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Murids, as the rat family is known, are more taxonomically diverse than any other mammal group and are found in nearly every part of the world... The study was based on remains recovered from the limestone cave known as Liang Bua, where partial skeletons of H. floresiensis have been found, along with stone tools and the remains of animals -- most of them rats. In fact, out of the 275,000 animal bones identified in the cave so far, 80 percent of them are from rodents... The study encompassed about 10,000 of the Liang Bua rat bones. The remains spanned five...

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...

For the past decade, a fossil human relative about the size of a toddler has loomed large in the story of our evolutionary history. This mysterious creature—found on the Indonesian island of Flores—has sparked a heated debate about its origins, including questions over its classification as a unique species. But now, a scattering of teeth and bone may at last unlock the mystery of the “hobbits,” also known as Homo floresiensis. The 700,000-year-old human remains are the first found outside Liang Bua cave, the site on Flores that yielded the original hobbit fossils. The much older samples show intriguing similarities...

Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old. The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall — an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits. On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years. The finding suggests that the...

Oct 23, 2014Bob Yirka Homo floresiensis adult female - model of head. (Phys.org) —It's been ten years since the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka, the "hobbit" were uncovered in Liang Bua, a cave, on the island of Flores in Indonesia, and scientists still can't agree on the diminutive hominin's origins. This month, the journal Nature has printed a comment piece by Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London and two pieces by Ewen Callaway, one a retrospective with interviews with the central players, and the other a podcast with the four principle scientists involved in the find—Bert Roberts,...

...we find the now inhospitable and hyper-arid zone of the southern Jordan Rift Valley was frequently lush and well-watered in the past.Our evidence suggests this valley had a riverine and wetland zone that would have provided ideal passage... out of Africa and deep into the Levant and Arabia...Our findings from sedimentary sections ranging 5 to 12 metres in thickness showed ecosystem fluctuations over time, including cycles of dry and humid environments. We also found evidence for the presence of ancient rivers and wetlands.Luminescence dating showed the sedimentary environments formed between 125,000 and 43,000 years ago, suggesting there had been multiple...

The remains of some of the earliest modern humans to enter Asia have been discovered in a Laos cave, according to a study published Tuesday.Excavations in the Tam Pa Ling cave over the past seven years revealed bone fragments belonging to early modern humans who inhabited the region some 86,000 years ago, and may have lived in the mountainous area for at least 68,000 years, according to Nature. The discovery pushes back the previous timeline on the exploration of humans, as these remains may be from some of the first humans to enter southeast Asia after leaving Africa...A small piece...

A new model for human evolution asserts that modern Homo sapiens stemmed from multiple genetically diverse populations across Africa rather than a single ancestral population. This conclusion was reached after researchers analyzed genetic data from present-day African populations, including 44 newly sequenced genomes from the Nama group of southern Africa. The research suggests that the earliest detectable split in early human populations occurred between 120,000 to 135,000 years ago, after long periods of genetic intermixing, and that subsequent migrations created a weakly structured genetic stem. Contrary to some previous models, this research implies that contributions from archaic hominins were unlikely...

In a cave just south of Lisbon, archaeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there—especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs...A wide variety of shellfish remains were found in the archaeological remains Nabais and her colleagues studied, but the shellfish in the undisturbed Paleolithic deposits are overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs. Their...

A dating method developed by a Purdue University geologist just pushed the age of some of these fossils found at the site of Sterkfontein Caves back more than a million years. This would make them even older than Dinkinesh, also called Lucy, the world's most famous Australopithecus fossil.

Contact: Robert Sanders rsanders@berkeley.edu 510-643-6998 University of California - Berkeley Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought Berkeley -- Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the...

Researchers have found evidence that a coronavirus epidemic swept East Asia some 20,000 years ago and was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people alive today. The new study suggests that an ancient coronavirus plagued the region for many years, researchers say. The finding could have dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination. Four other coronaviruses can also infect people, but they usually cause only mild colds. Scientists did not directly observe these coronaviruses becoming human pathogens, so they have relied on indirect clues to estimate when...

An ancient coronavirus, or a closely related pathogen, triggered an epidemic among ancestors of present-day East Asians roughly 25,000 years ago, a new study indicates.Analysis of DNA from more than 2,000 people shows that genetic changes in response to that persistent epidemic accumulated over the next 20,000 years or so, David Enard, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, reported April 8 at the virtual annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The finding raises the possibility that some East Asians today have inherited biological adaptations to coronaviruses or closely related viruses.The discovery opens the...

To extract ancient human chromosomal DNA from caves, Vernot and colleagues identified regions in chromosomes rich in mutations specific to hominids to help the team filter out nonhuman DNA. This helped the researchers successfully analyze Neandertal chromosomal DNA from more than 150 samples of sediment roughly 50,000 to 200,000 years old from a cave in Spain and two caves in Siberia.After the team compared its data with DNA previously collected from Neandertal fossils of about the same age, the findings suggested that all these Neandertals were split into two genetically distinct waves that both dispersed across Eurasia. One emerged about...

Stone man. This partial skull of a 500,000-year-old human was found in a slab of travertine from a quarry like this one in Turkey.Credit: John Kappelman/University of Texas, Austin Workers at a travertine factory near Denizli, Turkey, were startled recently when they sawed a block of the limestone for tiles and discovered part of a human skull. Now, it appears they unwittingly exposed fossilized remains of a long-sought species of human that lived 500,000 years ago, researchers say. Although only four skull fragments were found, the fossil also reveals the earliest case of tuberculosis. The Middle East has long been...

Most Ancient Case Of Tuberculosis Found In 500,000-year-old Human; Points To Modern Health IssuesView of the inside of a plaster cast of the skull of the newly discovered young male Homo erectus from western Turkey. The stylus points to tiny lesions 1-2 mm in size found along the rim of bone just behind the right eye orbit. The lesions were formed by a type of tuberculosis that infects the brain and, at 500,000 years in age, represents the most ancient case of TB known in humans. (Credit: Marsha Miller, the University of Texas at Austin)" ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2007) —...

Did Early Humans First Arise in Asia, Not Africa? Nicholas Bakalar for National Geographic News   December 27, 2005 -----snip------They believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth. New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia. -----snip------"What seems reasonably clear now," Dennell said, "is that the earliest hominins in Asia did not need large brains or bodies." These attributes...

Evidence for the orangutan being the closest living relative of modern humans is based on at least 35 known characters that appear to be either exclusive to humans and orangutans or largely absent in outgroups.

Infectious Evolution: Ancient virus hit apes, not our ancestors, in the genesMarch 5 Bruce Bower A vicious virus infected ancestral chimpanzees and gorillas in Africa between 4 million and 3 million years ago. Not only did it kill a great many of these primates, but it also infiltrated the surviving animals' genomes, altering the course of evolution. That's the picture emerging from a new analysis of modern-primate DNA. Around 1.5 million years ago, this virus of the class called retroviruses also infected ancestors of modern baboons and macaques, two African monkeys, reports geneticist Evan E. Eichler of the University of...

Full title: Four ancient skulls unearthed in Mexico suggest that North America was a melting pot of different peoples and cultures 10,000 years ago The first humans to settle in North America were more diverse than previously believed, according to a new study of skeletal fragments. US scientists analysed four skulls recovered from caves in Mexico that belonged to humans that lived sometime between 9,000 to 13,000 years ago. The researchers were surprised to find a high level of diversity, with the skulls ranging in similarity to that of Europeans, Asian and ...