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Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art -- 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain-- was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo...

Last Update: Thursday, September 1, 2005. 3:29pm (AEST) A reconstruction of the face of a young female Neanderthal who lived about 35,000 years ago in France. (AFP) Modern humans, Neanderthals shared earth for 1,000 years New evidence has emerged that Neanderthals co-existed with anatomically modern humans for at least 1,000 years in central France.The finding suggests Neanderthals came to a tragic and lingering end.Few chapters in the rise of Homo sapiens, as modern mankind is known, have triggered as much debate as the fate of the Neanderthals.Smaller and squatter than Homo sapiens but with larger brains, Neanderthals lived in Europe,...

Our ancestors colonised Europe and wiped out their Neanderthal cousins even faster than we thought, says a study published today. Argument has raged for years about whether our ancestors from Africa outsurvived, killed or bred with the Neanderthals, who were stronger, bulkier and shorter but had equally large brains. Now developments in radiocarbon dating suggest that many of the dates published over the past 40 years are likely to underestimate the true ages of the samples. Prof Paul Mellars, of the University of Cambridge, describes today in the journal Nature how better calibration of radiocarbon ages have led to revisions...

Published online: 22 February 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060220-11 Better bone dates reveal bad news for Neanderthals Modern humans took over Europe in just 5,000 years. Michael Hopkin These drawings from the Chauvet cave were originally dated to around 31,000 years ago. But a new analysis pushes that back four or five thousand years. © Nature, with permission from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Advances in the science of radiocarbon dating - a common, but oft-maligned palaeontological tool - have narrowed down the overlap between Europe's earliest modern humans and the Neanderthals that preceded them. Refinements to the technique, which...

Humans and Neanderthals, thought to have coexisted for 10,000 years across the whole of Europe, are more likely to have lived at the same time for only 6,000 years, the new study suggests. Scientists believe the two species could have lived side by side at specific sites for periods of only about 2,000 years, but Mellars claims they would have lived in competition at each site for only 1,000 years... Two new studies of stratified radiocarbon in the Cariaco Basin, near Venezuela, and of radiocarbon on fossilized coral formations in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific have given scientists a better...

LONDON — Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday. The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors. Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around...

Archaeologists have discovered fragments of one of the world's oldest sculptures, a lion-faced figurine estimated at 32,000 years old, from the dirt floor of a cave in southern Germany. The ivory figure, along with a tiny figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, marks the foundation of human artistry. Both were created by a Stone Age European culture that historians call Aurignacian. The Aurignacians appear to have been the first modern humans, with handicrafts, social customs and beliefs. They hunted reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoths and other animals. The Lion-Man sculpture, gradually re-assembled in workshops over decades after the fragments...

There's a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations. It's called the the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a really weird and mysterious place. The walls contain hundreds of animals—like the typical Paleolithic horses and bisons—but some of them are not supposed to be there, like lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas. A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may...

The cave, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site two years ago, was discovered in the south of France in 1994... Now, scientists have assembled more than 250 radiocarbon dates made from rock art samples, animal bones and the remains of charcoal used by humans... The newly synthesized data suggest the first period of human occupation lasted from 37,000 to 33,500 years ago. The second prehistoric occupation began 31,000 to 28,000 years ago and lasted for 2,000 to 3,000 years, the researchers wrote... The two groups, separated by millenniums, had no connection with each other, they said. The first round of...

...In 1997, Pyros was brought from Slovenia to this mountain range on the Spanish-French border to replenish a brown bear population on the verge of extinction. And boy did he ever get the job done. About three-quarters of the nearly 40 bears now roaming the Pyrenees are his offspring, say French and Spanish conservation officials. Pyros stands nearly 7 feet tall on his hind legs and weighs more than 500 pounds. His amorousness has made him a living legend. The lumbering Lothario has mated with at least eight different females, including some of his own offspring... 2012 scientific paper in...

So how many of you have had a bear climbed up into your treestand? If you did encounter such occasions, how did you all reacted? This brave hunter had a bear climbed up his stand while he was video recording this, see his reaction here.

A Boy Scout troop leader was mauled by a bear after he and three Scouts stumbled upon the animal in northern New Jersey on Sunday, the Rockaway Township Police Department said. The three Scouts accompanying him were unharmed, officials said. The Boy Scout leader, Christopher Petronino, took the three Scouts to a cave at Split Rock Reservoir in Morris County, which is about 25 miles west of New York City. The 50-year-old had known about the cave since the 1980s but had never witnessed a bear using it before, according to CNN affiliate WCBS. When Petronino entered the cave Sunday...

'He said it was one of the best days of his presidency': Bear Grylls reveals how Obama ate raw salmon and discussed drinking urine while 50 Secret Service agents watched, ahead of Alaska premiere They shared tea brewed from berries, ate bear-gnawed bloody salmon, talked about drinking urine and discussed climate change - all while snipers kept watch from the mountains and the official food taster looked on nervously. **SNIP** Obama, 54, threw himself into the once-in-a-lifetime experience with considerable gusto, shrugging off the food taster, sharing Gryll's water bottle, lighting fires and eating catkin berries. The TV host revealed...

On a call this morning down at Courthouse Pier and this little girl walks up to me. She was about 3/4 holding a teddy bear. I heard her mother tell the little girl to tell me. I turned and asked what I could do for her and she hands me her bear. I tried to give it back but she refused. She looked up at me and said it was to keep me safe. I said thank you while trying to keep my voice from cracking. I put the bear on my passenger seat for her to see. Her mother...

The Drudge Report had sparked an internet frenzy after claiming Oscar-tipped actor is sexually assaulted in the brutal western Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox has been forced to deny internet reports that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is raped by a bear in the Oscar-tipped Alejandro González Iñárritu western The Revenant. News aggregator The Drudge Report posted an article claiming that the film features “a shocking scene of a wild bear raping Leo DiCaprio”, and said the segue had caused controversy at early screenings. “The bear flips Leo over and thrusts and thrusts during the explicit mauling,” continues the article. “He is...

The Russian Bear is Cutting off the Serpent's Head Here:Many Equations are Going to Change!by Hala Homsi Beware the bear, namely the "Russian bear". For those who know Russian affairs, "when it rises up, it doesn't just shake the inside of the house, but the entire world," president of the Open University: Dialogue of Civilizations in Moscow, member of the Russian Academy of Education and Professor of Western Thought and Philosophy of Civilizations at Lebanese University, Dr Suheil Farh, tells an-Nahar. For the Russian bear to rise up finally and be active militarily in Syria in the air and on...

Was an 85-Year-Old woman a victim of Disneyitis?  She was born two years after the release of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. She, much like Timothy Treadwell, appears to be a victim of severe anthropomorphism (thinking of animals as humans).  In this case, she was feeding several black bears.  One of them broke into her house and killed her.  From missoulian.com: KALISPELL - The elderly woman attacked by a black bear inside her home west of Kalispell over the weekend has died from injuries she sustained in the incident. The Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks personel stated the problem...

A Montana bow hunter is recovering after he survived a grizzly bear mauling by remembering a tip from his grandmother and shoving his arm down the animal’s throat. Chase Dellwo, 26, was hunting with his brother northwest of the town of Choteau on Saturday when he came face-to-face with a 350- to 400-pound male grizzly, the Great Falls Tribune reported

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A homeless man fashioned a machete-like blade to a groomed tree branch and speared a hungry black bear cub that was sniffing for food Friday morning at an illegal camp site in Anchorage. The cub, estimated to be about a year and a half old, and an older bear thought to be its mother had been at the camp site for days stealing food, authorities said. On Friday morning, the cub was seen outside a tent. David Tandler, 49, told officers he was worried it would harm children inside the tent, Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman Beth...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A homeless man fashioned a machete-like blade to a groomed tree branch and speared a hungry black bear cub that was sniffing for food Friday morning at an illegal camp site in Anchorage. The cub, estimated to be about a year and a half old, and an older bear thought to be its mother had been at the camp site for days stealing food, authorities said.