Posted on 01/20/2003 11:04:12 AM PST by Junior
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Comfortable, coddled 21st century humans, meet Ice Age Neanderthal.
The first complete skeleton of a Neanderthal, the prehistoric people who became extinct about 30,000 years ago, graces an American Museum of Natural History exhibition in New York on the mysteries of human origins. It features fossils and artifacts up to a million years old dug up in caves at two sites in northern Spain.
"This really blew me away, I have to say," said Ian Tattersall, co-curator of "The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca" exhibition which opened last week and runs through April 13.
"I really had never met a Neanderthal before but I think I have now," Tattersall said, standing in front of the 5-foot-4-inch (1.6-meter) adult male skeleton, which is adjacent to a replica of a modern male human skeleton with a description of the differences between the two.
The reproduction of the Neanderthal skeleton is displayed in the exhibition's final section about hominids that lived in Europe in the last 100,000 years. Curators said the skeleton was included to provide visitors more context for the exhibit. It was reproduced from fossil bones from several specimens found in Germany, France, Italy, Israel, Belgium and Iraq.
The Neanderthals inhabited Europe for more than 150,000 years -- longer than the modern human species has existed. The Neanderthals were a close relative of the hominids from the Spanish site, ancestral primates who walked on two legs.
Evidence of hominids was found at one of the Atapuerca sites, Sima de Los Huesos (Pit of the Bones). This site and a second site in a nearby complex of caves, Gran Dolina, are 9 miles east of the city of Burgos. Home to a medieval Gothic cathedral, Burgos is 130 miles north of the Spain's capital Madrid.
CANNIBALISM
The exhibit describes how Gran Dolina revealed a place once occupied by an 800,000-year-old species preserved in the oldest well-dated Western European hominid fossils. These led scientists to declare in 1997 a new species, Homo antecessor.
Tools and fossilized bones unearthed by archeologists at Gran Dolina also suggested the first case of documented human cannibalism, curators said.
And an apparently intentional accumulation of bones, both hominid and animal, at the Pit of Bones suggests some kind of ceremonial activity, curators said, but the exact nature is a mystery. They also speculated that a carefully shaped quartzite hand ax found there and on public exhibit for the first time at the museum, might have been used in mortuary practices.
Museum President Ellen Futter said at the exhibition's media preview that together, the hominid fossils and the ax "offer remarkably early evidence of humanity's capacity for gruesomely horrific behavior on the one hand as well as exceptional creativity on the other. Mankind at its very worst and very best."
Curator Tattersall explained that the evidence of cannibalism was "inferential" because marks on the hominid bones showed they were defleshed, cut and dismembered in exactly the same way as the animal bones.
"If the animal bones were food refuse, then maybe the human bones were as well," Tattersall said.
PIT OF BONES
The findings at Gran Dolina and Sima de los Huesos, were the fruits of 25 years work and presented to the scientific community in papers published five years ago, curators said. Some of the fossils and artifacts have been displayed in Burgos, but the new exhibition at the world-famous New York museum has brought them to a wider audience of visitors.
Work at the sites continues and the curators said there was more to find out about Homo antecessor in the deeper levels of Gran Dolina.
"The sites at Atapuerca are incredibly exciting to work on, as we continue to make new discoveries about our predecessors and how they may have lived," said exhibition co-curator Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro.
The museum exhibit allows the visitor to walk through time, starting with "Lucy" -- among the best known of all hominids who lived in east Africa 3 million years ago -- and on to a history of the Caves of Atapuerca and the excavations there.
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Gods |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. A link back here from DC turned up during a search for something else. |
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