Lost Civilisations Tens Of Thousands Of Years Old Discovered In India's Western State Of Maharashtra?

BBC: Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation

The discovery of rock carvings believed to be tens of thousands of years old in India's western state of Maharashtra has greatly excited archaeologists who believe they hold clues to a previously unknown civilisation, BBC Marathi's Mayuresh Konnur reports.

The rock carvings - known as petroglyphs - have been discovered in their thousands atop hillocks in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra.

Mostly discovered in the Ratnagiri and Rajapur areas, a majority of the images etched on the rocky, flat hilltops remained unnoticed for thousands of years.

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WNU Editor: This discovery is  raising more questions than answers.

Oldest Evidence Of Violence Between Humans Unearthed In China

Maba "man" took a wallop from something, but lived to fight another day. BBC

Ancient Skull Found In China May Be Oldest Evidence Of Violence Between Humans -- The Telegraph

An ancient skull discovered in China may be the oldest evidence of violence between humans, according to researchers.

A fracture on the right temple of the skull is likely to have been caused by a blow to the side of the head some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

“There are older cases of bumps and bruises and cases of trauma,” said Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis, US, to the BBC.”

But this is the first one I am aware of where the most likely interpretation is getting whooped by someone else – to put it bluntly.”

The skull was unearthed in a cave near Maba in 1958 but its significance only came to light recently.

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More Evidence Of Archaeologists Uncovering Evidence Of Early Human Violence

'Earliest' evidence of human violence -- BBC
Evidence uncovered of world's oldest violent argument -- CBS
The Roots of Violence -- The Scientist
Archaeologists Uncover Evidence Of Early Human Violence -- And Caring -- Forbes
Bashed Skull Is Earliest Evidence of Human Aggression? -- National Geographic

New Theory On The Origin Of Primates

New biogeographic reconstruction of primates, flying lemurs, and tree shrews about 185 millions of years in the early Jurassic. (Credit: Image courtesy of Buffalo Museum of Science)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 20, 2010) — A new model for primate origins is presented in Zoologica Scripta, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The paper argues that the distributions of the major primate groups are correlated with Mesozoic tectonic features and that their respective ranges are congruent with each evolving locally from a widespread ancestor on the supercontinent of Pangea about 185 million years ago.

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Humans Ate Fish 40,000 Years Ago

Chinese fishermen haul in the catch of fish from the frozen Chagan Lake in Songyuan, northeast China's Jilin province on December 25, 2008, at the start of the winter fishing season. Chagan Lake covers an area of 259 square kilometers and is one of the 10 largest freshwater lakes in China, where each winter, fishermen use the ancient method of breaking the ice with wooden stakes before placing their nets to harvest the fish. Getty Images

From Live Science:

At least one of our ancestors regularly ate fish 40,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Scientists analyzed chemical compositions of the protein collagen in an ancient human skeleton from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing to reach their conclusion.

Fishing at this time must have involved considerable effort, the researchers think, because fossil records suggest humans were not using sophisticated tools — beyond crude stone blades — until about 50,000 years ago.

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Oldest Stone Blades Uncovered

Cutting-edge technology. A stone core (lower left) and three of the recently found blades. Credit: Cara Roure Johnson and Sally McBrearty/University of Connecticut

Science Now:

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS--Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old. That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them?

Not long ago, researchers thought that blades were so hard to make that they had to be the handiwork of modern humans, who had evolved the mental wherewithal to systematically strike a cobble in the right way to produce blades and not just crude stone flakes. First, they were thought to be a hallmark of the late Stone Age, which began 40,000 years ago. Later, blades were thought to have emerged in the Middle Stone Age, which began about 200,000 years ago when modern humans arose in Africa and invented a new industry of more sophisticated stone tools. But this view has been challenged in recent years as researchers discovered blades that dated to 380,000 years in the Middle East and to almost 300,000 years ago in Europe, where Neandertals may have made them (ScienceNOW, 1 December 2008).

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Otzi The Prehistoric Iceman Goes Online Allowing Users To Virtually Tour His Body

Otzi has been photographed using 12 different angle-shots

From the Daily Mail:

A Stone Age warrior frozen in an icy tomb for 5,300 years can now be viewed in astonishing detail thanks to a new website.

The Iceman photoscan project took 150,000 high definition images of the perfectly preserved mummy from 12 different angles, which the researchers loaded onto the new website www.icemanphotoscan.eu.

This allows users to zoom into details that are just millimetres wide from the comfort of their living room. They can also view the mummy in 3D and see its distinctive tattoos in both white and UV light.

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How Broken Arm Led Scientists To Genome Of Neanderthals

From McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — It was an unfortunate accident, but a lucky break for modern science.

About 38,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man living in what's now Croatia broke his left arm, forcing him to use his other arm for most tasks. That increased the mass and density of the bone in the upper right arm, and preserved his DNA for researchers — using a dentist's drill — to recover many millennia later.

With that bit of material, along with scraps of DNA collected from half a dozen other Neanderthal fossils, scientists have now completed a rough partial draft of the genome of humans' prehistoric cousins.

The Neanderthals lived for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe and western Asia, but went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They were replaced by Cro-Magnons, the ancestors of modern humans.

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Biodiversity Hotspot Enabled Neanderthals To Survive Longer In South East Of Spain

Photo: Present day landscapes of Gibraltar (above) and reconstructed landscapes of Gibraltar from 30,000 years ago (below). (Credit: Museum of Gibraltar)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

The international team jointly led by Spanish researchers has reconstructed the landscape near Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, by means of paleobotanical data (plant fossil records) located in the geological deposits investigated between 1997 and 2004. The study, which is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews, also re-examines previous findings relating to the glacial refugia for trees during the ice age in the Iberian Peninsula.

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Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

From The Smithsonian:

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization.

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.

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Innovation Linked to Human Migration Out of Africa

Tools such as two-sided spearheads along with engraved objects that are about 71,000 years old are among many ancient human artifacts that researchers say signify high-level communication. The geographic distribution of these objects at nine sites in South Africa suggests innovation—not climate change—may have triggered early humans' migration out of Africa, researchers report in an October 2008 study.

Photograph courtesy Chris Henshilwood (National Geographic)

From National Geographic:

Innovation—not climate change—may have triggered early humans' migration out of Africa, a new study suggests.

For early Homo sapiens, periods of population movement coincided with social advances and tool-making innovation, the work found.

By contrast, human movements didn't match as closely with changes in Africa's climate, such as rainfall variation or other weather issues, as previous research had suggested.

The study authors caution, however, that their work doesn't suggest a specific cause-and-effect relationship.

"We see bursts of migration during a period with technological advances, so technology might have led to the migration," said Zenobia Jacobs, lead researcher from the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Alternatively, migration may have spread new ideas and skills throughout various populations.

"It's like the chicken-and-egg argument—did migration lead to innovation or did innovation stimulate migration?" Jacobs said.

The new study appears today in the journal Science.

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