Free Republic

Archaeological remains have shown that in the middle part the Stone Age, there were at least three different but partially contemporary cultural groups in Sweden. The groups are often called: Funnel Beaker culture, which is associated with Scandinavia's first farmers; Pitted Ware culture, which is mainly linked to fishing and hunting; and Battle Axe culture, which represents a blended culture of herding and farming... The researchers have analysed DNA from 25 Stone Age individuals from four Pitted Ware culture burial grounds on Gotland. About half of the individuals were buried in typical Pitted Ware culture graves and the other half...

How Europeans evolved white skin By Ann Gibbons ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago. The origins of Europeans...

BIG MOVES Ancient DNA indicates horse-riding pastoralists called the Yamnaya made two long-distance migrations around 5,000 years ago. One trip may have shaped Europe’s ancient Corded Ware culture, while the other launched central Asia’s Afanasievo culture. Nomadic herders living on western Asia’s hilly grasslands made a couple of big moves east and west around 5,000 years ago. These were not typical, back-and-forth treks from one seasonal grazing spot to another. These people blazed new trails. A technological revolution had transformed travel for ancient herders around that time. Of course they couldn’t make online hotel reservations. Trip planners would have searched...

First Homosexual Caveman FoundArchaeologists have unearthed the 5,000-year-old remains of what they believe may have been the world's oldest known gay caveman. Archeologists believe they have discovered a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic.The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves."From history and ethnology, we...

WHERE DO FINNS COME FROM? Not long ago, cytogenetic experts stirred up a controversy with their "ground-breaking" findings on the origins of the Finnish and Sami peoples. Cytogenetics is by no means a new tool in bioanthropological research, however. As early as the 1960s and '70s, Finnish researchers made the significant discovery that one quarter of the Finns' genetic stock is Siberian, and three quarters is European in origin. The Samis, however, are of different genetic stock: a mixture of distinctly western, but also eastern elements. If we examine the genetic links between the peoples of Europe, the Samis form...

Kamila Remisova Vesinova and her team of researchers from the Czech Archeological Society believe they have unearthed the remains of an early homosexual man. The remains date from around 2900-2500 B.C., on the outskirts of Prague. That claim stems from the fact the 5,000-year old skeleton was buried in a manner reserved for women in the Corded Ware culture: its head was pointed east rather than west, and its remains were surrounded by domestic jugs rather than by hammers, flint knives and weapons that typically accompany male remains....

In 1953, a significant burial site belonging to the Battle Axe Culture was found when constructing a roundabout in Linköping. 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together with a child, a dog and a rich set of grave goods including one of the eponymous battle axes. "Today, we call this site 'Bergsgraven'. I have been curious about this particular burial for a long time. The collaboration of archaeologists with geneticists allows us to understand more about these people as individuals as well as where their ancestors came from," says archaeogeneticist Helena Malmström of Uppsala University, lead...

The discovery of a "sealed" Stone Age house site from 3500 BC has stirred great excitement among archaeologists from Norway's Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo. The settlement site at Hamresanden, close to Kristiansand's airport at Kjevik in Southern Norway, looks like it was covered by a sandstorm, possibly in the course of a few hours. The catastrophe for the Stone Age occupants has given archaeologists an untouched "mini-Pompeii," containing both whole and reparable pots... the team working on the site at Hamresanden has discovered so many large shards of pottery that they think they can put...

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research... "Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.," Liu said. "While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route...

Ancient wheat suggests early China, Middle East trade The Xinjian mummies, discovered in 1987, may be linked to new carbon dating evidence of early East-West trade. Wheat grains nearly 5,000 years old found at a Chinese archaeological site two years ago, have revealed that western man travelled to China much earlier than previously thought. The research, published by Professor John Dodson and Professor Xiaoqiang Li, shows there are no modern wild varieties of the wheat and barley, which were found in the region in a domesticated form, and carbon dated to 2,650BC. It is now thought they originated in the...

For centuries, archaeologists have reconstructed the early history of Europe by digging up ancient settlements and examining the items that their inhabitants left behind. More recently, researchers have been scrutinizing something even more revealing than pots, chariots and swords: DNA. On Wednesday in the journal Nature, two teams of scientists — one based at the University of Copenhagen and one based at Harvard University — presented the largest studies to date of ancient European DNA, extracted from 170 skeletons found in countries from Spain to Russia. Both studies indicate that today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe...

Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains. Until now, researchers believed that homo sapiens, the direct descendants of modern man, evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia. Recently, discoveries of early human remains in China and Spain have cast doubt on the 'Out of Africa' theory, but no-one was certain. The new discovery of pre-historic human remains by Israeli university explorers in a cave near Ben-Gurion airport could force scientists to re-think earlier theories.

A new analysis finds that human ancestors living in what is now Spain fashioned double-edged stone cutting tools as early as 900,000 years ago, almost twice as long ago as previous estimates for this technological achievement in Europe. If confirmed, the new dates support the idea that the manufacture and use of teardrop-shaped stone implements, known as hand axes, spread rapidly from Africa into Europe and Asia beginning roughly 1 million years ago, say geologist Gary Scott and paleontologist Luis Gibert, both of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California. Evidence of ancient reversals of Earth's magnetic field in soil at...

Large ancient-DNA study uncovers population that moved westwards 4,500 years ago. A mysterious group of humans from the east stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago -- bringing with them technologies such as the wheel, as well as a language that is the forebear of many modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet conducted. Vestiges of these eastern emigres exist in the genomes of nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans. ...last year, a study of the genomes of ancient and contemporary Europeans found echoes not...

The first sequencing of ancient genomes extracted from human remains that date back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period over 13,000 years ago has revealed a previously unknown "fourth strand" of ancient European ancestry. This new lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the 'out of Africa' expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today. Here these hunter-gatherers largely remained for millennia, becoming increasingly isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last 'Glacial Maximum' some 25,000 years ago, which they weathered...

On the Presence of Non-Chinese at Anyang by Kim Hayes It has now become clear that finds of chariot remains, metal knives and axes of northern provenance, and bronze mirrors of western provenance in the tombs of Anyang indicate that the Shang had at least indirect contact with people who were familiar with these things. Who were these people? Where did they live? When did they arrive? Following the discovery of the Tarim Mummies, we now know that the population of the earliest attested cultures of what is present-day Xinjiang were of northwestern or western derivation. According to the craniometric...

Sand-covered Huns city unearthed 10/08/2002 XI'AN: Chinese archaeologists recently discovered a unique, ancient city which has lain covered by desert sands for more than 1,000 years. It is the first ruined city of the Xiongnu (Huns) ever found, said Dai Yingxin, a well-known Chinese archaeologist. The Xiongnu was a nomadic ethnic group, who for 10 centuries were tremendously influential in northern China. The unearthed city occupies 1 square kilometre in Jingbian County, in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, adjacent to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the north of the country. It is believed that the city was built by more...

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...

Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds. The genetic turnover was likely the result of a rapidly changing climate, which the earlier inhabitants of Europe couldn't adapt to quickly enough, said the study's co-author, Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany. The temperature change around that time was "enormous compared to the climactic changes that are happening in our century," Posth told Live Science. "You have to imagine that also the environment changed pretty drastically."...

Marean proposes that it was there, where the Arizona State University archaeologist now conducts excavations, that humankind's mental tide turned sometime between 164,000 and 120,000 years ago. Seaside survivors learned to read the moon's phases in order to harvest heaps of shellfish -- brain food extraordinaire -- during a few precious days each month when ocean tides safely retreated. Tantalizing traces of complex thinking and behavior, including lunar literacy, have turned up at South Africa's Pinnacle Point, a cave-specked promontory that juts into the Indian Ocean. Chunks of dark red pigment and strikingly beautiful seashells found by Marean's team in...