Attention to the Unseen

The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia. Ludovic Slimak, CC BY-ND By Ludovic Slimak, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès; Clément Zanolli, Université de Bordeaux; Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York), and Laure Metz, University of Connecticut Perched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It’s a strategic point…

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The Guardian reports: Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa. But unlike its modern electronic equivalent, this ancient web of social bonds used a far more prosaic medium. It relied on the sharing and trading of beads made of ostrich eggshells – one of humanity’s oldest forms of personal adornment. The research by scientists in Germany involved the study of more than…

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Science News reports: Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian Homo species such as Neandertals has come under increasing fire over the last decade. Research this year supported an alternative scenario in which H. sapiens evolved across vast geographic expanses, first within Africa and later outside it. The process would have worked as follows: Many Homo groups…

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Dawid A. Iurino for THOR, Author provided By Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Bournemouth University A collection of fossil footprints at Laetoli in Northern Tanzania, preserved in volcanic ash and dated to 3.66 million years ago, are still yielding surprises almost 45 years after their discovery. Based on a re-analysis of fossil footprints from one of Laetoli’s sites, the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature say they’ve discovered evidence of a previously…

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Robin McKie writes: Modern humans made several failed attempts to settle in Europe before eventually taking over the continent. This is the stark conclusion of scientists who have been studying the course of Homo sapiens’s exodus from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Researchers have recently pinpointed sites in Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic where our ancestors’ remains have been dated as being between 40,000 to 50,000 years old. However, bone analyses have produced genetic profiles that have…

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SciTechDaily reports: An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg paleoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans. The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our…

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By Josie Glausiusz On a searing hot summer day at ‘Ubeidiya, an ancient site in northern Israel, an undulating expanse of dry grasses and thistles stretches into the distance. Far on the horizon, the mountains of Jordan shimmer through the haze; nearby stand cultivated olive groves and a date palm plantation. Just south of the Sea of Galilee, and up a rocky dirt road, ‘Ubeidiya seems like a secret, with no sign to indicate its archaeological riches. About 1.5 million…

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William Deresiewicz writes: The Dawn of Everything [by David Graeber and David Wengrow] is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the…

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Charles Q. Choi writes: The largest-ever study of Arab genomes has revealed the most ancient of all modern Middle Eastern populations and is shedding light on how modern humans may have first expanded across the globe. The Arabian Peninsula — which today includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — has long served as a key crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia. Recent archaeological, fossil and DNA findings suggest that analyzing the Middle East and…

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Would we see Neanderthals (right) as human if they were around today? wikipedia, CC BY-SA Nicholas R. Longrich, University of Bath READER QUESTION: We now know from evolutionary science that humanity has existed in some form or another for around 2 million years or more. Homo sapiens are comparatively new on the block. There were also many other human species, some which we interbred with. The question is then inevitable – when can we claim personhood in the long story…

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Live Science reports: Ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen extremes of Siberia are the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, according to archaeologists. The bones from the woolly mammoth skeleton, dated to about 26,000 years ago, were excavated this summer by a Russian expedition to Kotelny Island, in the far northeast of Siberia — 615 miles (990 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle. The team pieced together more than two-thirds of…

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The Guardian reports: Researchers excavating a cave network on the Rock of Gibraltar have discovered a new chamber, sealed off from the world for at least 40,000 years, that could shed light on the culture and customs of the Neanderthals who occupied the area for a thousand centuries. In 2012, experts began examining Vanguard Cave, part of the Gorham’s Cave complex, to determine its true dimensions and to see whether it contained passages and chambers that had been plugged by…

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