Posted on 05/19/2005 2:44:29 PM PDT by blam
Earliest European 31,000 years old
Agençe France-Presse
Thursday, 19 May 2005
Radiocarbon dating of human remains found in the Czech Republic has confirmed they come from the oldest European found so far (Image: iStockphoto)
Fossilised human bones found in the Czech Republic have been dated back to some 31,000 years, which scientists say confirms them as the oldest known examples of Homo sapiens found in Europe.
Austrian and US scientists publish their carbon-dating results in today's issue of the journal Nature.
An upper jaw, teeth and the skull of a female were found in a cave in Moravia in the 19th century, but scientists have debated how old they are.
University of Vienna researcher Dr Eva Wild and colleagues used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to analyse carbon 14 isotopes in the dental remains.
These isotopes decay at a known rate, allowing scientists to calculate the age of a dead organism.
Wild's team suggests the teeth are about 31,000 radiocarbon years old, a yardstick that can be somewhat different from calendar years.
Radiocarbon years and calendar years tend to diverge and converge at different periods in prehistory, consistent with varying amounts of carbon 14 in the atmosphere.
The discrepancy is significant during this period in prehistory, and calibrating radiocarbon and calendar years is a matter of ongoing research.
How does this relate to Neanderthals?
The fossil's age, as calculated in this latest research, concurs with artefacts from other sites in Europe that have been carbon-dated to the same era.
The finding is important, because it could help solve the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals, a species of hominid that predominated in Europe before anatomically modern man showed up.
One school of thought suggests the Neanderthals were wiped out by the smarter H. sapiens or lost the battle for food and habitat, then simply faded away.
But another theory suggests the two hominid species lived side by side for many thousands of years and may have intermingled, which implies there could be Neanderthal genes in the human gene pool today.
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That's fascinating.
"Just a jolly little reminder that the average brain size of a Neanderthal was larger than that of modern man. Whatever happened to them, we didn't outsmart them."
:') Well said.
similar story.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002280296_humans19.html?syndication=rss
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