Free Republic

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...

Friday, 10 January, 2003, 11:20 GMT Georgian skull's link to our past The skull is thought to be 1.8 million years old By Robert Parsons in Dmanisi, Georgia The moment is indelibly burned into Dato Zhvania's memory. It had been a day like any other - a day of back-breaking, painstakingly meticulous work. A day of throbbing, enervating heat. But as he sifted gingerly through the baked patch of ground before him, his fingers touched something different. The team celebrates their find His pulse quickened. The archaeological site at the medieval town of Dmanisi, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south-west of...

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...

The late Early Pleistocene site near Untermassfeld, in Germany, is now well known for a rich array of fauna dating back to about 1.07 million years ago, including simple 'Mode 1' (or Oldowan-type) stone tools evidencing early human occupation. Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple 'Mode 1' stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of...