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Category: Anthropology

Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Nature reports: It was the finger seen around the world. In 2008, archaeologists working in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, uncovered a tiny bone: the tip of the little finger of an ancient human that lived there tens of thousands of years ago. The fragment didn’t seem remarkable, but it was well preserved, giving researchers hope that it harboured intact DNA. A team of geneticists led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,…

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Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

An outrigger canoe would typically have several paddlers and one navigator. AP Photo/David Goldman By Richard (Rick) Feinberg, Kent State University Wet and shivering, I rose from the outrigger of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. We’d been at sea all afternoon and most of the night. I’d hoped to get a little rest, but rain, wind and an absence of flat space made sleep impossible. My companions didn’t even try. It was May 1972, and I was three months into doctoral…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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New evidence prompts researchers to rethink humanity’s origin story

New evidence prompts researchers to rethink humanity’s origin story

By Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias This article was originally published on SAPIENS As a university student in the early 2010s, I recall how beautifully simple our origin story was: Homo sapiens evolved in East African savannas around 150,000 years ago. Then, sometime around 70,000 years ago, a mutation occurred that endowed these individuals with the capacity for complex, symbolic behavior. This set them apart from any other species and allowed them to leave Africa and take over the world, replacing all other humans they encountered….

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Ancient tusk fragments hint at social learning among early humans 400,000 years ago

Ancient tusk fragments hint at social learning among early humans 400,000 years ago

ZME Science reports: In the plains of western Ukraine, researchers digging through ancient soil found a handful of small, broken pieces of ivory that might change how we think about early humans. The fragments—24 in total—came from the tusks of a long-extinct mammoth species. Most were unremarkable at first glance. But as scientists studied them more closely, they noticed patterns and shapes that didn’t seem like they had been accidentally broken. Some pieces had been chipped in a way that…

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Sunscreen, clothes and caves may have helped Homo sapiens survive magnetic pole shift 41,000 years ago

Sunscreen, clothes and caves may have helped Homo sapiens survive magnetic pole shift 41,000 years ago

University of Michigan: Ancient Homo sapiens may have benefited from sunscreen, tailored clothes and the use of caves during the shifting of the magnetic North Pole over Europe about 41,000 years ago, new University of Michigan research shows. These technologies could have protected Homo sapiens living in Europe from harmful solar radiation. Neanderthals, on the other hand, appear to have lacked these technologies and disappeared around 40,000 years ago, according to the study, published in Science Advances and led by…

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What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

Ben Daitz writes: The Horus Group, named after the Egyptian god of healing, is an international team of cardiologists, archaeologists and radiologists who have studied more than 200 mummies in Egypt, Peru, the Aleutian Islands and Italy with computer tomography (CT) scans and genetic analyses. They wanted to see if atherosclerosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, is a disease of modernity, our high stress, cholesterol-laden lifestyle, or if it had been there all along. Are…

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Early hominin, Homo erectus, lived in a brutal desert, study finds

Early hominin, Homo erectus, lived in a brutal desert, study finds

The New York Times reports: Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains had evolved. But a new study hints that maybe we aren’t so special. A million…

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Archaic humans might actually be the same species as modern humans, study suggests

Archaic humans might actually be the same species as modern humans, study suggests

Science Alert reports: Our species is defined by a long list of cultural and genetic traits that set us apart from our ancient counterparts. New research suggests at least some key distinctions date back earlier than previously estimated, hinting that modern and archaic humans – including our close, extinct relatives – have more in common than we ever thought. “Our results point to a scenario where Modern and Archaic should be regarded as populations of an otherwise common human species,…

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An archeological revolution is transforming our image of human freedoms

An archeological revolution is transforming our image of human freedoms

David Wengrow writes: Contemporary historians tell us that, by the start of the Common Era, approximately three-quarters of the world’s population were living in just four empires (we’ve all heard of the Romans and the Han; fewer of us, perhaps, of the Parthians and Kushans). Just think about this for a minute. If true, then it means that the great majority of people who ever existed were born, lived and died under imperial rule. Such claims are hardly original, but…

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The communication we share with apes

The communication we share with apes

Anthony King writes: There are few one-offs in life on Earth—rarely can a single species boast a trait or ability that no other possesses. But human language is one such oddity. Our ability to use subtle combinations of sounds produced by our vocal cords to create words and sentences, which when combined with grammatical rules, convey complex ideas. There were attempts in the 1950s to teach chimpanzees to “speak” some words, but these failed. And with no other living relatives…

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How primate eye tracking reveals new insights into the evolution of language

How primate eye tracking reveals new insights into the evolution of language

Mariya Surmacheva/Shutterstock By Vanessa Wilson, University of Hull The human environment is a very social one. Family, friends, colleagues, strangers – they all provide a continuous stream of information that we need to track and make sense of. Who is dating whom? Who is in a fight with whom? While our capacity for dealing with such a large social network is impressive, it’s not something especially unique to humans. Other primates do it too. We – humans and other primates…

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New study reveals hunter-gatherers, regardless of gender, are the ultimate athletes

New study reveals hunter-gatherers, regardless of gender, are the ultimate athletes

ZME Science reports: Across the dense forests of the Congo, the sunlit islands of the Pacific, and the icy reaches of the Arctic, the few remaining hunter-gatherers have thrived thanks to their astonishing athleticism. A new study led by George Brill and colleagues from the University of Cambridge reveals that hunter-gatherer societies worldwide practiced an extraordinary range of locomotory behaviors. These include walking, running, swimming, diving, and climbing. One of the most intriguing findings was that men and women across…

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‘Large head people’: Fossil evidence of a newly discovered form of large brained hominin

‘Large head people’: Fossil evidence of a newly discovered form of large brained hominin

Science Alert reports: A “provocative” new piece in Nature has proposed a whole new group of ancient humans – cousins of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – that once lived alongside Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100,000 years ago. The brains of these extinct humans, who probably hunted horses in small groups, were much bigger than any other hominin of their time, including our own species. Paleoanthropologist Xiujie Wu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and anthropologist Christopher Bae from the University of Hawai’i…

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Fossilized footprints reveal 2 extinct hominin species living side by side 1.5 million years ago

Fossilized footprints reveal 2 extinct hominin species living side by side 1.5 million years ago

Excavating the new trackway site, with footprints from hominins, birds and other animals visible in foreground. Neil Roach By Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Smithsonian Institution; Kevin Hatala, Chatham University, and Purity Kiura, National Museums of Kenya Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants in the lives of many different extinct organisms, back to the earliest…

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Their DNA survives in diverse populations across the world – but who were the Denisovans?

Their DNA survives in diverse populations across the world – but who were the Denisovans?

This finger bone discovered in Siberia in 2008 led to the original Denisovan discovery. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Linda Ongaro, Trinity College Dublin It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late 2000s. Thanks to advances in DNA analysis, this was all that was required for scientists to be able to identify an entirely new group of hominins, meaning upright primates on the same evolutionary branch as humans. Now known…

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