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A routine construction dig has turned up a fossil skull that is giving scientists a better glimpse inside the head of our ancient predecessor, Homo erectus. According to a report published today in the journal Science, the find suggests that the H. erectus population that occupied the island of Java was isolated from other Asian populations and probably made only minimal genetic contributions to the ancestry of modern humans. So far, more than 20 hominid skull fossils have been found at sites in Java. The latest, dubbed Sm 4 (see image), was recovered from the bed of the Solo River...

Most recent dating places one wave of human dispersal out of Africa into southeastern Spain at almost one million years ago. Using state-of-the-art dating methodologies, a team of scientists have obtained or confirmed a date range between .9 and .85 Mya (million years ago) as a time when a species of Old World monkey (Theropithecus) and an early species of human occupied the cave site of Cueva Victoria in southeastern Spain. It is a location not far from where many scientists have hypothesized that humans may have crossed over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at...

Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean islands thousands of years earlier than previously thought. This prehistoric seafaring could shed light on the mental capabilities of these lost relatives of modern humans, researchers say. Scientists had thought the Mediterranean islands were first settled about 9,000 years ago by Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers and shepherds... For instance, obsidian from the Aegean island of Melos was uncovered at the mainland Greek coastal site of Franchthi cave in layers that were about 11,000 years old, while excavations on the southern coast of Cyprus...

Modern science has held that islands such as Cypress and Crete were first inhabited by seafaring humans approximately 9,000 years ago by agriculturists from the late Neolithic period. Simmons writes that research over the past 20 years has cast doubt on that assumption however and suggests that it might be time to rewrite the history books. He cites evidence such as pieces of obsidian found in a cave in mainland Greece that were found to have come from Melos, an island in the Aegean Sea and were dated at 11,000 years ago as well as artifacts from recent digs on...

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers. Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. Now, George Ferentinos of...

Archaeologists on the island of Crete have discovered what may be evidence of one of the world's first sea voyages by human ancestors, the Greek Culture Ministry said Monday A ministry statement said experts from Greece and the U.S. have found rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old close to shelters on the island's south coast. Crete has been separated from the mainland for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have traveled there by sea (a distance of at least 40 miles). That would upset the current view that...

<p>Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.</p> <p>That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.</p>

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species -- perhaps Homo erectus -- had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser...

Imagine a group of Homo erectus, the earliest members of our family genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that island, but ideas about...

Stone man. This partial skull of a 500,000-year-old human was found in a slab of travertine from a quarry like this one in Turkey.Credit: John Kappelman/University of Texas, Austin Workers at a travertine factory near Denizli, Turkey, were startled recently when they sawed a block of the limestone for tiles and discovered part of a human skull. Now, it appears they unwittingly exposed fossilized remains of a long-sought species of human that lived 500,000 years ago, researchers say. Although only four skull fragments were found, the fossil also reveals the earliest case of tuberculosis. The Middle East has long been...

An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. "The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life," said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of...

While the author of this webpage does not believe that Homo Erectus is responsible for the surface lithics found in the Calico Mountains of California, he does believe the presence of these lithics is quite important in establishing the fact that man was on this continent eons before those of the Clovis school are willing to admit. Once the door is thrown open to an earlier arrival date for man on this continent, then serious study will hopefully begin on the many early man sites to be found in both North and South America, but currently ignored because of their...

Chinese paleontologists discovered the two incisors in 1965 and the relatively simple stone tools in 1973 in the Yuanmou Basin... and might be from the species Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of humans that may have been the first human to spread beyond Africa about 1.8 million years ago. Scientists have gotten mixed results for the age of the site because there were no volcanic crystals in the soils for reliable radiometric dating. Lacking solid dates, researchers thought until a decade ago that the earliest humans didn't reach Asia until 1 million years ago. But a series of dates for...

Erectus AhoyPrehistoric seafaring floats into view Bruce Bower As the sun edged above the horizon on Jan. 31, 2000, a dozen men boarded a bamboo raft off the east coast of the Indonesian island of Bali. Each gripped a wooden paddle and, in unison, deftly stroked the nearly 40-foot-long craft into the open sea. Their destination: the Stone Age, by way of a roughly 18-mile crossing to the neighboring island of Lombok. Project director Robert G. Bednarik, one of the assembled paddlers, knew that a challenging trip lay ahead, even discounting any time travel. Local fishing crews had told him...

October 13, 2003 Stranger in a New Land Stunning finds in the Republic of Georgia upend long-standing ideas about the first hominids to journey out of Africa By Kate Wong We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: "Little Gidding" In an age of spacecraft and deep-sea submersibles, we take it for granted that humans are intrepid explorers. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, the propensity to colonize is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our...

THE discovery of human footprints, preserved by volcanic ash, have put back the likely date that the American continent was colonised by Man by almost 30,000 years, British scientists say. The prints, found by the scientists at the edge of a lake in Mexico, are thought to be about 40,000 years old. Their discovery upsets the widely accepted theory that Man first reached America across a land bridge, now covered by the Bering Sea, 11,500 years ago. Casts of the footprints reveal that a community of Homo sapiens lived in the Valsequillo Basin, near Puebla in central Mexico. Their feet...

Mata Menge, however, produced a small number of stone tools, including some made of nonlocal chert, as well as remains of large stegodon, crocodile, giant rat, freshwater molluscs, and plants... Morwood dated the sites using a technique that analyzes individual zircon crystals from volcanic deposits. A sample from Tangi Talo, taken near a pygmy stegodon tusk and giant tortoise shell fragments, yielded a date of about 900,000 years ago. At Mata Menge, a sample from just beneath the artifact-bearing level dated to about 880,000 years ago, while another, taken above in situ artifacts, gave a date of about 800,000... Tools...

Illustration by Michael Rothman Before An Australopithecus, sporting full-bodied fur about four million years ago. After An archaic human walked fur-free about 1.2 million years ago, carrying fire on the savanna ONE of the most distinctive evolutionary changes as humans parted company from their fellow apes was their loss of body hair. But why and when human body hair disappeared, together with the matter of when people first started to wear clothes, are questions that have long lain beyond the reach of archaeology and paleontology. Ingenious solutions to both issues have now been proposed, independently, by two research groups analyzing...

Narrow skulls clue to first Americans 11:24 04 September 03 NewScientist.com news service Skull measurements on the remains of an isolated group of people who lived at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California has stirred up the debate on the identity of the first Americans once again. The earliest inhabitants of North America differed subtly but significantly from modern native Americans. The difference is clearly seen in the skull shapes of the first people to colonise the continent, who had longer, narrower skulls than modern people. One theory says it is because two distinct groups of people migrated to...