Free Republic

Some people in the Brazilian Amazon are very distant relations of indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians, two groups of scientists who conducted detailed genetic analyses reported Tuesday. But the researchers disagree on the source of that ancestry. The connection is ancient, all agree, and attributable to Eurasian migrants to the Americas who had some Australasian ancestry, the scientists said. But one group said the evidence is clear that two different populations came from Siberia to settle the Americas 15,000 or more years ago. The other scientific team says there was only one founding population from which all indigenous...

Researchers found four teeth in the Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha'ayin (not far from Tel Aviv), and they were astonished at test results that conclude the fossils to be some 400,000-years-old. The significance of this is that it's possible that the origin of prehistoric man is in Israel, and not in East Africa. And an additional surprise is that prehistoric man was mainly vegetarian and not carnivorous. The cave is 10 meters deep and its surface area is approximately 300 square meters. Researchers have been sifting through it for some 15 years to discover remains from prehistoric times. The ancient...

For centuries, archaeologists have reconstructed the early history of Europe by digging up ancient settlements and examining the items that their inhabitants left behind. More recently, researchers have been scrutinizing something even more revealing than pots, chariots and swords: DNA. On Wednesday in the journal Nature, two teams of scientists — one based at the University of Copenhagen and one based at Harvard University — presented the largest studies to date of ancient European DNA, extracted from 170 skeletons found in countries from Spain to Russia. Both studies indicate that today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe...

A new species of ancient human has been unearthed in the Afar region of Ethiopia, scientists report. Researchers discovered jaw bones and teeth, which date to between 3.3m and 3.5m years old. It means this new hominin was alive at the same time as several other early human species, suggesting our family tree is more complicated than was thought. The study is published in the journal Nature. The new species has been called Australopithecus deyiremeda, which means "close relative" in the language spoken by the Afar people. The ancient remains are thought to belong to four individuals, who would have...

Centre for Experimental Archaeology on Belfield campus is only one of its kind in the world.Brendan O’Neill at work on his early medieval round house on the UCD campus. How did our ancestors create the world they lived in? How did they survive without the modern accoutrements that make our lives easy? The question is at the heart of archaeology and forms the basis of a unique project in a quiet corner of University College Dublin’s sprawling Belfield campus. UCD is the only university in the world with a centre for experimental archaeology. It is not made of bricks and...

Unearthed, the prince of Stonehenge By Roger Highfield (Filed: 21/08/2002) A prehistoric prince with gold ear-rings has been found near Stonehenge a few yards away from the richest early Bronze Age burial in Britain. Earlier this year, archaeologists found an aristocratic warrior, also with gold ear-rings, on Salisbury Plain and speculated that he may have been an ancient king of Stonehenge. The body was laid to rest 4,300 years ago during the construction of the monument, along with stone arrow heads and slate wristguards that protected the arm from the recoil of the bow. Archaeologists named him the Amesbury Archer....

When Science is Betrayed – and What Lessons We Should Learn By: Msgr. Charles PopeThere is a great reverence for science in our culture. On the one hand, rightly so. Science has made enormous strides that have changed life as we know it. Profound discoveries have eradicated diseases, improved health, increased the world’s food supply, led to a computer revolution, drawn us higher into outer space and deeper into inner space, revealed hidden mysteries of nature, and produced technologies unimaginable to even our recent ancestors.On the other hand, the reverence of science has tipped perhaps too far in the direction of a...

eborah Haarsma, the Director of BioLogos, is professor of Astronomy, and her husband, Loren Haarsma, teaches Physics at Calvin College in Michigan. The biology department of Calvin College issued this statement on May 7, 2010: "We teach evolutionary theory as the best scientific explanation for the dynamic diversity of life on Earth. . . . We teach biology from an evolutionary paradigm." Neither Deborah nor Loren are biologists, though biologists serve on the BioLogos team. Neither are anthropologists, and as far as I can discover, no anthropologists serve on the BioLogos team. That is unfortunate since anthropology has much to...

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals. This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull. However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics. Yesterday...

Pictograph Photo Gallery A pictograph is a drawing or painting that is created on a rock. It is not "carved" into the rock - that would be a "petroglyph." This is a series of photographs of pictographs from around the world. There are many links to other galleries.

DNA analysis has debunked the longstanding theory that the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established Europe's first advanced Bronze Age culture, were from Africa. The Minoan civilisation arose on the Mediterranean island of Crete in approximately the 27th century BC and flourished for 12 centuries until the 15th century BC. But the culture was lost until British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans unearthed its remains on Crete in 1900, where he found vestiges of a civilisation he believed was formed by refugees from northern Egypt. Modern archaeologists have cast doubt on that version of events, and now DNA tests of...

In the Altay Mountains of southern Siberia, some 200 miles from where Russia touches Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, nestled under a rock face about 30 yards above a little river called the Anuy, there is a cave called Denisova. It has long attracted visitors. The name comes from that of a hermit, Denis, who is said to have lived there in the 18th century. Long before that, Neolithic and later Turkic pastoralists took shelter in the cave, gathering their herds around them to ride out the Siberian winters. Thanks to them, the archaeologists who work in Denisova today, surrounded by...

Fossilized feces offer new evidence that Neanderthals ate both meat and plants. Chemical analysis confirmed the oldest-known ancient human fecal matter, according to a study published yesterday (June 25) in PLOS ONE. Previous isotope studies of bones suggested Neanderthals were primarily meat-eaters. Analyses of tartar from their teeth have indicated they may have also eaten plants, although some researchers noted that these plant remains could be traces from the stomach contents of herbivore prey. Stool, however, is "the perfect evidence because you’re sure it was consumed," study author Ainara Sistiaga from the University of La Laguna in Spain told BBC...

...The Pope has rejected the idea of same-sex marriage as an “anthropological regression” and stressed that when it comes to adoption, “every person needs a male father and a female mother.” Pope Francis explained his views on these hot-button issues in his book, On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century, which he co-wrote with Rabbi Abraham Skorka in 2010 and which was republished after the then-Argentine cardinal was elected to the papacy in March 2013. The book is a dialogue between Skorka and the future Pope and includes a chapter on...

It’s not much of a stretch to believe that getting stoned in the Stone Age was as popular among prehistoric Europeans as it is now. However, new evidence suggests that marijuana, mushrooms, alcohol and other mood-altering substances were used for more than zonking with Zonk – they played crucial roles in spiritual practices, especially burial rituals and communications with the after-world.Elisa Guerra-Doce of the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain has documented the cultural contexts in which forms of alcohol and drugs were used in prehistoric Europe. The forms she looked for were fossilized leaves and seeds of psychoactive plants, residues...

Look around the Amazon rainforest today and it’s hard to imagine it filled with people. But in recent decades, archaeologists have started to find evidence that before Columbus’s arrival, the region was dotted with towns and perhaps even cities. The extent of human settlement in the Amazon remains hotly debated, partly because huge swaths of the 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest remain unstudied by archaeologists. Now, researchers have built a model predicting where signs of pre-Columbian agriculture are most likely to be found, a tool they hope will help guide future archaeological work in the region. In many ways, archaeology in the Amazon...

Full Title: Did Beer create modern society? Ancient man developed agriculture to brew alcohol and not to bake bread, claims scientist Some scientists claim beer - not bread - is the reason early man adopted a society based on farming around 10,000 years ago, a key moment in our evolution. The cultivation of grain saw the transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a widely-accepted theory is that the crops were used to bake bread, but experts claim it was the prospect of a brew that drove the desire to settle down and start a farm.

A high-quality genome sequence obtained from a female Neanderthal toe bone reveals that the individual’s parents were close relatives and that such inbreeding was prevalent among her recent ancestors, according to a paper published today (December 18) in Nature. But the sequence also reveals that interbreeding occurred between Neanderthals and other hominin groups, including early modern humans. “Did humans evolve like a constantly branching tree? A lot of people think so,” said Milford Wolpoff, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “But there’s also been this thread of thought, by some...

The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains were used for bread, which today represents a basic staple. But some scientists argue that it wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry. Beer has plenty to recommend it over bread. First, and most obviously, it is pleasant to drink. “Beer had all the same nutrients as bread, and it had one additional advantage,” argues Solomon...

An artist's interpretation of the hominins that lived near the Sima de los Huesos cave in Spain. Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries. In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years. The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a...