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“An interesting aspect of the Denisova 11 genome is that it allows us to learn things about two populations — the Neanderthals from the mother’s side, and the Denisovans from the father’s side,” said co-author Dr. Fabrizio Mafessoni, from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.The researchers found that Denisova 11’s father, whose genome bears traces of Neanderthal ancestry, came from a population related to a later Denisovan found in the cave.The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe than to an earlier Neanderthal found in...

The detailed analysis of this tool and the luminescence dating of the sediment that bears the wooden remains indicate that the objects were deposited around 90,000 years ago, and thus were made by neandertals. The Micro-CT analysis and a close examination of the surface have shown that a yew trunk was cut longitudinally into two halves. One of this halves was scraped with a stone tool and treated with fire to harden it and to facilitate the scraping to obtain a pointed morphology. Use-wear analysis revealed that it was used for digging in search of food, flint, or simply to...

The woman may have been just a teenager when she died more than 50,000 years ago, too young to have left much of a mark on her world. But a piece of one of her bones, unearthed in a cave in Russia's Denisova valley in 2012, may make her famous. Enough ancient DNA lingered within the 2-centimeter fragment to reveal her startling ancestry: She was the direct offspring of two different species of ancient humans -- neither of them ours. An analysis of the woman's genome, reported in this week's issue of Nature, indicates her mother was Neanderthal and her...

Pygmy population near cave where Homo floresiensis fossils were found appears to have evolved short stature independently from the mysterious ancient hominins A fossil skeleton found in a cave on Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2004 turned out to be a previously unknown, very small species of human. Nicknamed the "hobbit" (officially Homo floresiensis), it remains a mysterious species with an unknown relationship to modern humans. Intriguingly, the current inhabitants of Flores include a pygmy population living in a village near the Liang Bua cave where the fossils were found. An international team of scientists has now sequenced and analyzed the...

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...

Scientists hope the pea-sized blobs can help explain the rise of modern humans. Neanderthals went extinct about 40,000 years ago, but thanks to cutting-edge science, there is now a lab in California that has petri dishes filled with pea-sized versions of the cavemen's brains. Why are researchers cultivating and studying these minibrains? The reason, they say, is that these small neural lumps may reveal why Neanderthals died out and Homo sapiens went on to conquer much of the planet. "Neanderthals are fascinating because they shared Earth with us, and there is now genetic evidence we actually bred with them," study...

Credit: Mathieu Duval ========================================================================= First direct dating of an early human tooth confirms the antiquity of Homo antecessor, western Europe's oldest known human fossil species. A previous find from the unit TD6 of Atapuerca Gran Dolina archaeological site in northern Spain has yielded more information about our early human lineage. An international team of researchers from Australia, China, France and Spain has conducted the first direct dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antecessor (H. antecessor), the earliest known hominin species identified in Europe. The study shows that H. antecessor probably lived somewhere between 772 000 and 949...

A Neanderthal seems to have left a message etched in stone about 35,000 years ago, a new study finds. An analysis of the slanted, zigzag lines — engraved on a piece of flint discovered at a Neanderthal site in Crimea — reveals that they likely weren't made willy-nilly. Rather, the Neanderthal artist would have needed excellent fine motor skills and attention to detail to etch the lines, which may carry symbolic meaning, the researchers said. If this new interpretation is correct, the engraved piece of flint will join a growing list of artifacts showing that Neanderthals were likely complex beings...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and...

Archaeological excavations at the Aranbaltza site in the Basque Country coast (Northern Spain) have revealed several episodes of neandertal occupations with preserved wooden remains... In 2015, the excavation revealed two very well preserved wooden tools, one of which is a 15 cm-long digging stick... The detailed analysis of this tool and the luminescence dating of the sediment that bears the wooden remains indicate that the objects were deposited around 90,000 years ago, and thus were made by neandertals. The Micro-CT analysis and a close examination of the surface have shown that a yew trunk was cut longitudinally into two halves....

Paris (AFP) – Cro-Magnon man had a face covered in lumps including a large one on his forehead — likely benign tumours caused by a genetic disease, according to a team of French researchers in new findings published Friday. The skeleton of Cro-Magnon 1, a male Homo sapiens dating back 28,000 years, was discovered in 1868 in the Eyzies cave in France’s southwestern Dordogne region. To mark 150 years since the discovery of the bones, a team of researchers including anthropologist Philippe Charlier reexamined the remains. At the end of their investigation, “we proposed a new diagnosis: he had suffered...

People today of Native American, European, Asian, and North African heritage have Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, with percentages estimated between 1-4 percent. As a result, the majority of people alive today are related to these humans that, as a distinct population, are thought to have gone extinct 39,000-41,000 years ago. An international team of researchers led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has just overcome the problem, allowing for whole genome sequencing of five Neanderthals who lived 39,000-47,000 years ago. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, provide important insights into Neanderthal history before and...

A group of astronomers from the US, Europe, Chile and South Africa have determined that 70,000 years ago a recently discovered dim star is likely to have passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close - five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri. In a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, lead author Eric Mamajek from the University of Rochester and his collaborators analyzed the velocity and trajectory of a low-mass star system nicknamed "Scholz's star." The star's trajectory...

Highlighted by astronomers at the University of Rochester and the European Southern Observatory, the star — nicknamed “Scholz’s star” — has a very low tangential velocity in the sky, but it has been clocked traveling at a breakneck speed away from us. In other words, from our perspective, Scholz’s star is fleeing the scene of a collision with us. “Most stars this nearby show much larger tangential motion,” said Eric Mamajek, of the University of Rochester. “The small tangential motion and proximity initially indicated that the star was most likely either moving towards a future close encounter with the solar...

Scholz's star -- named after the German astronomer who discovered it -- approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system. ... Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid, the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very...

They have an unwarranted image as brutish and uncaring, but new research has revealed just how knowledgeable and effective Neanderthal healthcare was. The study, by the University of York, reveals that Neanderthal healthcare was uncalculated and highly effective -- challenging our notions that they were brutish compared to modern humans. The researchers argue that the care provided was widespread and should be seen as a "compassionate and knowledgeable response to injury and illness." It is well known that Neanderthals sometimes provided care for the injured, but new analysis by the team at York suggest they were genuinely caring of their...

A new study led by the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology shows that paintings in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago - 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art - including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs - must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time. It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans. Published today in the journal Science, the study reveals how...

A study suggests that early Neanderthals in southern Tuscany may have used fire to manufacture wooden tools used for foraging. In 2012, excavations for constructing thermal baths at Poggetti Vecchi, nestled at the foot of a hill in Grosseto in southern Tuscany, turned up a trove of wooden implements and fossil bones of the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus. The site was radiometrically dated to the late Middle Pleistocene, around 171,000 years ago, when early Neanderthals inhabited the region. Biancamaria Aranguren and colleagues report that most of the wooden implements were hewn from boxwood branches and likely used as digging sticks....

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the oldest fossil of a modern human outside Africa. The fossil suggests that humans first migrated out of the continent much earlier than previously believed. The scientists were digging in a cave called Misliya, on the slopes of Mount Carmel on the northern coast of Israel. "The cave is one of a series of prehistoric caves," says Mina Weinstein-Evron of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who led the team. "It's a collapsed cave, but people lived there before it collapsed." The cave had been occupied for several hundred thousand years,...

The left hemi-maxilla with teeth. Credit: Rolf Quam _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. "Misliya is an exciting discovery," says Rolf Quam, Binghamton University anthropology professor and a coauthor of the study. "It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we...