of tobacco goes back thousands of years earlier than scientists realized.

These findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“We now know that Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been using tobacco for much of time since they arrived,” Daron Duke, lead author on the study and principal of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group, tells Inverse.
Last edited by caltrek on Sun Nov 07, 2021 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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