Humboldt Beacon
Posted: 09/22/2010 02:45:48 PM PDT
By Jason Valenti
In August, the Humboldt Beacon carried the article, “Validating Bigfoot” which described the work of researchers with the Falcon Project, a plan that intends to carry out research in Humboldt County. This is the second in a 4-part series by Jason Valenti, a member of the Falcon Project team. For additional information, contact the writer at jason@sasquatchresearch.net.
In the latter part of the 1800s, everyone thought that the Great Panda was a joke, a hoax and a grand tale that hunters brought back to augment their tales of adventure. I mean, come on. Here is an animal that is not doing anything sophisticated in its environment to hide from predators, and is a two-toned black and white bear, living its life against almost nothing but green background, and is a vegetarian. No one could believe that a bear lived like that. It had to be a tall tale.
Plus, with these slow moving creatures living on a restricted diet of only bamboo leaves, you would think that finding them would be a fairly simple game plan: find the bamboo, and you'll find the Pandas, right?
Wrong.
Their habitat is in the Szechuan province of China, which is geographically the size of Washington state. It is mountainous, very few roads run through much of it, and there are steep mountain cliffs at every turn, making it an extremely difficult area to navigate on foot (and this was the only mode of transportation available in the 1800s).
Proving the existence of the Panda is a perfect example of how a good sized animal can remain elusive for a long period of time in a given region.
It took over 60 years, from when the first expedition was launched in 1869, to find and capture the first panda. Then it was 30+ more years until someone accidentally came across a second one and shot it, thus proving their existence once and for all in 1935.
This “hoax” has now been hunted nearly to extinction.
The difficulty in finding those Pandas had nothing to do with what the Panda was doing to remain elusive, but everything to do with how we humans behave in the environments of our world. As much as people would like to believe that we can live in the deep forest and the jungles on this planet, there are an overwhelmingly large amount of evidence showing that we are not biologically equipped to do so, let alone pursue elusive animals on foot.
How humans do it, how hominoids do it
Humans take down sections of forests and jungles to set up their communities and farms for their basic survival needs.
Hominoids gather, hunt, eat, sleep, reproduce and live happily and easily in the forests that the planet provides them. Humans take years to painstakingly build roads over mountains. Hominoids just climb straight up said mountains.
Humans don't live anything like Hominoids, but we've been trying to track them their way, in their environment, on foot, where none of our modern conveniences, farms or roads exist. And we wonder why we can't find them.
We don't have the physiology to match theirs, and without some type of cooperative survival practices with other humans, we cannot keep up with them. Ecological niches, like where the panda lives, are perfect examples of why Hominoids may dwell in total self sufficiency, and completely out of the average range of humans.
Gathering evidence
The first photographic evidence of the existence of Hominoids came from an expedition in the Himalayas in 1951. Eric Shipton took a series of images of an alleged trackway produced by a Yeti or Abominable Snowman.
Now, the Himalayan ranges are comprised of an area the size of the United States. The terrain is very uneven and is covered with jagged rock, ice and snow in many places. There have been millions of years for this Hominoid to speciate and for its feet to modify through micro-evolution, so that it can navigate this type of terrain well. The shape of the track of these Hominoids, in this part of the world, totally matches the type of foot it would have to possess in order to walk on that type of terrain.
Tracks are the best evidence we have to date that can be verified, studied and explained through the science of ichnology. This is basically the study of plant and animal traces, and has been less used by the average person in “civilized” countries, since humans don't live much in the wilds of the jungles and forests of the world.
Our ancestors didn't have a choice but to be well-educated about the tracks being made in the environment in which they lived. Their very lives depended on being able to identify the animals in their environment for the purposes of either avoiding predators or being able to hunt for food.
(Source not given)
Showing posts with label hominoid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hominoid. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Ancient legends once walked among early humans?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-06-18-ancient-legends_N.htm
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads — have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?
Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.
But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.
Wild people?
Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.
Heaney notes that legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries. "The reports of wild men, although having typical mythic overtones, do often reflect what we know of primitive hominins," Heaney says, by e-mail. "The presumed almases of Central Asia could be any one of a number of pre-(homo) sapien ancestors."
What about their gold-mine-guarding griffon foes? In a 1993 companion piece to a look at the Arismaspians by Heaney, Stanford historianAdrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, suggested their legend sprang from dinosaur bones unearthed by nomads in their travels across the steppes of Western Mongolia.
"That region could well be Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) in western Mongolia and environs, where I have wandered many long days and have seen ancient and contemporary small gold mines," says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, who calls a dinosaur-bone origin for griffon stories reasonable. But as for Arimaspians being the same as the newly-discovered archaic humans, Davis-Kimball has pretty strong doubts.
"We have excavated Bronze Age hunters and gatherers and small villagers along the Eurasian rivers — these were the people that precede the nomads by a 1,000 or maybe even many more years. I've seen lots of skeletons from many locales in my travels from Hungary to Mongolia, but none that correlates with this new hominid line or with the one-eyed Arimaspians," Davis-Kimball says, by e-mail. "It's too difficult for me to believe that hominids living 1,000,000 years ago could be perpetuated in a myth to the time of Herodotus or about 450 BC."
Another explanation came in a 2008 Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia journal study by Dima Cheremisin of the Russian Academy of Sciences who looked at the ancient Pazyryk tribe of Siberia, an Iron Age tribe whose burial mounds dot the Altai Mountains. "The mythical griffon is the most popular figure in Pazyryk art, suggesting that the Pazyryk people maybe identified with the 'griffons guarding gold,' mentioned by Aristeas and Herodotus," Cheremisin noted.
And cryptozoologists, who make a study of legendary creatures, have offered similar archaic human explanations in the past for sightings of the Yeti or Bigfoot. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of modern cryptozoology, theorized in the 1980's that such sightings of the wild people could be based on ancestral memories of Neanderthals.
Of course, it does turn out that people seem to have interbred with Neanderthals, according to a May Science magazine report led by Svante Pääbo, a long-time ancient genome researcher who also was a co-author on the Denisova Cave discovery report. More than 50,000 years ago, most likely in the Near East, intermingling of early modern humans and Neanderthals led to modern-day Europeans and Asians typically having a genome that is 1- 4% Neanderthal, according to the study.
Such interbreeding is another staple of old stories. Hercules, the hero of Greek myths, walked around in a lion skin with a club over his shoulders and was wondrously strong, a bit like a Neanderthal, due to half-divine parentage.
Even the Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children.
"These stories go back millennia, but they don't go back that far," says biblical archaeologist Robert Cargill of UCLA. "There's no way that the author of the Book of Genesis had in mind Neanderthals." Most likely, ancient people were trying to explain the origin of tall people, Cargil says, and pointing back to a time when things were so bad that even semi-divine creatures were misbehaving.
Of course, it's fun to speculate. After all, researchers in 2003 discovered another human species, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbits" for their puny stature about three feet tall, who died out perhaps 12,000 years ago in Indonesia.
So we have hobbits, giants, and possibly cyclopean wild men, running around in prehistory. It's not quite The Lord of the Rings, but we can certainly forgive Herodotus for some of his taller tales.
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads — have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?
Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.
But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.
Wild people?
Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.
Heaney notes that legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries. "The reports of wild men, although having typical mythic overtones, do often reflect what we know of primitive hominins," Heaney says, by e-mail. "The presumed almases of Central Asia could be any one of a number of pre-(homo) sapien ancestors."
What about their gold-mine-guarding griffon foes? In a 1993 companion piece to a look at the Arismaspians by Heaney, Stanford historianAdrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, suggested their legend sprang from dinosaur bones unearthed by nomads in their travels across the steppes of Western Mongolia.
"That region could well be Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) in western Mongolia and environs, where I have wandered many long days and have seen ancient and contemporary small gold mines," says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, who calls a dinosaur-bone origin for griffon stories reasonable. But as for Arimaspians being the same as the newly-discovered archaic humans, Davis-Kimball has pretty strong doubts.
"We have excavated Bronze Age hunters and gatherers and small villagers along the Eurasian rivers — these were the people that precede the nomads by a 1,000 or maybe even many more years. I've seen lots of skeletons from many locales in my travels from Hungary to Mongolia, but none that correlates with this new hominid line or with the one-eyed Arimaspians," Davis-Kimball says, by e-mail. "It's too difficult for me to believe that hominids living 1,000,000 years ago could be perpetuated in a myth to the time of Herodotus or about 450 BC."
Another explanation came in a 2008 Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia journal study by Dima Cheremisin of the Russian Academy of Sciences who looked at the ancient Pazyryk tribe of Siberia, an Iron Age tribe whose burial mounds dot the Altai Mountains. "The mythical griffon is the most popular figure in Pazyryk art, suggesting that the Pazyryk people maybe identified with the 'griffons guarding gold,' mentioned by Aristeas and Herodotus," Cheremisin noted.
And cryptozoologists, who make a study of legendary creatures, have offered similar archaic human explanations in the past for sightings of the Yeti or Bigfoot. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of modern cryptozoology, theorized in the 1980's that such sightings of the wild people could be based on ancestral memories of Neanderthals.
Of course, it does turn out that people seem to have interbred with Neanderthals, according to a May Science magazine report led by Svante Pääbo, a long-time ancient genome researcher who also was a co-author on the Denisova Cave discovery report. More than 50,000 years ago, most likely in the Near East, intermingling of early modern humans and Neanderthals led to modern-day Europeans and Asians typically having a genome that is 1- 4% Neanderthal, according to the study.
Such interbreeding is another staple of old stories. Hercules, the hero of Greek myths, walked around in a lion skin with a club over his shoulders and was wondrously strong, a bit like a Neanderthal, due to half-divine parentage.
Even the Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children.
"These stories go back millennia, but they don't go back that far," says biblical archaeologist Robert Cargill of UCLA. "There's no way that the author of the Book of Genesis had in mind Neanderthals." Most likely, ancient people were trying to explain the origin of tall people, Cargil says, and pointing back to a time when things were so bad that even semi-divine creatures were misbehaving.
Of course, it's fun to speculate. After all, researchers in 2003 discovered another human species, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbits" for their puny stature about three feet tall, who died out perhaps 12,000 years ago in Indonesia.
So we have hobbits, giants, and possibly cyclopean wild men, running around in prehistory. It's not quite The Lord of the Rings, but we can certainly forgive Herodotus for some of his taller tales.
Monday, 29 March 2010
Neanderthal may not be the oldest Dutchman
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/neanderthal-may-not-be-oldest-dutchman
Neanderthal may not be the oldest Dutchman
Published on : 26 March 2010 - 4:48pm
By Henk-Sjoerd Oosterhoff
People may well have been roaming the land we now call the Netherlands for far longer than was assumed until recently. There is evidence to suggest that the country was home to the forebears of the Neanderthals. Amateur archaeologist Pieter Stoel found materials used by the oldest inhabitants in the central town of Woerden. These artefacts were shown to be at least 370,000 years old, which takes us back to long before the time of the Neanderthals.
Our ancient forebears are often described as cavemen but that is not entirely accurate. There were no caves in this environment, explains Pieter Stoel:
"No, they cannot be specifically described as cave dwellers. There were no caves here in the Low Countries. They can best be described as people who travelled through the country along the rivers, where they could easily hunt the animals that came to the water to drink. At the time when they possibly roamed the Netherlands, the North Sea was dry, which would have enabled them to walk to England for example."
Unique
Pieter Stoel is an amateur archaeologist. For 14 years, he has conducted research in his spare time, alongside his day job as high school physics and chemistry teacher. But next year he intends to leave the classroom behind him and focus completely on his research. He describes the find in Woerden as unique.
"It consists of splinters and cores of flint. There are no hand axes, as they were not used by this culture. These items were sucked out of a sump pit at a depth of between 27 and 36 metres."
Research institute TNO has studied the layers of soil and determined the age of the objects raised during the dredging work. The remarkable conclusion is that they are at least 370,000 years old.
"That's a record. They may even be up to 600,000 years old, but that's something we have yet to prove."
Follow-up research is needed to show whether the artefacts actually come from the layers at the bottom of the pit or whether they were shifted by the dredging work. A layer by layer study is now being carried out to see which artefacts are located where.
"We are still awaiting conclusive evidence."
Rewriting history
A similar find has already been made in the British town of Pakefield. This makes sense given that Pakefield and Woerden are only 225 kilometres apart as the crow flies. During that period, the two countries were not separated by the sea. It could well be that the forebears of the Neanderthals walked from Woerden to Pakefield.
"It was a pleasant enough climate and all they had to do was follow the Meuse and the Rhine."
Pieter Stoel's discovery may end up rewriting history. Until now, the assumption was that the ancestors of the Dutch walked from France to England and only arrived in the Netherlands at a later date. But the archaeologist now thinks the opposite might be just as plausible.
"There may even have been various migration flows. There may well have been people who made hand axes and who migrated from France to England. But it is also plausible that people whose culture did not include the hand axe arrived in England from Europe, via Germany and the Netherlands."
Homo sapiens
Pieter Stoel stops short of concluding that the British are therefore descended from the Dutch. It could be the case, but all things are relative. The archaeologist is quick to add that we - Homo sapiens- ultimately originate from Africa.
Neanderthal may not be the oldest Dutchman
Published on : 26 March 2010 - 4:48pm
By Henk-Sjoerd Oosterhoff
People may well have been roaming the land we now call the Netherlands for far longer than was assumed until recently. There is evidence to suggest that the country was home to the forebears of the Neanderthals. Amateur archaeologist Pieter Stoel found materials used by the oldest inhabitants in the central town of Woerden. These artefacts were shown to be at least 370,000 years old, which takes us back to long before the time of the Neanderthals.
Our ancient forebears are often described as cavemen but that is not entirely accurate. There were no caves in this environment, explains Pieter Stoel:
"No, they cannot be specifically described as cave dwellers. There were no caves here in the Low Countries. They can best be described as people who travelled through the country along the rivers, where they could easily hunt the animals that came to the water to drink. At the time when they possibly roamed the Netherlands, the North Sea was dry, which would have enabled them to walk to England for example."
Unique
Pieter Stoel is an amateur archaeologist. For 14 years, he has conducted research in his spare time, alongside his day job as high school physics and chemistry teacher. But next year he intends to leave the classroom behind him and focus completely on his research. He describes the find in Woerden as unique.
"It consists of splinters and cores of flint. There are no hand axes, as they were not used by this culture. These items were sucked out of a sump pit at a depth of between 27 and 36 metres."
Research institute TNO has studied the layers of soil and determined the age of the objects raised during the dredging work. The remarkable conclusion is that they are at least 370,000 years old.
"That's a record. They may even be up to 600,000 years old, but that's something we have yet to prove."
Follow-up research is needed to show whether the artefacts actually come from the layers at the bottom of the pit or whether they were shifted by the dredging work. A layer by layer study is now being carried out to see which artefacts are located where.
"We are still awaiting conclusive evidence."
Rewriting history
A similar find has already been made in the British town of Pakefield. This makes sense given that Pakefield and Woerden are only 225 kilometres apart as the crow flies. During that period, the two countries were not separated by the sea. It could well be that the forebears of the Neanderthals walked from Woerden to Pakefield.
"It was a pleasant enough climate and all they had to do was follow the Meuse and the Rhine."
Pieter Stoel's discovery may end up rewriting history. Until now, the assumption was that the ancestors of the Dutch walked from France to England and only arrived in the Netherlands at a later date. But the archaeologist now thinks the opposite might be just as plausible.
"There may even have been various migration flows. There may well have been people who made hand axes and who migrated from France to England. But it is also plausible that people whose culture did not include the hand axe arrived in England from Europe, via Germany and the Netherlands."
Homo sapiens
Pieter Stoel stops short of concluding that the British are therefore descended from the Dutch. It could be the case, but all things are relative. The archaeologist is quick to add that we - Homo sapiens- ultimately originate from Africa.
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Lluc, Anoiapithecus brevirostris, A New Hominoid Species from Abocador de Can Mata, Spain
June 2, 2009
By way of Afarensis is news of a new Middle Miocene hominoid species found from the Abocador de Can Mata site in Spain. It is classified as a great ape with many afropithecid and several kenyapithecine features which I’ll give an overview of in a bit. Furthermore, the specimen, IPS43000, is 11.9 million years old, dated via magnetostratigraphic series and associated fauna from the strata it was recovered in.
The authors have published the paper in the journal PNAS under the title, “A unique Middle Miocene European hominoid and the origins of the great ape and human clade.”
What’s unique about this hominoid, aptly named Lluc or enlightenment in Latin, is that it has a very modern face… In other words it’s got a reduced facial prognathism. The specimen includes a fragmented cranium that with most of the face preserved and the associated mandible. While the muzzle of Lluc is so reduced that only find comparable values within the genus Homo, Lluc’s got an array of primitive features, such as super thick dental enamel and teeth with bulbar cusps. The mandible is also very robust. All of which are characteristics of afropithecids — primitive hominoids from the African Middle Miocene.
But other more derived features, like the forward positioning of the zygomatic bone and a bold mandibular torus along with a a reduction in the maxillary sinus, are shared only with the kenyapithecines. Kenyapithecines are a group of apes that ever dispersed outside the African continent and colonized the Mediterranean region, by about 15 million years ago, and are collectively grouped in the genera Kenyapithecus and Griphopithecus.
Ultimately, you can see how this specimen (IPS43000), Anoiapithecus brevirostris, has a combined a set of features that until now had never been found from the fossil record. The array of features allows us enables to identify two possibilities to be the ancestral form to our family (Kenyapithecus and Griphopithecus). The authors take a leap of faith here arguing that when one takes into account that these two genera cannot be considered members of the family Hominidae yet, because they lack its basic diagnostic features, they find it obvious that the origin of our family is a phenomenon that took place on the Mediterranean region during the time span comprised between their arrival from Africa by about 15 Ma, and about 13 Ma, when we began to find in els Hostalets the first members of our family.
- Moya-Sola, S., Alba, D., Almecija, S., Casanovas-Vilar, I., Kohler, M., De Esteban-Trivigno, S., Robles, J., Galindo, J., & Fortuny, J. (2009). A unique Middle Miocene European hominoid and the origins of the great ape and human clade Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811730106
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
