Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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

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Research Confirms Eastern Wyoming Paleoindian Site as Americas’ Oldest Mine
May 19, 2022

Introduction:
(University of Wyoming) Archaeological excavations led by Wyoming’s state archaeologist and involving University of Wyoming researchers have confirmed that an ancient mine in eastern Wyoming was used by humans to produce red ocher starting nearly 13,000 years ago.

That makes the Powars II site at Sunrise in Platte County the oldest documented red ocher mine -- and likely the oldest known mine of any sort -- in all of North and South America.
Red more here: http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2022/05/res ... -mine.html
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Turkish hilltop where civilization began
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-turkish-h ... began.html
by Fulya Ozerkan
Mysterious: The carved T-shaped megaliths at the prehistoric Gobekli Tepe near Sanliurfa, Turkey.
On a sun-blasted hillside in southeast Turkey, the world's oldest known religious sanctuary is slowly giving up its secrets.

"When we open a new trench, we never know what to expect," said Lee Clare of the German Archaeology Institute, who has been excavating there since 2013.

"It is always a big surprise."

Gobekli Tepe, which means "Potbelly Hill" in Turkish, is arguably the most important archaeological site on Earth.

Thousands of our prehistoric ancestors gathered around its highly-decorated T-shaped megalith pillars to worship more 7,000 years before Stonehenge or the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

"Its significance is hard to overstate," Sean Lawrence, assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, told AFP.

Academics believe the history of human settlement began in these hills close to the Syrian border some 12,000 years ago when groups of Stone Age hunter gatherers came together to construct these sites.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Evidence of fire use at ancient campsite in Israel
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-evidence- ... srael.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Israel and one in Canada has found evidence of fire use by early hominins (during the Lower Paleolithic) at an ancient camp site in Israel. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes using an AI application to test for flint tool exposure to temperatures associated with fire.

The general consensus among scientists is that fire use by early humans goes back as far as 1.5 million years and is believed to have been opportunistic—those early humans did not start fires, but took advantage of those that came about naturally due to lightning strikes. It is believed that humans did not learn to start and control fire until approximately 150,000 years ago. In this new effort, the researchers suspected that million-year-old artifacts found at a campsite at Evron Quarry in Israel might have been subjected to fire but they had no direct evidence. To address that problem they turned to artificial intelligence.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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100,000-year-old polar bear genome reveals ancient hybridization with brown bears
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-year-old- ... cient.html
by University of California - Santa Cruz
The skull of an ancient polar bear, nicknamed Bruno, was found on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in 2009. It is the only ancient polar bear skull ever recorded and the only ancient polar bear bone known from North America. Credit: Pam Grove

An analysis of ancient DNA from a 100,000-year-old polar bear has revealed that extensive hybridization between polar bears and brown bears occurred during the last warm interglacial period in the Pleistocene, leaving a surprising amount of polar bear ancestry in the genomes of all living brown bears.

The study, led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was published June 16 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The researchers obtained ancient DNA from the skull of a juvenile polar bear that was found in 2009 on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in Arctic Alaska. Scientists nicknamed the bear 'Bruno,' although DNA analysis later showed it to be a female.

"The availability of Bruno's paleogenome has made it possible to detect an ancient admixture event that impacted all living brown bears," said first author Ming-Shan Wang, a postdoctoral scientist in the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Olive trees were first domesticated 7,000 years ago
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-olive-tre ... years.html
by Tel-Aviv University
A joint study by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University unraveled the earliest evidence for domestication of a fruit tree. The researchers analyzed remnants of charcoal from the Chalcolithic site of Tel Zaf in the Jordan Valley and determined that they came from olive trees. Since the olive did not grow naturally in the Jordan Valley, this means that the inhabitants planted the tree intentionally about 7,000 years ago.

The study was led by Dr. Dafna Langgut of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology & Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University. The charcoal remnants were found in the archaeological excavation directed by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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46,000-Year-Old Aboriginal Sacred Caves Are Blown Up By Mining Company
Friday, June 17, 2022

Image

An Aboriginal site in Western Australia which is estimated to be 46,000 years old has been destroyed in order for an iron ore mining to be constructed in its place. The shelter caves of Juukan Gorge 1 and 2, which carry significant historical and cultural inheritance, were obliterated by detonating explosives, according to ABC News.

The two shelters were located approximately 60km north-west of Mount Tom Price on Hamersley Plateau. Prior archeological research had shown that the caves were occupied by Aboriginal people over 46,000 year ago - the oldest known inhabited caves on the plateau.

An excavation of the shelters carried out in 2014, uncovered a wealth of artifacts going back as far as 28,000 years ago. The artifacts include sacred objects and tools. The cave also has a 4,000 year-old lock of plaited human hair. Upon genetic analysis of the hair, it was established that the inhabitants of the caves were direct ancestors of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people, the current owners of the area.
https://www.thinkinghumanity.com/2022/0 ... mpany.html
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Canterbury suburbs were home to some of Britain's earliest humans, 600,000-year-old finds reveal
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-canterbur ... liest.html
by Tom Almeroth-Williams, University of Cambridge
Archaeological discoveries made on the outskirts of Canterbury, Kent (England) confirm the presence of early humans in southern Britain between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest known Paleolithic sites in northern Europe.

The breakthrough, involving controlled excavations and radiometric dating, comes a century after stone tool artifacts were first uncovered at the site.

The research, led by archaeologists at the University of Cambridge, confirms that Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthals, occupied southern Britain in this period (when it was still attached to Europe) and gives tantalizing evidence hinting at some of the earliest animal hide processing in European prehistory.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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New study solves long-standing mystery of what may have triggered ice age
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-long-stan ... e-age.html
by Daniel Stolte, University of Arizona

A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000 years ago come from, and how could they grow so quickly?

Understanding what drives Earth's glacial–interglacial cycles—the periodic advance and retreat of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere—is no easy feat, and researchers have devoted substantial effort to explaining the expansion and shrinking of large ice masses over thousands of years. The new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, proposes an explanation for the rapid expansion of the ice sheets that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the most recent ice age, and the findings could also apply to other glacial periods throughout Earth's history.

About 100,000 years ago, when mammoths roamed the Earth, the Northern Hemisphere climate plummeted into a deep freeze that allowed massive ice sheets to form. Over a period of about 10,000 years, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets covering much of today's Canada, Siberia and northern Europe.
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Fossils in the 'Cradle of Humankind' may be more than a million years older than previously thought
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-fossils-c ... years.html
by Brittany Steff, Purdue University
The earth doesn't give up its secrets easily—not even in the "Cradle of Humankind" in South Africa, where a wealth of fossils relating to human evolution have been found.

For decades, scientists have studied these fossils of early human ancestors and their long-lost relatives. Now, a dating method developed by a Purdue University geologist just pushed the age of some of these fossils found at the site of Sterkfontein Caves back more than a million years. This would make them older than Dinkinesh, also called Lucy, the world's most famous Australopithecus fossil.

The "Cradle of Humankind" is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Africa that comprises a variety of fossil-bearing cave deposits, including at Sterkfontein Caves. Sterkfontein was made famous by the discovery of the first adult Australopithecus, an ancient hominin, in 1936. Hominins includes humans and our ancestral relatives, but not the other great apes. Since then, hundreds of Australopithecus fossils have been found there, including the well-known Mrs. Ples, and the nearly complete skeleton known as Little Foot. Paleoanthropologists and other scientists have studied Sterkfontein and other cave sites in the Cradle of Humankind for decades to shed light on human and environmental evolution over the past 4 million years.

Darryl Granger, a professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences in Purdue University's College of Science, is one of those scientists, working as part of an international team. Granger specializes in dating geologic deposits, including those in caves. As a doctoral student, he devised a method for dating buried cave sediments that is now used by researchers all over the world. His previous work at Sterkfontein dated the Little Foot skeleton to about 3.7 million years old, but scientists are still debating the age of other fossils at the site.
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caltrek
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Re: Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Dogs Could Have Joined Humans More Than Once, Ancient Wolf DNA Has Revealed

by Michele Starr
June 30, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) The beloved pooch snoring on your couch or sticking a snoot under your arm at dinner time came from a much wilder origin. At some point, dogs diverged from gray wolves under the guidance of domestication, to become the diverse fuzzbutts that fill our homes and hearts with such joy today.

Exactly when and how this process took place, however, is something of a mystery. Now ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of our best non-human friends.

"Through this project we have greatly increased the number of sequenced ancient wolf genomes, allowing us to create a detailed picture of wolf ancestry over time, including around the time of dog origins," explained geneticist Anders Bergström of The Francis Crick Institute in the UK.
"By trying to place the dog piece into this picture, we found that dogs derive ancestry from at least two separate wolf populations – an eastern source that contributed to all dogs and a separate more westerly source that contributed to some dogs."

All domestic dogs today, from the teensiest chihuahua to the mightiest mastiff, belong to the same species, Canis familiaris. And all are descended from wolf ancestry shared with today's gray wolf (Canis lupus). But the timeline is murky, and hotly debated. Some scientists controversially suggest that the process began over 100,000 years ago.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/ice-age-w ... e-thought

Abstract from the study:
(Nature)The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived… Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.
Read more here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04824-9
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