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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 ancient bones and teeth of a previously unknown human relative — one that was even smaller than the so-called Hobbit — have been discovered deep in a cave on an island in the Philippines. The newfound species is named Homo luzonensis in honor of Luzon, the island where the mysterious beings lived during the late Pleistocene epoch, more than 50,000 years ago. At less than 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall, H. luzonensis is the second known dwarf human on record, the first being Homo floresiensis, also known as the Hobbit, whose remains were found on the Indonesian island of...

In 2013 scientists excavating a cave in South Africa found remains of Homo naledi, an extinct hominin now thought to have lived 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. Based on the cranial remains, the researchers concluded it had a small brain only about the size of an orange or your fist. Recently, they took another look at the skull fragments and found imprints left behind by the brain. The impressions suggest that despite its tiny size, Homo naledi’s brain shared a similar shape and structure with that of modern human brains, which are three times as large. “We’ve now seen that...

The "hobbit" had neighbors. Back in 2004, researchers announced the discovery of this tiny, ancient human, which apparently hunted dwarf elephants with stone tools on the Indonesian island of Flores 18,000 years ago. Its discoverers called the 1-meter-tall creature Homo floresiensis, but skeptics wondered whether it was just a stunted modern human. In the years since, researchers have debunked many of the "sick hobbit" hypotheses. Yet scientists have continued to wonder where the species came from. Now, an international team originally led by the hobbit discoverer reports stone tools, dated to 118,000 to 194,000 years ago, from another Indonesian island,...

Most recent dating places one wave of human dispersal out of Africa into southeastern Spain at almost one million years ago. Using state-of-the-art dating methodologies, a team of scientists have obtained or confirmed a date range between .9 and .85 Mya (million years ago) as a time when a species of Old World monkey (Theropithecus) and an early species of human occupied the cave site of Cueva Victoria in southeastern Spain. It is a location not far from where many scientists have hypothesized that humans may have crossed over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at...

Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean islands thousands of years earlier than previously thought. This prehistoric seafaring could shed light on the mental capabilities of these lost relatives of modern humans, researchers say. Scientists had thought the Mediterranean islands were first settled about 9,000 years ago by Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers and shepherds... For instance, obsidian from the Aegean island of Melos was uncovered at the mainland Greek coastal site of Franchthi cave in layers that were about 11,000 years old, while excavations on the southern coast of Cyprus...

Modern science has held that islands such as Cypress and Crete were first inhabited by seafaring humans approximately 9,000 years ago by agriculturists from the late Neolithic period. Simmons writes that research over the past 20 years has cast doubt on that assumption however and suggests that it might be time to rewrite the history books. He cites evidence such as pieces of obsidian found in a cave in mainland Greece that were found to have come from Melos, an island in the Aegean Sea and were dated at 11,000 years ago as well as artifacts from recent digs on...

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers. Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. Now, George Ferentinos of...

Archaeologists on the island of Crete have discovered what may be evidence of one of the world's first sea voyages by human ancestors, the Greek Culture Ministry said Monday A ministry statement said experts from Greece and the U.S. have found rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old close to shelters on the island's south coast. Crete has been separated from the mainland for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have traveled there by sea (a distance of at least 40 miles). That would upset the current view that...

<p>Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.</p> <p>That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.</p>

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species -- perhaps Homo erectus -- had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser...

The archaeologist who helped discover the extinct Homo species Flores Hobbit, Professor Mike Morwood, has died after a struggle with cancer. New Zealand-born Professor Morwood, who was based at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong, was also a world expert in Australian rock art. Professor Morwood was based at the University of New England in 2003 when he and a team of Indonesian researchers excavated the Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores and found a set of curious bones that came to be known as Homo floresiensis or the Hobbit. The discovery...

Following on from the previous article, The First Boat People, we know that Sahul, the original name of Australia during prehistoric times, was settled around 40,000 years ago. Although this date is disputed it is now universally accepted as the most accurate and reliable. But who were these first people and from where did they come? Could humans have developed in Australia at the same time they were developing in Africa? Was there a wave of immigrants or only one founding population? And where does Homo floriensis fit into this picture, if at all? It can quite comfortably be stated...