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Homo erectus, one of modern humans' direct ancestors, was a wandering bunch. After the species dispersed from Africa about two million years ago, it colonized the ancient world, which included Asia and possibly Europe. But about 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus essentially vanished. The lone exception was a spot called Ngandong, on the Indonesian island of Java. But scientists were unable to agree on a precise time period for the site...A new study...dates the last existence of Homo erectus at Ngandong between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago.

Cave art depicting a hunting scene has been found in Indonesia dated to 44,000 years old, making it the oldest rock art created by humans. The painting itself is intriguing because it shows a group of figures that represent half-animal, half-human hybrids called therianthropes. The therianthropes are hunting warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes called anoas using spears and ropes. The abstract figures depict a story, which changes our view of early human cognition, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The art could even show the foundation of human spirituality, given the supernatural scene depicted. "To me,...

Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago... The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time. The team has concluded that many forms of life survived the super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks. According to the team, a potentially ground-breaking implication of the new work is that the species responsible for making the stone tools in India was Homo...

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—The massive Toba volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 74,000 years ago did not cause a six-year-long "volcanic winter" in East Africa and thereby cause the human population in the region to plummet, according to new University of Arizona-led research. The new findings disagree with the Toba catastrophe hypothesis, which says the eruption and its aftermath caused drastic, multi-year cooling and severe ecological disruption in East Africa. "This is the first research that provides direct evidence for the effects of the Toba eruption on vegetation just before and just after the eruption," said lead author Chad...

"We found the very first evidence for archaeological assemblages in association with the Toba ash", says Petraglia. "We found Middle Palaeolithic assemblages below and above the ash indicating the technologies being used at the time of the event. When the stone tool assemblages were analyzed from contexts above and below the ash, we found that they were very similar........We therefore concluded that the Middle Palaeolithic hominins survived the eruption and there was population continuity. This is not what would have been expected based on general theories that the Toba super-eruption decimated populations." Moreover, similar findings published by Christine Lane, et...

...a team of archaeologists excavating in India then claimed to have found evidence that modern humans were there before the eruption possibly as early as 120,000 years ago, much earlier than Europe or the Near East were colonised. These findings, based on the discovery of stone tools below a layer of Toba ash, were published in Science in 2007. Now Professor Richards working principally with the archaeologist Professor Sir Paul Mellars, of the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, with a team including Huddersfield University s Dr Martin Carr and colleagues from York and Porto has published his...

The idea that humans nearly became extinct 75,000 ago because of a super-volcano eruption is not supported by new data from Africa, scientists say. In the past, it has been proposed that the so-called Toba event plunged the world into a volcanic winter, killing animal and plant life and squeezing our species to a few thousand individuals. An Oxford University-led team examined ancient sediments in Lake Malawi for traces of this climate catastrophe. It could find none... Researchers estimate some 2,000-3,000 cubic kilometres of rock and ash were thrown from the volcano when it blew its top on what is...

Super-eruption: no problem?Tools found before and after a massive eruption hint at a hardy population. Katharine Sanderson Massive eruptions make it tough for life living under the ash cloud. A stash of ancient tools in India hints that life carried on as usual for humans living in the fall-out of a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia —...

The new jawbone: its teeth are smaller than those of other human relatives Scientists have unearthed the jawbone of what they claim is one of the very first humans. The 2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than researchers thought that our kind first emerged. The discovery in Ethiopia suggests climate change spurred the transition from tree dweller to upright walker. The head of the research team told BBC News that the find gives the first insight into "the most important transitions in human evolution". Prof Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas said the discovery...

The next time you feel like taking the path of least resistance, consider the fate of humankind's ancestral predecessor, Homo erectus: According to the authors of a new study published in PloS One, laziness may have precipitated the early humans' extinction, leaving them unable -- and unwilling -- to adapt to changing environments... The team found that H. erectus tended to pursue "least-effort strategies" when crafting tools and collecting resources, even sticking to one generic tool for most activities. In a statement, lead author Ceri Shipton, an archaeologist at ANU, notes that the primitive peoples "really don't seem to have...

Critical review of growing archaeological and palaeoenvironmental datasets relating to the Middle and Late Pleistocene (300-12 thousand years ago) hominin dispersals within and beyond Africa, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, demonstrates unique environmental settings and adaptations for Homo sapiens relative to previous and coexisting hominins such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus. Our species' ability to occupy diverse and 'extreme' settings around the world stands in stark contrast to the ecological adaptations of other hominin taxa, and may explain how our species became the last surviving hominin on the planet. The paper, by scientists from the Max Planck...

Modern humans' distant relatives left Africa earlier than previously thought—rewriting a key chapter in humankind's epic prequel, according to a discovery unveiled on Wednesday in Nature. Nearly a hundred stone tools found at the Shangchen site in central China may push back the spread of our ancient cousins—hominins—out of Africa by more than a quarter million years. The toolmakers lived at Shangchen on and off for 800,000 years between 2.1 and 1.3 million years ago, leaving behind tools that are unprecedented outside of Africa. The site's oldest tools are roughly 300,000 years older than Dmanisi, a 1.8-million-year-old site in the...

“We regard its age as quite likely between 865,000 and 810,000 years ago,” said Michael Walker of Spain’s Murcia University, a lead researcher on Cueva Negra. “[Arguably] Until now hand-axes in Europe have not been recorded from before 500,000 years ago,” said Walker. Moreover, he adds, “the evidence of combustion [use of fire] is also the oldest anywhere outside Africa.” The new dating results were acquired through biochronological analysis of small-mammal teeth remains found within the Cueva Negra rockshelter, indicating they accumulated during what is technically called the Matuyama magnetochron, or between 0.99 and 0.78 Ma. Researchers do not yet know...

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...

Ancient human fossils show women much smaller Thu Aug 9, 2007 10:18AM EDT NAIROBI (Reuters) - Homo erectus, long viewed as a crucial evolutionary link between modern humans and their tree-dwelling ancestors, may have been more ape-like than previously thought, scientists unveiling new-found fossils said on Thursday. Revealing an ancient skull and a jawbone from two early branches of the human family tree -- Homo erectus and Homo habilis -- a team of Kenyan scientists said they were surprised to find that early female hominids were much smaller than males. The skull was the first discovery of a female Homo...

NEW YORK — A startling new report asserts that the first known Americans arrived much, much earlier than scientists thought — more than 100,000 years ago __ and maybe they were Neanderthals. If true, the finding would far surpass the widely accepted date of about 15,000 years ago. Researchers say a site in Southern California shows evidence of humanlike behavior from about 130,000 years ago, when bones and teeth of an elephantlike mastodon were evidently smashed with rocks. The earlier date means the bone-smashers were not necessarily members of our own species, Homo sapiens. The researchers speculate that these early...

Who’s your daddy? An unknown hominin species that bred with early human ancestors when they migrated from Africa to Australasia has been identified through genome mapping of living humans. The genome analysis also questions previous findings that modern humans populated Asia in two waves from their origin in Africa, finding instead a common origin for all populations in the Asia-Pacific region, dating back to a single out-of-Africa migration event. Modern humans first left Africa about 60,000 years ago, with some heading west towards Europe, and others flowing east into the Asia-Pacific region. Previous research looking at the genomes of people...

A team of Italian researchers have possibly uncovered the oldest ever fossilized footprint left behind by modern man's ancestor, Homo Erectus. The prints are thought to date back some 800,000 years and were unearthed in the desert of south eastern Eritrea... Alfredo Coppa... from Rome's Sapienza university... and his Italian colleagues were working with researchers from Eritrea's National Museum when they unearthed the 26 m2 slab of stone containing the footprints. Today, the area lies in the middle of an arid desert, but 800,000 years ago the environment was very different. The fossilized footprints, which are almost indistinguishable to those...

In what has been described as a breakthrough, Vietnamese and Russian archaeologists have found valuable artifacts in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai that they say belonged to ancient humans around 800,000 years ago. The traces of homo erectus or "upright man," including fossils and more than 200 stone tools, were discovered at 12 locations around An Khe Town, according to the findings announced by the scientists on Friday. It was "the biggest and most important" archeological discovery not only for Vietnam but Asia, Dr. Nguyen Giang Hai, chief of Vietnam's Institute of Archeology, told Tuoi Tre newspaper. The...

Not long ago, most paleoanthropologists thought that intercontinental travel was reserved for hominids who were big of brain and long of limb. Until very recently, the fossil evidence suggested that early humans did not journey out of Africa until they could walk long distances and were smart enough to invent sophisticated tools. Then, 2 years ago, a team working at Dmanisi, Georgia, shook up those ideas. It reported finding two small skulls dated to a surprisingly ancient 1.75 million years ago and associated with only primitive stone tools (Science, 12 May 2000, p. 948). Now, on page 85 of this...