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Ice Age Magnetic Reversal Was Global Event And Linked With Super Volcano Eruption And Rapid Climate Variability, Says New Research October 17, 2012 in Geology & Climate During the last ice age, around 41,000 years ago, there was a very rapid and complete reversal of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, according to new research. There was already localized evidence of polarity reversals during this time, but with the new research, the theory that it was a global event is now strongly supported. And very interestingly, it is one that nearly coincided with the very fast, short-term climate variability of the last...

"We looked at the basic timeline revealed by similar stone points, and it shows that humans were using them in Europe before they appeared in the Levant - the opposite of what we'd expect if the innovation had led to the humans' migration from Africa to Europe," said Dr. Kadowaki. "Our new findings mean that the research community now needs to reconsider the assumption that our ancestors moved to Europe and succeeded where Neanderthals failed because of cultural and technological innovations brought from Africa or west Asia." By re-examining the evidence, the researchers showed that the comparable stone weapons appeared...

A Neanderthal skeleton, left, compared with a modern human skeleton. Credit: American Museum of Natural History DNA testing of a human mandible fossil found in Romania has revealed a genome with 4.8 to 11.3 percent Neanderthal DNA—its original owner died approximately 40,000 years ago, Palaeogenomicist Qiaomei Fu reported to audience members at a Biology of Genomes meeting in New York last week. She noted also that she and her research team found long Neanderthal sequences. The high percentage suggests, she added, that the human had a Neanderthal in its family tree going back just four to six generations. The finding...

Gideon Hartman of the University of Connecticut and colleagues from an international group of universities and research institutions came to this conclusion by reconstructing the hunting ranges of Neanderthals who occupied the cave at two distinct Ice Age occupational phases separated by about 10,000 years. The first phase occurred during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 (71,000-129,000 years ago), and the second occurred during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (57,000-70,000 years ago). They analyzed the comparison of oxygen, carbon, and strontium isotope samples from the tooth enamel of excavated gazelle remains with modern isotope data from the Amud Cave region. What they...

A team of researchers working in Italy has confirmed that Altamura Man was a Neanderthal and dating of pieces of calcite which were on the remains has revealed that the bones are 128,000 to 187,000 years old. In their paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the team describes how they extracted a small bone sample and examined it and what they found by doing so. Altamura Man was discovered in a cave in southern Italy in 1993 by cave explorers. The finding was reported to researchers at the University of Bari. The remains were embedded in rock and...

New remains recovered in an excavation carried out over 40 years ago have enabled this auditory ossicle to be reconstructedAsier Gómez-Olivencia, an Ikerbasque researcher at the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, has published in The Journal of Human Evolution a piece of research in which he stresses the importance of reviewing old excavationsThe Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia between 230,000 and 28,000 years ago... The archaeological site at La Ferrassie, excavated throughout the 20th century, is a mythical enclave because it was where 7 Neanderthal skeletons, ranging from foetuses to almost complete skeletons of...

In their climate simulations, Black and colleagues found that the largest temperature decreases after the eruption occurred in Eastern Europe and Asia and sidestepped the areas where the final Neanderthal populations were living (Western Europe). Therefore, the authors conclude that the eruption was probably insufficient to trigger Neanderthal extinction. However, the abrupt cold spell that followed the eruption would still have significantly impacted day-to-day life for Neanderthals and early humans in Europe. Black and colleagues point out that temperatures in Western Europe would have decreased by an average of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius during the year following the eruption....

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

A new intensive survey of the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle of the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur "ubiquitously" across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts per square metre, or 75 million per square kilometre. Researchers say the vast 'carpet' of stone-age tools -- extracted from and discarded onto the escarpment over hundreds of thousands of years -- is the earliest known example of an entire landscape being modified by hominins: the group of creatures that include us and our ancestral species. The Messak Settafet runs a total length of 350...

Megan Gannon March 14, 2015The eight eagle talons from Krapina arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site. (Luka Mjeda, Zagreb) Long before they shared the landscape with modern humans, Neanderthals in Europe developed a sharp sense of style, wearing eagle claws as jewelry, new evidence suggests. Researchers identified eight talons from white-tailed eagles — including four that had distinct notches and cut marks — from a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal cave in Croatia. They suspect the claws were once strung together as part of a necklace or bracelet. "It really is absolutely stunning," study author David Frayer,...

A set of eagle talons found in present-day Croatia dated approximately 130,000 years ago includes several marks and polishing facets that show they were manipulated into a piece of jewelry, said David Frayer, a professor emeritus of anthropology who was part of the study... Frayer said the eight white-tailed eagle bones were discovered more than 100 years ago from a single level at the Krapina Neanderthal site, which was originally excavated between 1899-1905. However, researchers only recently recognized the cut marks on the bones as human manipulations. "There's just no doubt that they made it, and it was a necklace...

Dogs are humanity’s oldest friends, renowned for their loyalty and abilities to guard, hunt and chase. But modern humans may owe even more to them than we previously realised. We may have to thank them for helping us eradicate our caveman rivals, the Neanderthals.

Perhaps even more intriguing is a single shell with what appears to be a geometric pattern—zigzagged grooves carved into the center of the outer shell. Analysis points to the patterns being carved on purpose. Again the team turned to modern mussels; they tried carving similar patterns into Potamida littoralis with a shark tooth and compared that to weathering and natural abrasions. Sure enough, their carvings were the closest matches to the ancient pattern. “That must have been an appealing thing for Homo erectus,” says Joordens. “You can imagine sitting there with a shell in one hand and a tool in...

In 2010, scientists made a startling discovery about our past: About 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians. Now two teams of researchers have come to another intriguing conclusion: Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of Asians at a second point in history, giving them an extra infusion of Neanderthal DNA. The findings are further evidence that our genomes contain secrets about our evolution that we might have missed by looking at fossils alone. "We're learning new, big-picture things from the genetic data, rather than just filling in details," said Kirk E. Lohmueller, a geneticist...

Neanderthal communities divided some of their tasks according to their sex. This is one of the main conclusions reached by a study performed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)... which analyzed 99 incisors and canine teeth of 19 individuals from three different sites (El Sidron, in Asturias - Spain, L'Hortus in France, and Spy in Belgium), reveals that the dental grooves present in the female fossils follow the same pattern, which is different to that found in male individuals. Analyses show that all Neanderthal individuals, regardless of age, had dental grooves. According to Antonio Rosas, CSIC researcher at the...

In a series of histograms (graphs showing the distribution of genome and population data), Hawks shows that Asian and European genomes have significantly more Neanderthal DNA than African genomes. The averages for Asian and European samples are around 3% higher than the average for African samples. Whatever gave Africans some degree of similarity to Neanderthals, non-Africans seem to have received around 3% more of it. Europeans average a bit more Neanderthal DNA than Asians, showing that Europeans probably mixed with Neanderthals as they moved into Europe, adding a secondary mix of Neanderthal DNA into their genome beyond the primary mix...

Modern Y-Chromosome Variation Surpasses Archaic Humans by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * The human Y-chromosome has been a sore point among secular scientists in recent years because of its many anti-evolutionary surprises. Adding to the Darwinian grief, is yet one more shocking Y-chromosome study that more clearly illustrates the boundaries of human genetic diversity. Much controversy has brewed during the past few years over the genomic sequences of what have been termed "archaic" humans. This so-called "ancient DNA" was extracted from bone fragments of "Neandertal" and "Denisovan" specimens and then sequenced, providing draft blue prints of these respective genomes.1, 2 While...

Contact: Mary Rice mary@mrcommunication.org European Society of Human Genetics Ancient Etruscans were immigrants from Anatolia, or what is now TurkeyGeneticists find the final piece in the puzzle Nice, France: The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from...

26 March 2002 01:46 GMT DNA traces roots back to Stone Age By Paul Lashmar 24 March 2002 Are you a Viking, Saxon, Pict, Celt, or descendant of an ancient African tribe? New DNA testing methods will enable us to trace our family tree right back to the Stone Age. Until recently, researching your ancestry meant hours of painstaking digging through fusty old files in public record offices or asking older relatives about their family memories. When the 1901 census was released online, demand was so great that the system crashed. The new scientific technique for tracing relatives allows individuals...

A mystery of Neanderthals for more than a century is one that's literally as plain as the noses on their faces - why did they have such big schnozes? One common answer suggests their faces somehow helped our extinct relatives deal with the extreme cold they faced. Now, however, scientists find that Neanderthal faces were not built for the cold - meaning that no one still knows why Neanderthals had such noses. The enigma that such a large nose poses is that it seems like an excellent way to lose heat - a paradox, given that Neanderthals lived when glaciers...