Free Republic

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has set Oct. 28 as the date for House Republicans to select their nominee for his replacement, with the full chamber voting on Oct. 29, Republican Representative John Mica of Florida said on Wednesday.

Forty-seven smooth teeth dug out of a cave in southern China reveal that Homo sapiens may have arrived there 80,000 years ago...The findings, published this week in the journal Nature, may compel researchers to reconsider their theories about human migrations out of Africa.

This statement isn't new, but for years anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of art understood these artistic manifestations as purely aesthetic and decorative motives. Eduardo Palacio-Pérez, researcher at the University of Cantabria (UC), now reveals the origins of a theory that remains nowadays/lasts into our days. "This theory is does not originate with the prehistorians, in other words, those who started to develop the idea that the art of primitive peoples was linked with beliefs of a symbolic-religious nature were the anthropologists"... This idea appeared at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. Up until...

New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.Neanderthals survived in Europe through a number of ice ages and died out only about 30,000 years ago. The site at La Cotte de St Brelade reveals a near-continuous use of the cave site spanning over a quarter of a million years, suggesting a considerable success story in adapting to a changing climate and landscape, prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens. New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led...

Jerusalem Burial Cave Reveals:Names, Testimonies of First Christiansby Jean Gilman JERUSALEM, Israel - Does your heart quicken when you hear someone give a personal testimony about Jesus? Do you feel excited when you read about the ways the Lord has worked in someone's life? The first century catacomb, uncovered by archaeologist P. Bagatti on the Mount of Olives, contains inscriptions clearly indicating its use, "by the very first Christians in Jerusalem."If you know the feeling of genuine excitement about the workings of the Lord, then you will be ecstatic to learn that archaeologists have found first-century dedications with the names...

A close up of one of the stalagmites analyzed in the study. Credit: Jud Partin When Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Kim Cobb and graduate student Jud Partin wanted to understand the mechanisms that drove the abrupt climate change events that occurred thousands of years ago, they didn't drill for ice cores from the glaciers of Greenland or the icy plains of Antarctica, as is customary for paleoclimatolgists. Instead, they went underground. Growing inside the caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo are some of the keys to understanding how the Earth's climate suddenly changed - several times -...

In 2008, archeologists working at the Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains discovered a tiny piece of a finger bone, believed to be a pinky, buried with ornaments in the cave. Scientists extracted the mitochondrial DNA (genetic material from the mother’s side) from the ancient bone and checked to see if its genetic code matched with the other two known forms of early hominids–Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans. What they found was a real surprise. The team, led by geneticist Svaante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute, discovered that the mtDNA from the finger bone matched neither–suggesting there...

Reference Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003. Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701. What was done In the words of the authors, "high-resolution records of ð13C and ð18O in stalagmite SF-1 from Buddha Cave [33°40'N, 109°05'E] are used to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." What was learned Among the climatic episodes evident in the authors' data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and...

YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD of the Stone Age diet craze known as the Paleolithic Diet, made popular most recently by Dr. Loren Cordain's best-seller The Paleo Diet. The premise is simple: If our early human ancestors couldn't have eaten it, we shouldn't, either. It's the one time, it seems, that being like a caveman is a good thing. The theory goes (and archaeological evidence corroborates) that early hunter-gatherers, while they may not have lived as long, still had some major health advantages on most of us modern humans. They were much taller, averaging 6-foot-5 to our 5-foot-11; had stronger, heavier bones;...

Bronze Age rock carving depicts a Mediterranean style boat. Above: A graphic representation of the Auga dos Cebros petroglyph, showing the obvious boat feature at the bottom. This image is a screenshot of the same as depicted in the YouTube video (see below). =================================================================================================================== A unique petroglyph discovered near the Atlantic coast of northern Spain has provided evidence that contacts between ancient Atlantic cultures and contemporaneous cultures of the Mediterranean were earlier and perhaps more intense than previously thought. The rock art panel, located in the Costa dos Castros region and known as Auga dos Cebros, depicts a boat with...

<p>Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?</p> <p>Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday.</p> <p>The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.</p>

Ancient Human Behavior Uncovered Article Date: 24 Jun 2007 - 4:00 PDT A major question in evolutionary studies today is how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern" One index of 'behavioural modernity' is in the appearance of objects used purely as decoration or ornaments. Such items are widely regarded as having symbolic rather than practical value. By displaying them on the body as necklaces, pendants or bracelets or attached to clothing this also greatly increased their visual impact. The appearance of ornaments may be linked to a growing sense of...

Gideon Hartman of the University of Connecticut and colleagues from an international group of universities and research institutions came to this conclusion by reconstructing the hunting ranges of Neanderthals who occupied the cave at two distinct Ice Age occupational phases separated by about 10,000 years. The first phase occurred during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 (71,000-129,000 years ago), and the second occurred during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (57,000-70,000 years ago). They analyzed the comparison of oxygen, carbon, and strontium isotope samples from the tooth enamel of excavated gazelle remains with modern isotope data from the Amud Cave region. What they...

Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans and possibly interbred with them, according to new research. Stone axes and sharp flint arrowheads of both branches of the human race have been discovered in limestone caves in northern Israel. The findings, reported in the Times, have led archeologists to believe the two sub-species found harmony in a coastal mountain range that today is in a state of war with its neighbours...

In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor -- or close relative -- of Neandertals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neandertals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution. Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals...

Fossil remains show the merging of Neandertals, modern humans By Neil Schoenherr The early modern human remains from the Pestera Muierii (Cave of the Old Woman), Romania, which were discovered in 1952, have been poorly dated and largely ignored. But recently, a team of researchers from the Anthropological and Archaeological Institutes in Bucharest, Romania, and from WUSTL has been able to directly date the fossils to 30,000 years ago. The fossils prove that a strict population replacement of the Neandertals did not happen. "What these fossils show is that these earliest modern humans had a mosaic of distinctly modern human...

A 16-year-old French volunteer archaeologist has found an adult tooth dating back around 560,000 years in southwestern France, in what researchers hailed as a "major discovery" Tuesday. "A large adult tooth—we can't say if it was from a male or female—was found during excavations of soil we know to be between 550,000 and 580,000 years old, because we used different dating methods," paleoanthropologist Amelie Viallet told AFP. "This is a major discovery because we have very few human fossils from this period in Europe," she said. The tooth was found in the Arago cave near the village of Tautavel, one...

Thousands of years ago, a human -- probably hungry and right-handed -- found an old spear point amid these low hills and re-shaped it. Last week [in 2013] University of Cincinnati student Liz Ceddia found it again: flaked in a distinctive pattern and still sharp enough to break skin... The students are working with Ken Tankersley, a University of Cincinnati archaeology professor who first visited the area as a child. He keeps coming back to seek evidence of how climate change affects area flora and fauna. It's one of his major areas of research. Big Bone Lick State Park --...

When People Fled Hyenas By Lee Dye Special to ABCNEWS.com Nov. 20 — Deep inside a cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains, Christy Turner and his Russian colleagues may have found an answer to a question that has hounded him for more than three decades. As a young anthropologist, Turner spent time in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1970s, working at several archaeological sites and occasionally gazing westward toward Siberia. "I thought, 'That's the place that Native Americans came from,' " he says now from his laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe. But why, he wondered then as he still...

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1249418627506&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull "Then Moses and the elders of Israel charged all the people as follows: 'Keep the entire commandment that I am commanding you today. On the day that you cross over the Jordan into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall set up great stones and cover them with plaster. You shall write on them all the words of this law when you have crossed over." (Deuteronomy 27:1-3). Rubble on floor may have fallen from the ceiling during earthquakes since the cavern was fashioned. Built on the foundations of an ancient Byzantine church, the Greek...