Human Prehistory (3.3 million years BC – 3500 BC)

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Women Hunt in Most Foraging Societies, Using Their Own Tools and Strategies
by Carly Cassella
June 29, 2023

Introduction:

( Science Alert) Hunter-gatherer roles in human society are not nearly as gendered as anthropologists and archaeologists have traditionally believed, with narratives of 'man the hunter' and 'woman the gatherer' crumbling in the face of new evidence.

In recent years, ancient sites around the world strongly suggest that women have been fishing, hunting big game, and going to war alongside men for many millennia.

In fact, they still are.

Despite what modern gender stereotypes would have you believe, a new analysis of a broad range of foraging societies within the past century has revealed a number of their hunters were female.

The data review, led by Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University, considers 63 modern foraging societies, including those in the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Oceanic region. Close to 80 percent of those societies show evidence of female hunting in ethnographic reports from the past 100 years

Read more of the Science Alert article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/women-hun ... trategies

Read a presentation of the study in PLOS ONE here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti ... ne.0287101


World map of the locations of 63 different foraging societies analyzed.
The map is in the public domain and can be attributed to Petr Dlouhy, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... ue_sea.svg.

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Tiny Extinct Penguin Was One Of The Smallest To Ever Walk The Earth
by Eleanor Higgs
July 7, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) New Zealand is currently home to three of the world’s penguin species, including the smallest living penguin: the little penguin. A recent discovery of two fossilized skulls has found a potentially even smaller penguin species that might have been the ancestor to those living today. Meet Eudyptula wilsonae.

The new fossil specimens were found in the Tangahoe Formation in the south of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. The two fossil skulls are extremely similar to the skulls of living little blue penguins but are slightly narrower. While the lack of other bones makes it hard to judge the complete size, the tiny new penguin species may have been around the same size as a little penguin. Living little penguins are around 30 centimeters tall (11.8 inches) and weigh a maximum of 1.5 kilograms ( 3.3 pounds).

New Zealand is also home to some of the largest penguin species to ever walk the Earth, some the size of a human. Earlier this year two new species of giant ancient penguins were discovered that tipped the scales in the other direction to E. wilsonae. The largest, Kumimanu fordycei, weighed in at 154 kilograms (340 pounds), beating the previous whopper, Kumimanu biceae, which is thought to have weighed around 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

The new species has been named Wilson's little penguin (Eudyptula wilsonae), after the ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson who was a conservationist and seabird researcher and cofounder of an NGO that works to conserve seaboard habitats on the west coast of New Zealand.

The team thinks the skulls are around 3 million years old and could provide more important information about how the penguins survived in seas that were much warmer than they are today.

Read more of the IFL Science article here: https://www.iflscience.com/tiny-extinc ... rth-69721

For a somewhat technical discussion of the subject penguins as found in the Journal of Paleantology: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journal ... EF7DBC47F

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‘Giant’ 300,000-year-old handaxes unearthed in Kent

Thu 6 Jul 2023 08.22 BST

Researchers have discovered some of the largest early prehistoric stone tools in Britain, including a foot-long handaxe almost too big to be handled.

The excavations, which took place in Kent, revealed prehistoric artefacts in deep ice age sediments preserved on a hillside above Medway Valley.

The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East, discovered 800 stone artefacts, thought to be more than 300,000 years old, buried in material that filled a sinkhole and ancient river channel.

Two large flint knives described as giant handaxes were among the discoveries.

Handaxes are stone artefacts that have been chipped, or knapped, on both sides to produce a symmetrical shape with a long cutting edge.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... rthed-kent



Photograph: UCL Archaeology South-East/PA

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Early humans were weapon woodwork experts, study finds
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-early-hum ... perts.html
by University of Reading

A 300,000-year-old hunting weapon has shone a new light on early humans as woodworking masters, according to a new study.

State-of-the-art analysis of a double-pointed wooden throwing stick, found in Schöningen in Germany three decades ago, shows it was scraped, seasoned and sanded before being used to kill animals. The research indicates early humans' woodworking techniques were more developed and sophisticated than previously understood.

The findings, published today in PLOS ONE, also suggest the creation of lightweight weapons may have enabled group hunts of medium and small animals. The use of throwing sticks as hunting aids could have involved the entire community, including children.

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Remains found in China may belong to previously unknown human lineage

Scientists in eastern China examined a jawbone, fragments of a skull and various foot bones from a hominin that lived approximately 300,000 years ago; Findings suggest this particular lineage bears a closer resemblance to Homo sapiens, or modern-day humans

https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science ... /ryjn4f0j3

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How the Oldest Ever Human Bones Were Found Buried In A Moroccan Cave
by Laura Simmons
August 10, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) You can find all manner of weird and wonderful stuff in caves. From softball-sized spiders to ancient water, and even the remnants of Neanderthal interior design, some of our planet’s greatest treasures have been found in its hidden hollows. It was in a cave in Morocco that archaeologists made a discovery that changed our view of the very origins of our species: the oldest ever human fossils.

The find was made at the Jebel Irhoud site in western Morocco, approximately 50 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of the port city of Safi. It’s a site that’s been known to archaeologists since the 1960s, yielding a rich offering of ancient stone tools, bones, and other artifacts.

An excavation project that began in 2004 eventually led to the discovery of 16 new Homo sapiens fossils, including teeth, skulls, and long bones from at least five individuals. Buried within the same deposits were animal bones, mostly from gazelle, and tools dating back to the Middle Stone Age.

Rarely for a site of this age on the African continent, evidence of heating on many of the flint artifacts uncovered near the human fossils meant the scientists were able to use a sophisticated technique called thermoluminescence dating, allowing them to establish a clear chronology for the finds, as well as taking a fresh look at some fossils from early digs at the site.

Further extract:

“This is much older than anything else in Africa that we could relate to our species,” team lead Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told IFLScience when the findings were published in 2017. “In light of this new date – at 300,000 years old – it convinced us that this material that we present is the very root of our species. The oldest Homo sapiens ever found in Africa.”

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-old ... ave-70200

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Ancient metal cauldrons give us clues about what people ate in the Bronze Age
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-ancient-m ... eople.html
by Cell Press
Archaeologists have long been drawing conclusions about how ancient tools were used by the people who crafted them based on written records and context clues. But with dietary practices, they have had to make assumptions about what was eaten and how it was prepared.

A new study published in the journal iScience on August 18 analyzed protein residues from ancient cooking cauldrons and found that the people of Caucasus ate deer, sheep, goats, and members of the cow family during the Maykop period (3700–2900 BCE).

"It's really exciting to get an idea of what people were making in these cauldrons so long ago," says Shevan Wilkin of the University of Zurich. "This is the first evidence we have of preserved proteins of a feast—it's a big cauldron. They were obviously making large meals, not just for individual families."

Scientists have known that the fats preserved in ancient pottery and the proteins from dental calculus—the hard mineralized plaque deposits on the teeth—contain traces of the proteins ancient people consumed during their lives.

Now, this study combines protein analysis with archaeology to explore specific details about the meals cooked in these particular vessels. Many metal alloys have antimicrobial properties, which is why the proteins have been preserved so well on the cauldrons. The microbes in dirt that would normally degrade proteins on surfaces such as ceramic and stone are held at bay on metal alloys.

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How Neanderthals Managed To Take Down Giant Elephants 125,000 Years Ago
by Stephen Luntz
August 26, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Despite its name, the mammoth was not the largest Pleistocene land animal. That status goes to its relative, the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), which, due to weighing up to 13 tonnes, was twice the size of a modern African elephant and lived across Asia and Europe until around 100,000 years ago. Anthropologists have sought evidence that Neanderthals hunted Palaeoloxodon, maybe even to extinction, but evidence has been ambiguous until a recent discovery that could change the way we envisage our nearest extinct relatives’ social structures.

For around 700,000 years, Palaeoloxodon is thought to have survived ice ages in southern Europe and the Middle East, expanding its range into central Europe during interglacials. Their enormous size means the adults at least were probably more threatened by lack of food than by predators, until they ran into one that could wield weapons and work in teams.

Although Neanderthals’ toolmaking skills gave them the capacity to take on Palaeoloxodon, that alone doesn’t prove they did. Fighting a rampaging beast that size would have been a terrifying experience, even with spears, and might not have been worth it if most of the meat would need to be left behind. However, in a recent study, a team led by Professor Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center have pointed to abundant cutmarks on bones as proof elephant was part of the Neanderthal diet.

The evidence comes from the Neumark-Nord 1 site near Halle, Germany, where 3,122 bones, tusks, and teeth – thought to come from more than 70 straight-tusked elephants – have been found, dating to around 125,000 years ago. Gaudzinski-Windheuser and co-authors found signs of cutmarks on many of these bones that could only come from stone tools being used to slice off meat.

Although scavenging on elephants that died in other ways might leave the same marks as butchering those that had been hunted, the concentration of so many bones in one place makes that unlikely.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/how-neande ... ago-70371