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

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Population collapse almost wiped out human ancestors, say scientists

Thu 31 Aug 2023 19.00 BST

Early human ancestors came close to eradication in a severe evolutionary bottleneck between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, according to scientists.

A genomics analysis of more than 3,000 living people suggested that our ancestors’ total population plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals for about 117,000 years. Scientists believe that an extreme climate event could have led to the bottleneck that came close to wiping out our ancestral line.

“The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction,” said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research.

However, Manzi and his colleagues believe that the existential pressures of the bottleneck could have triggered the emergence of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, which some believe is the shared ancestor of modern humans and our cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago.

“It was lucky [that we survived], but … we know from evolutionary biology that the emergence of a new species can happen in small, isolated populations,” said Manzi.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... scientists

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World's oldest wooden structure found in Zambia

Archaeologists say the structure dates back 476,000 years. It was intentionally shaped with wooden tools to create stable joints, attesting to the cognitive skills of Homo sapiens' forebears.

09/20/2023

Archaeologists working near Zambia's Kalambo Falls say they have unearthed the world's oldest wooden structure.

Embedded in clay and further preserved by a high water table, scientists say the structure, made from the logs of a large-fruited willow tree, was intentionally created roughly 476,000 years ago.

The well-preserved specimen was made before the advent of Homo sapiens, which archaeologists say points to a vastly higher cognitive ability than has been previously ascribed to such ancient ancestors.

The oldest wooden structure known before the announcement of the Zambia find was just 9,000 years old. The oldest known wooden artifact, discovered in Israel, is a 780,000-year-old fragment of plank.

https://www.dw.com/en/worlds-oldest-woo ... a-66878895

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with this in mind I wouldn't be shocked to read in the future of the discovery of a city much older then the current oldest.

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Neanderthals hunted dangerous cave lions, study shows
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-neanderth ... lions.html
by University of Reading

Neanderthals hunted cave lions and used the skin of this dangerous carnivore, a new study has shown for the first time.

Excavations at Einhornhöhle (Unicorn Cave) in the Harz Mountains (Lower Saxony, Germany) in 2019 uncovered abundant Ice Age animals, among which were a few bones of the extinct cave lion. The bones were discovered in a cave gallery approximately 30 meters from the now-collapsed entrance in a layer that dates to more than 200,000 years ago.

The new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, outlines how a research team detected a toe bone with a cut mark among the remains of the cave lion. This led to the team determining that Neanderthals removed the lion's pelt with the claws attached, indicating that they used the skin for their own purposes.

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New study shows ancient Europe was not all forest, half was covered in grassland
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-ancient-e ... sland.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of ecologists, biologists, geographers, geologists and Earth scientists from across Europe, working with a colleague from the U.K. and another from Canada, has found evidence suggesting that Europe was not covered heavily by forest during the Last Interglacial period, as many have suggested, but was instead half grassland. In their project, published in the journal Science Advances, the group studied pollen samples collected over many years at dig sites across Europe.

As the researchers note, there are many opinions regarding the European landscape during the Last Interglacial period 116,000 to 129,000 years ago—the period just before modern humans arrived on the scene. Many have suggested that virtually the entirety of the continent was covered by thick forests.

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Paleolithic humans may have understood the properties of rocks for making stone tools
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-paleolith ... stone.html
by Nagoya University

A research group led by the Nagoya University Museum and Graduate School of Environmental Studies in Japan has clarified differences in the physical characteristics of rocks used by early humans during the Paleolithic. They found that humans selected rock for a variety of reasons and not just because of how easy it was to break off. This suggests that early humans had the technical skill to discern the best rock for the tool.

The researchers have published the results in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.

As Homo sapiens moved from Africa to Eurasia, they used stone tools made of rocks, such as obsidian and flint, to cut, slice, and craft ranged weapons. Because of the significant role they played in their culture, understanding how early humans made stone tools is important to archaeologists.

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Unusual Hand Ax Discovered in Saudi Arabia
November 30, 2023

Introduction:

(Archaeology) ALULA, SAUDI ARABIA—A 20-inch-long hand ax sharpened on two edges was discovered on the surface of a sand dune in northwestern Saudi Arabia, according to a Live Science report. Excavation of the area uncovered an additional 13 smaller hand axes. The long, narrow tool is nearly four inches wide and about two inches thick. Researchers led by archaeologist Ömer Can Aksoy and Giulia Edmond of the Royal Commission for AlUla said that the basalt ax is easily held with two hands, but it is unclear how it might have been used for cutting or chopping. Aksoy explained that other tools found in the area may be about 200,000 years old, based upon an assessment of their form and characteristics, but the hand ax has not yet been dated.

Read more here: https://www.archaeology.org/news/11924 ... bia-tool

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Ancient Bones Reveal
Hominins Hunted Beavers At Least 400,000 Years Ago
by Enrico de Lazaro
November 29, 2023

Introduction:

(Sci.News) Archaeologists from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie and Leiden University say they have found cut marks on the bones of two beaver species from the 400,000-year-old hominin open air site of Bilzingsleben in central Germany. Their results demonstrate a greater diversity of prey choice by Middle Pleistocene hominins than commonly acknowledged, and a much deeper history of broad-spectrum subsistence than commonly assumed, already visible in prey choices 400,000 years ago.

“A solid understanding of early hominin diets, key for tracking human behavioral and cognitive evolution, is hampered by the fact that the archaeological record is strongly biased towards the remains of large ungulates, while it is well-established that a reliance on game meat alone would not have provided a sufficient subsistence base given human dietary needs,” said study’s first author Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and her colleagues.

“Despite various biases, recent studies documented a greater diversity in hominin food choices, including regular exploitation of a variety of small animals, plant and aquatic foods, not only for the early modern human lineage in Africa, but also for Neanderthals, be it mainly from the southern parts of their range.”

“Most of that evidence dates respectively to the Middle Stone Age of Africa and to the later Middle Paleolithic in Europe, from about 125,000 years ago onwards,” they noted.

“Far less is still known about the subsistence base of the Middle Pleistocene predecessors of both lineages, with that record still strongly suggestive of a narrow, large- and medium-sized ungulates focused subsistence base.”

Read more of the Sci.News article here: https://www.sci.news/archaeology/homin ... 493.html

For a presentation of research results as published in the journal Scientific Reports . https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-46956-6

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War in The Time Of Neanderthals: How Our Species Battled For Supremacy For Over 100,000 Years
Nicholas R. Longrich
December 16, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis – the Neanderthals. They weren’t our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel.

Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become. It’s tempting to see them in idyllic terms, living peacefully with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. If so, maybe humanity’s ills – especially our territoriality, violence, wars – aren’t innate, but modern inventions.

Biology and paleontology paint a darker picture. Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were likely skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivalled only by modern humans.

Top predators

Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. These predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Neanderthals faced the same problem; if other species didn’t control their numbers, conflict would have.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/war-in-the- ... rs-72048

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North America's first people may have arrived by sea ice highway as early as 24,000 years ago
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-north-ame ... a-ice.html
by Liza Lester, American Geophysical Union

One of the hottest debates in archaeology is how and when humans first arrived in North America. Archaeologists have traditionally argued that people walked through an ice-free corridor that briefly opened between ice sheets an estimated 13,000 years ago.

But a growing number of archaeological and genetic finds—including human footprints in New Mexico dated to around 23,000 years old—suggests that people made their way onto the continent much earlier. These early Americans likely traveled along the Pacific coastline from Beringia, the land bridge between Asia and North America that emerged during the last glacial maximum when ice sheets bound up large amounts of water causing sea levels to fall.