Ethiopian jawbone may mark dawn of humankind

A 2.8-million-year-old mandible and a digital model of a key fossil paint a complicated picture of the genus Homo.

Ewen Callaway

04 March 2015

The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone that may have come from the first Homo.

A 2.8-million-year-old battered jawbone from Ethiopia may represent the earliest ancient human fossil ever discovered — pushing back the known origins of humankind by 500,000 years. The remains, alongside a digital reconstruction of a damaged fossil from a key early-human species, point to an evolutionary explosion at the dawn of our genus, Homo.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the latest link in a chain of ancestry that stretches back 5 to 7 million years to a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, humanity's two closest living relatives. An incomplete fossil record means that researchers have had a hard time finding the other links of that chain, and distinguishing true human ancestors from evolutionary dead-ends — side branches in the family tree.

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Fossil foot bones hint at mystery walker

Scientists have obtained a fascinating new insight into the evolution of humans and our ability to walk.

It comes from the fossilised bones of a foot that were discovered in Ethiopia and dated to be 3.4 million years old.

The researchers say they do not have enough remains to identify the species of hominin, or human ancestor, from which the right foot came.
But they tell Nature journal that just the shape of the bones shows the creature could walk upright at times.

The fossil haul consists of eight elements from the forefoot - bones such as metatarsals and phalanges.

The specimens were pulled from clay sediments at Burtele in the central Afar region, about 520km north-east of the capital Addis Ababa.

It is a significant discovery because it demonstrates there was more than one pre-human species living in East Africa between three and four million years ago, each with its own method of moving around.

The other creature was the famous "Lucy" animal (Australopithecus afarensis), whose remains were first identified in the Afar in the 1970s.

Lucy's body was built for walking. Her big toe was aligned with the other four digits of the foot, and she had a human-like arch that allowed for very efficient locomotion.

The owner of the partial foot from Burtele was not afarensis; that can be said definitively.

The fossils indicate it had no arch and the big toe was opposed to the other digits, enabling the animal to grasp branches in a tree.

But the fact this creature could and would walk on the ground is evidenced by the nature of the bone joints. These were arranged such that the foot could push off, or toe-off - something only humans do as they walk, and something flat-footed apes cannot achieve.

"If you look at the lateral metatarsal head along with the proximal toe bone, the phalanx - that particular joint is really unique in hominids," explained team member Dr Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University, US.

"You can see it's a very different kind of a joint, because when you toe-off and push forward in that last phase of walking, your toes are highly flexed. In order to achieve that, you have to change the base of the phalanx and the metatarsal head - you have to change both sides of the joint. And it's a highly characteristic type of change that we can pick out immediately," he told the BBC.

The scientists can only speculate as to identity of the Burtele species. Without skull and teeth elements, a formal classification is impossible.

The team says the animal's morphology is reminiscent in some respects to a 4.4-million-year-old creature known as Ardipithecus ramidus. Although, again, it is not ramidus.

"It may be a relic species that was lingering around until 3.4 or 3.3 million years ago, and which had its origins way back in Ardipithecus ramidus times," suggested team leader Dr Yohannes Haile-Selassie.

"But obviously we cannot put it into the Ardipithecus genus or call it a ramidus species because we do not have any craniodental elements associated with this foot.

"We've kept digging at the Burtele site; we have a few isolated teeth, but that's all," the Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator told BBC News.

It is, though, a remarkable thought that there were these two very distinct species effectively rubbing shoulders with each other 3.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.

The landmark Lucy specimen unearthed in 1974 was found at Hadar, about 50km from Burtele. Other remains of afarensis have been discovered closer still.

Dr Isabelle De Groote is a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum.

"I think this is really exciting," she said.

"We have so few foot remains, they so rarely preserve, that we tend to take great leaps through evolution where there are no specimens at all representing long periods of time," she commented.

"This new foot helps elucidate the process of how the bi-pedal foot evolved. We can see something of the sequence in how changes to bones occurred."


Read on:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17533826

'Red Deer Cave people' may be new species of human

Stone age remains of people with a penchant for home-cooked venison could represent a new human evolutionary line

The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.

The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.

Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans.

The individuals differ from modern humans in their jutting jaws, large molar teeth, prominent brows, thick skulls, flat faces and broad noses. Their brains were of average size by ice age standards.

"They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians," said Darren Curnoe, who led the research team at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

"While finely balanced, I think the evidence is slightly weighted towards the Red Deer Cave people representing a new evolutionary line. First, their skulls are anatomically unique. They look very different to all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago," Curnoe told the Guardian.

"Second, the very fact they persisted until almost 11,000 years ago, when we know that very modern looking people lived at the same time immediately to the east and south, suggests they must have been isolated from them. We might infer from this isolation that they either didn't interbreed or did so in a limited way."

One partial skeleton, with much of the skull and teeth, and some rib and limb bones, was recovered from Longlin cave in Guangxi province. More than 30 bones, including at least three partial skulls, two lower jaws and some teeth, ribs and limb fragments, were unearthed at nearby Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan province.

At Maludong, fossil hunters also found remnants of various mammals, all of them species still around today, except for giant red deer, the remains of which were found in abundance. "They clearly had a taste for venison, with evidence they cooked these large deer in the cave," Curnoe said.

The findings are reported in the journal PLoS ONE.

The stone age bones are particularly important because scientists have few human fossils from Asia that are well described and reliably dated, making the story of the peopling of Asia hopelessly vague. The latest findings point to a far more complex picture of human evolution than was previously thought.

"The discovery of the Red Deer Cave people shows just how complicated and interesting human evolutionary history was in Asia right at the end of the ice age. We had multiple populations living in the area, probably representing different evolutionary lines: the Red Deer Cave people on the East Asian continent, Homo floresiensis, or the 'Hobbit', on the island of Flores in Indonesia, and modern humans widely dispersed from northeast Asia to Australia. This paints an amazing picture of diversity, one we had no clue about until this last decade," Curnoe said.

Much of Asia was also occupied by Neanderthals and another group of archaic humans called the Denisovans. Scientists learned of the Denisovans after recovering a fossilised little finger from the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia in 2010.

The fossils from Longlin cave were found in 1979 by a geologist prospecting in the area. At the time, researchers removed only the lower jaw and a few fragments of rib and limb bones from the cave wall. The rest of the skeleton was left encased in a block of rock, which sat in the basement of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Kunming, Yunnan, for 30 years. The fossils were rediscovered in 2009 by Ji Xueping, a researcher at the institute, who teamed up with Curnoe to examine the remains.

"It was clear from what we could see that the remains were very primitive and likely to be scientifically important. We had a skilled technician remove the bones from the rock, and they were glued back together. Only then was it clear what we had found: a partial skeleton with a very unusual anatomy," Curnoe said.

The fossils at Maludong were found in 1989 but went unstudied until 2008.

Lumps of charcoal uncovered alongside the Longlin fossils were carbon dated to 11,500 years, a time when modern humans in southern China began to make pottery for food storage and to gather wild rice in some of the first steps towards full-scale farming.

Marta Mirazón Lahr, an evolutionary biologist at Cambridge University, is convinced the remains are from modern humans. The unusual features, she said, suggest the Red Deer Cave people are either "late descendants of an early population of modern humans in Asia" or a very small population that developed the traits through a process known as genetic drift.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, London, was similarly sceptical.

"The human remains from the Longlin Cave and Maludong are very important, particularly because we do not have much well-described and well-dated material from the late Pleistocene of China.

"The fossils are unlike recent populations of modern humans in several respects, and the mosaic of more archaic features could indicate the dispersal of a poorly known and more primitive form of modern human that left Africa before the main exodus at about 60,000 years. This dispersal could have reached as far as China, surviving there for many millennia, before disappearing in the last 12,000 years."

But he added: "There might be another possible explanation for the more archaic features. Could these alternatively be attributed to gene flow from a more archaic population that survived alongside modern humans? In the case of the Longlin Cave and Maludong fossils, the most likely candidate would be the enigmatic Denisovans who apparently interbred with the ancestors of modern Australasians somewhere in south east Asia. Could these Chinese fossils be further evidence of such hybridisation?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/14/red-deer-cave-people-species-human

Face-To-Face With an Ancient Human

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — A reconstruction based on the skull of Norway's best-preserved Stone Age skeleton makes it possible to study the features of a boy who lived outside Stavanger 7 500 years ago.

"It is hoped that this reconstruction is a good likeness and that, if someone who knew him in life had been presented with this restoration, they would hopefully have recognised the face," says Jenny Barber, an MSc student at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

She has scientifically rebuilt the face of the strong and stocky Viste Boy, who lived in the Vistehola cave near Stavanger, so that people can now look him right in the eye.

Ms Barber is studying forensic art, an unusual discipline embracing such elements as human anatomy and identification in order to recreate the appearance of an actual person.

This modelling method is primarily employed to assist police investigations, and is little known or used in Norway. But the country's most extensive reconstruction of a Stone Age skeleton has now been achieved.

Complete
Discovered in 1907, the Viste Boy represents the most complete Norwegian Stone Age skeleton and the third oldest human remains ever found in the Norway.

His dark-coloured skull and bones are currently on display in a glass case at the Archaeological Museum on the University of Stavanger (UiS).

Analyses show that the Viste Boy was approximately 15 when he died. He stood a bit less than 1.25 metres tall and probably lived in a group of 10-15 people.

From their studies of rubbish in and around Vistehola, the archaeologists determined that this clan ate fish -- mostly cod -- as well as oysters, mussels, cormorants, elk and wild pig.

They also thought that the teenager might have been sickly, which would explain his early death.

Woman
The oldest of Norway's known skeletons from the Stone Age belonged to a woman and was discovered at Søgne near Kristiansand in 1994. Her skull has been dated to 8 600 years ago.

She was the subject of Norway's first and hitherto only reconstruction of such ancient bones, which was exhibited at the University of Oslo's Museum of Art History in 1997.

This model was based on data from a series of skull X-rays, which allowed specialists at University College in London to build a three-dimensional recreation.

But reconstruction techniques are steadily improving, and the model of the Viste Boy reproduces his features differently than with the Søgne woman.

"The goal has been to create something as similar as possible to the original," explains Ms Barber. "That's what facial reconstruction is all about -- identification and recognition of a unique person."

Read on ...

Lock of hair pins down early migration of Aborigines

A lock of hair has helped scientists to piece together the genome of Australian Aborigines and rewrite the history of human dispersal around the world. DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago.

This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15020799

Early humans, ritual cannibals: Study

Archaeologists have found 32,000-year-old human remains in southeastern Europe, which suggest that the earliest humans practiced “mortuary” or “ritual” cannibalism.


The excavated human remains, the oldest known in Europe, were found at a shelter-cave site called Buran-Kaya III in Ukraine and exhibit post-mortem cut marks, the MSNBC reports.


"Our observations show a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull," said the paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Stephane Pean.

However, Pean said that the treatment of the human bodies, which came with ornaments, did not follow nutritional purposes, rejecting the possibility of dietary cannibalism.

"Observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary disposal," he described.

The experts also excavated valuable artifacts at the site in Ukraine consisting of five mammoth beads, one engraved plate made out of mammoth ivory and 35 perforated shells.

Source: Press TV [July 11, 2011]
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2011/07/early-humans-ritual-cannibals-study.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+(The+Archaeology+News+Network)

Prehistoric Aurochs Remains Reveal Caveman Grilling Rituals, Techniques

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/prehistoric-aurochs-bbq_n_886097.html?ir=Weird+News

The "Paleolithic Diet" has come in and out of fashion since the 1970s. Its adherents eat mostly grilled meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts—supposedly the only foods available to our ancient ancestors. But new research suggests that cavemen indulged in richer fare as well, at least when such victuals had a ritual significance.

Read on...

Why is there only one human species?

Not so very long ago, we shared this planet with several other species of human, all of them clever, resourceful and excellent hunters, so why did only Homo sapiens survive?

Huge debates rage about human origins, but the broad consensus among scientists is that all the different species of human that have ever existed were descended from ape-like creatures that walked upright in Africa more than six million years ago.

Read on...

Charnel house gives up its secret: 1,000 human bones

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Charnel-house-gives-up-its.6786940.jp

A STONE AGE burial chamber in Orkney has yielded a gruesome haul of more than 1,000 human bones, it was revealed yesterday. The 5,000-year-old human bones - numbering at least 1,000, but possibly as many as 2,000 - were found in just one of the five chambers of the Banks Tomb on South Ronaldsay.

Read on...

Ancient humans, dubbed 'Denisovans', interbred with us (via Dawn Holloway)

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species.



The ancient humans have been dubbed Denisovans after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found.

There is also evidence that this group was widespread in Eurasia.

A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species - perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.

'Sensational' find
According to the researchers, this provides confirmation there were at least four distinct types of human in existence when anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) first left their African homeland.
Along with modern humans, scientists knew about the Neanderthals and a dwarf human species found on the Indonesian island of Flores nicknamed The Hobbit. To this list, experts must now add the Denisovans.


The implications of the finding have been described by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London as "nothing short of sensational".

Scientists were able to analyse DNA from a tooth and from a finger bone excavated in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia. The individuals belonged to a genetically distinct group of humans that were distantly related to Neanderthals but even more distantly related to us.

The finding adds weight to the theory that a different kind of human could have existed in Eurasia at the same time as our species.

Researchers have had enigmatic fossil evidence to support this view but now they have some firm evidence from the genetic study carried out by Professor Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.


"A species of early human living in Europe evolved," according to Professor Paabo.

"There was a western form that was the Neanderthal and an eastern form, the Denisovans."

The study shows that Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of the present day people of the Melanesian region north and north-east of Australia. Melanesian DNA comprises between 4% and 6% Denisovan DNA.

David Reich from the Harvard Medical School, who worked with Svante Paabo on the study, says that the fact that Denisovan genes ended up so far south suggests they were widespread across Eurasia: "These populations must have been spread across thousands and thousands of miles," he told BBC News.

One mystery is why the Denisovan genes are unique in modern Melanesians and are not found in other Eurasian groups that have so far been sampled.

'Fleeting encounter'
Professor Stringer believes it is because there may have been only a fleeting encounter as modern humans migrated through South-East Asia and then on to Melanesia.

"It could be just 50 Denisovans interbreeding with a thousand modern humans. That would be enough to produce this 5% of those archaic genes being transferred," he said.


"So the impact is there but the number of interbreeding events might have been quite small and quite rare."

No one knows when or how these humans disappeared but, according to Professor Paabo, it is very likely something to do with modern people because all the "archaic" humans, like Denisovans and Neanderthals disappeared sometime after Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene.

"It is fascinating to see direct evidence that these archaic species did exist (alongside us) and it's only for the last few tens of thousands of years that is unique in our history that we are alone on this planet and we have no close relatives with us anymore," he said.

The study follows a paper published earlier this year by Professor Paabo and colleagues that showed there was interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals as they emerged from Africa 60,000 years ago.

By Pallab Ghosh

Science correspondent, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12059564