Ardi - Cousin Of The 'Missing Link' - Named Scientific Breakthrough Of 2009

Breakthrough of the Year Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

The discovery of a short, ape like creature, that lived more than four million years ago just as humans began walking on two legs was the most important breakthrough of the year, according to one of the most prestigious science magazines.

Ardi - a seven stone, four-foot tall female who roamed African forests 4.4million years ago- was the oldest member of the human family tree found so far, pre-dating the previous ancestor "Lucy" by a million years.

Her discovery, reported in October, sheds light on a crucial period when we were just leaving the trees.

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3-D Renderings Bring Ancient Hominids to Life

From Wired Science:

For decades, paleoartists have told the story of human evolution through sculpture and drawing. Now their tools have evolved, too.

Computers allow a level of detail and control that isn’t possible with other media. Their creations can come closer than ever to bringing our ancestors to life.

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Human Origins: Our Crazy Family Tree

The first specimen of Paranthropus boisei, also called Nutcracker Man, was reported by Mary and Louis Leakey in 1959 from a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.

From Live Science:

As the only remaining primate built to stride the world on two legs, it would be easy to assume that our extinct relatives were much like us, if perhaps hairier with smaller brains.

But fossils reveal evolution could take our relatives in bizarre directions, involving skulls resembling nutcrackers and miniature bodies resembling the hobbits of Lord of The Rings.

"These fossils tell us that human evolution was a long process of experimentation, not the outcome of a long process of fine-tuning leading just to us," said paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

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Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

Image: A fossil discovery suggests humans may be descended from an animal that resembles present-day lemurs like this one. AP Photo/Karen Tam

From The Wall Street Journal:

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar.

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African Tribe Populated Rest Of The World

From The Telegraph:

The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.

Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

Genetic analysis of modern day human populations in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and South America have revealed that they are all descended from these common ancestors.

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The First European: Created From Fragments Of Fossil, The Face Of Our Forbears 35,000 Years Ago

The first modern European: Forensic artist Richard Neave reconstructed the face based on skull fragments from 35,000 years ago

From Daily Mail:

Dressed in a suit, this person would not look out of place in a busy street in a modern city.

The clay sculpture, however, portrays the face of the earliest known modern European - a man or woman who hunted deer and gathered fruit and herbs in ancient forests more than 35,000 years ago.

It was created by Richard Neave, one of Britain's leading forensic scientists, using fossilised fragments of skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago.

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Meet The Ancestors: DNA Study Pinpoints Namibia As Home To The World's Most Ancient Race

The San people, hunter-gatherers in south-west Africa for thousands of years, are believed to be the oldest population of humans on Earth

From The Daily Mail:

Scientists have long known that humans originated in Africa, but now a groundbreaking DNA study has revealed our 'Garden of Eden' is likely to be on the South African-Namibian border.

For it is the San people, hunter-gatherers in this area for thousands of years, who researchers now believe are the oldest human population on Earth.

They are descended from the earliest human ancestors from which all other groups of Africans stem and, in turn, to the people who left the continent to populate other corners of the planet.

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Deformed Skull Suggests Human Ancestors Had Compassion

A newly reconstructed deformed fossil skull suggests our human ancestors probably cared for deformed offspring for years.

From Wired Science:

The skull indicates that the child who lived about 530,000 years ago would have been severely handicapped — and yet survived at least five years and possibly several years longer. That suggests the parents or community provided the child with care, despite his or her obvious deformities.

"Her/his pathological condition was not an impediment to receiv[ing] the same attention as any other Middle Pleistocene Homo child," the the team of Spanish researchers write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Hobbit Skeleton Replica Goes On Display

Image: Artist's rendition of Homo floresiensis. Credit: National Geographic Society/ Peter Schouten

From Live Science:

A cast of a "hobbit" skeleton will go on public display for the first time as part of a human evolution symposium April 21 on Long Island, New York.

The hobbit fossils (and near fossils) were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Some scientists think the discovery represents a new species of human. Others argue it was human like us, only with a disorder called microcephaly which gave it an unusually small head.

The skeleton is set to go on display at Stony Brook University's Staller Center for the Arts as part of the 7th Human Evolution Symposium there.

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'Peking Man' Older Than Thought; Somehow Adapted To Cold

Darryl Granger, a Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, stands with the accelerator mass spectrometer used in a study that determined the age of "Peking Man" was around 200,000 years older than previously thought. Purdue is the only university in the nation with an accelerator mass spectrometer powerful enough to perform the type of testing used in this study. (Credit: Purdue News Service photo/Andrew Hancock)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2009) — A new dating method has found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting he somehow adapted to the cold of a mild glacial period.

A dating method developed by a Purdue University researcher allowed a more accurate determination of the age of the Zhoukoudian, China, site of remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man." The site was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old. Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old.

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The Shoe Fits! 1.5 Million-Year-Old Human Footprints Found

A photograph of the footprint's upper footprint surface showing good definition of the toe pads; the second toe is partially obscured by the third toe. Credit: Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University

From Live Science:

Early humans had feet like ours and left lasting impressions in the form of 1.5 million-year-old footprints, some of which were made by feet that could wear a size 9 men's shoe.

The findings at a Northern Kenya site represent the oldest evidence of modern-human foot anatomy. They also help tell an ancestral story of humans who had fully transitioned from tree-dwellers to land walkers.

"In a sense, it's like putting flesh on the bones," said John Harris, an anthropologist with the Koobi Fora Field School of Rutgers University. "The prints are so well preserved ."

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Why Did Humans Migrate To The Americas?

From nps.org

From Live Science:

The Americas were the last (well, second-to-last if you count Antarctica) continents to be inhabited by early humans. Archaeologists estimate that people entered North America by crossing over the Bering Strait, which back then was a wide swath of land, about 15,000 years ago.

In other words, people got here by walking a very long distance.

Our image of this major migration is fanciful. When I teach about the peopling of the Americas, I show a slide of people purposefully trekking in a straight line on a tundra from Siberia to Alaska, as if there was some destination on the other side and the only way to get there was to follow the leader, one behind the other.

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If Climate Didn't Doom Neanderthals, Did Humans?

A map of Europe and part of the Middle East depicts the approximate range of the Neanderthals as provided by Richard Klein. The illustration below demonstrates some of the differences in the skulls between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Illustration copyright Richard Klein (Image from National Geographic)

From Wired News:

Neanderthals could handle the weather, but they couldn't handle us, concludes a new analysis of late-Pleistocene hominid habitation.

Soon after modern humans arrived in Western Europe, plenty of temperate, food-rich habitat existed for our evolutionary near-brothers — but their settlements dwindled, and modern human settlements spread.

These patterns suggest that one of modern anthropological history's great mysteries had a harsh ending: a competition in which Neanderthals, for reasons still unknown, were doomed.

"Neanderthals didn't end up being the champion lineage that emerged from the end of the Pleistocene," said study co-author A. Townsend Peterson, a Kansas University evolutionary biologist. "Wouldn't it be fascinating to understand that weird point in human history, when there were two lineages of Homo, in the same region?"

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European Neanderthals Had Ginger Hair And Freckles

The gene known as MC1R suggests the Neanderthals had
fair skin and even freckles like redheads.

From The Telegraph:

Neanderthals living in Europe were fair skinned, freckled and had ginger hair, a study has revealed.

In a major breakthrough, Spanish scientists have discovered the blood group and two other genes of the early humans who lived 43,000 ago.

After analysing the fossil bones found in a cave in north-west Spain, the experts concluded they had human blood group "O" and were genetically more likely to be fair skinned, perhaps even with freckles, have red or ginger hair and could talk.

The investigating team from Spain's government scientific institute, CSIC, used the very latest forensic techniques to remove the bones for analysis to prevent them getting contaminated with modern DNA.

Carles Lalueza, an evolutionary biologist with the investigation, said: "What we were trying to do was to create the most realistic image of the Neanderthals with details that are not visible in the fossils, but which form part of their identity."

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Prehistoric Family Values

Together in death. Genetic analysis suggests that a mother, a father, and their two boys were buried in the same grave. Credit: Photo courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences

From Science Magazine:

When Barack Obama moves into the White House in January, he'll bring his wife and children with him. The nuclear family is not only as American as apple pie but also the cultural norm in most societies across the world. New genetic and chemical analyses of 4600-year-old burials in Germany suggests that family togetherness has deep roots, going back at least as far the beginnings of agriculture in Europe.

Before humans settled down and began to farm, they lived as nomadic hunters and gatherers. Many anthropologists have assumed, based on observations of sometimes polygamous modern-day hunter-gatherers, that the basic social unit of early humans was the band or tribe rather than the family. Figuring out when the nuclear family became central to human social organization has been difficult. Archaeologists have dug up thousands of skeletons at early farming sites across the Near East and Europe, and many of them are buried together in ways that might suggest family ties.

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Earliest Known Human Had Neanderthal Qualities

This map shows the Kibish Formation site, where the fossils of the earliest modern human were found. The site is located in southwest Ethiopia. (From Discovery)

From Discovery:

Aug. 22, 2008 -- The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by multiple international research teams.

The extraordinary findings, which will soon be outlined in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution devoted to the first known Homo sapiens, also reveal information about the material culture of the first known people, their surroundings, possible lifestyle and, perhaps most startling, their probable neighbors -- Homo erectus.

"Omo I," as the researchers refer to the find, would probably have been considered healthy-looking and handsome by today's standards, despite the touch of Neanderthal.

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New Evidence Provides An Alternative Route 'Out Of Africa' For Early Humans

A generalized map of the Sahara shows the location of the sample sites and the fossilized river courses. (Credit: Anne Osborne)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The widely held belief that the Nile valley was the most likely route out of sub-Saharan Africa for early modern humans 120,000 year ago is challenged in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team led by the University of Bristol shows that wetter conditions reached a lot further north than previously thought, providing a wet 'corridor' through Libya for early human migrations. The results also help explain inconsistencies between archaeological finds.

While it is widely accepted that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa 150-200 thousand years ago, their route of dispersal across the hyper-arid Sahara remains controversial. The Sahara covers most of North Africa and to cross it on foot would be a serious undertaking, even today with the most advanced equipment.

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Controversy About Our Ancestors

A sculptor's rendering, part of an exhibit focusing on the 3.2-million-
year-old hominid called Lucy, shows how she might have looked in life.
(Photo: Dave Einsel / Getty Images file)

Puzzling Over Pre-Humans -- Cosmic Log/MSNBC

The world’s best-known skeleton of a human ancestor - whose name, "Lucy," came from a Beatles song - now lies splayed out in Seattle's Pacific Science Center like ornaments in a glass jewelry case. Or, more aptly, like 3.2-million-year-old pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Anthropologists are still working on the puzzles about human origins that have been posed by Lucy and other fossils, including a major find that was made just a couple of miles away from the place where Lucy was found 34 years ago.

The long-running mystery surrounding the "First Family" - a grouping of fossil bones representing up to 17 of Lucy's kin from Ethiopia's Afar region - is just one of the many unresolved plot threads in the scientific story about our long-ago ancestors.

"Lucy's Legacy," an exhibition that began its Seattle run last weekend, recaps the story so far. The traveling exhibit made news last year when it came to the Houston Museum of Natural History, because it represented the first time the Ethiopian government allowed Lucy's skeleton to be displayed abroad. Since then, the cultural controversy has settled down - but scientific controversies continue.

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Earliest Known Human Had Neanderthal Qualities

This map shows the Kibish Formation site, where the fossils of the earliest modern human were found. The site is located in southwest Ethiopia. (Photo from Discover)

From Discover:

Aug. 22, 2008 -- The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by multiple international research teams.

The extraordinary findings, which will soon be outlined in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution devoted to the first known Homo sapiens, also reveal information about the material culture of the first known people, their surroundings, possible lifestyle and, perhaps most startling, their probable neighbors -- Homo erectus.

"Omo I," as the researchers refer to the find, would probably have been considered healthy-looking and handsome by today's standards, despite the touch of Neanderthal.

Read more ....

Neanderthals Had A Taste For Seafood

The Gibraltar caves from the sea. All have evidence of Neanderthal occupation.
Photograph: Natural History Museum, London

From The Guardian - Science:

The last of the Neanderthals feasted on warmed mussels, baby seals and washed-up dolphins, according to fossil hunters working in ancient seaside caves in Gibraltar.

Excavations in the giant Gorham's and Vanguard caves on the Rock's eastern flank unearthed flint stone tools and remnants of seafood meals alongside the long-dead embers of hearths, which have been carbon-dated to around 28,000 years ago.

The findings suggest that Neanderthals who lived in the caves exploited the plentiful resources that the Mediterranean shoreline provided, and may help explain why groups living in Gibraltar clung on to life while those elsewhere became extinct around 7,000 years earlier.

An international team led by Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London and Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum uncovered bones and shells that had clearly been butchered with primitive cutting and stripping tools.

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