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Professor Stanley H. Ambrose Department of Anthropology, University Of Illinois, Urbana, USA Extract from "Journey of Human Evolution" [1998] 34, 623-651 The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge...

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments. The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks. The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US. They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some...

The sabretooth tiger may have looked a fearsome sight with its massive canines but its reputation takes something of a knock with a new piece of research. Scientists who have studied the extinct creature's skull in detail say it had a relatively weak bite - compared with, say, a modern lion. And although those fangs must have been amazing killing implements, they made for a very restricted hunting strategy.....

<p>Arch Cape, Oregon) – The mysterious chunks of wood have shown up periodically over the last few decades, sticking out of the sand like doomed creatures trying to make their last, desperate escape from a dreadful fate beneath the rest of the world. They make momentary impressions on passersby, who have no clue to the real meaning of these muted witnesses to an age practically before Mankind. They are unintentional memorials to the grandiose forest that once stood here, now reduced to twisted, tortured shapes that scream silently from another epoch.</p>

Public release date: 19-Feb-2007 Contact: Erin Doonan edoonan@cell.com 617-397-2802 Cell Press DNA analysis reveals rapid population shift among Pleistocene cave bears Studying DNA obtained from teeth of ancient cave bears, researchers have been able to identify a shift in a particular population of the bears inhabiting a European valley in the late Pleistocene era. The findings illustrate the ability of DNA sequence analysis to reveal aspects of animal population dynamics in the distant past and potentially illuminate the influence of human migrations in animal population changes. The new work, reported by a collaborative group of researchers including Michael Hofreiter of...

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday. Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out...

Sorry if this is a repost. Elephants and lions unleashed on North America? 18:00 17 August 2005 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner Elephants, lions, cheetahs and camels could one day roam the western US under a proposal to recreate North American landscapes as they existed more than 13,000 years ago, when humans first encountered them. The plan, proposed in a commentary in Nature and co-authored by 13 ecologists and conservation biologists, would help enrich a North American ecosystem that was left almost devoid of large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene period. It would also help preserve wildlife that...

A bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years has been revived by NASA scientists. Once scientists thawed the ice, the previously undiscovered bacteria started swimming around on the microscope slide. The researchers say it is the first new species of microbe found alive in ancient ice. Now named Carnobacterium pleistocenium, it is thought to have lived in the Pleistocene epoch, a time when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover, who led the team, said the find bolsters the case for finding life elsewhere in the universe, particularly given this week's...

Uncovering Ice Age archaeology in JordanEarly humans hunted large game near now-vanished lakes By Daily Star Staff Tuesday, August 24, 2004 AMMAN: The early prehistory and archaeology of the Middle Pleistocene, or Ice Age, is being revealed in remarkable detail in studies in southern Jordan. The work, begun in the late 1990s, has documented the presence of Homo erectus, our ancient ancestor, at a series of archaeological sites at Ayoun Qedim in the al-Jafr Basin. Today al-Jafr Basin is one of the most arid places in the Middle East. During the Pleistocene, the basin was filled with an enormous freshwater...

As elusive as the Cheshire Cat, the first people to arrive in the Americas have tended to appear and vanish with each new twist in the archaeological record. The latest disappearing act may be taking place on page 501, where new evidence, some claim, casts another shadow over a once-cherished idea: that Asian big-game hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge to give rise to the Clovis people, who were considered the first Americans. New dates show that a crucial Siberian site, thought to be a way station along the Bering road, wasn't occupied until after the Clovis had begun killing...

<p>Humanity's first steps out of Africa along a path that led ultimately to dominion over the earth are subject to intense scientific debate. So is the role played by the Neandertals who roamed across Europe for 100,000 years before quietly disappearing. The two issues may well be related, and a University of Tennessee anthropologist reports statistical evidence that Neandertals and emerging modern humans likely interbred and evolved together.</p>

Big chill killed off the Neanderthals 19:00 21 January 04 It is possibly the longest-running murder mystery of them all. What, or even who, killed humankind's nearest relatives, the Neanderthals who once roamed Europe before dying out almost 30,000 years ago? Suspects have ranged from the climate to humans themselves, and the mystery has deeply divided experts. Now 30 scientists have come together to publish the most definitive answer yet to this enigma. They say Neanderthals simply did not have the technological know-how to survive the increasingly harsh winters. And intriguingly, rather than being Neanderthal killers, the original human settlers...

<p>Washington — A people who may have been ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, enduring one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age, according to researchers who discovered the oldest evidence yet of humans living near the frigid gateway to the New World. Russian scientists uncovered a 30,000-year-old site where ancient hunters lived on the Yana River in Siberia, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering land bridge that then connected Asia with North America.</p>

Public release date: 16-Jun-2004 Contact: Marie Gilbert marie.gilbert@uaf.edu 907-474-7412 University of Alaska Fairbanks Mammoths stranded on Bering Sea island delayed extinction Fossil is first record in the Americas of a mammoth population to have survived the Pleistocene Woolly mammoths stranded on Pribilofs delayed extinction Fossil is first record in the Americas of a mammoth population to have survived the Pleistocene St. Paul, one of the five islands in the Bering Sea Pribilofs, was home to mammoths that survived the extinctions that wiped out mainland and other Bering Sea island mammoth populations. In an article in the June 17, 2004 edition...

PALEONTOLOGICAL TESTIMONY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Pleistocene Extinction Paleontologists the world over know that something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. In fact, well over 200 species of animals (involving millions of individuals) totally disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000-12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the Pleistocene Extinction (Click for table). Moreover, there is evidence of large geological changes which took place, such as massive...

"Jurassic Park" was a work of fiction. Pleistocene Park is in the process of becoming fact. A joint team of Japanese and Russian scientists arrived in the Siberian province of Yakutsk late last month to excavate a number of creatures that have been extinct for millennia -- including mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. They plan to extract DNA from the frozen remains, cross-breed the retrieved nuclei with the creatures' modern-day counterparts and return the resurrected dinosaurs to a vast "safari park" in northern Siberia. "It probably sounds a little far-fetched, but it's absolutely possible to do this," said professor Akira Iritani,...

Interview with Ross MacPhee What killed the mammoths and other behemoths that once roamed the Americas? This mammalogist thinks it may have been hyperlethal disease Image: Clare Flemming Around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, North America witnessed an extinction that claimed its mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and numerous other large-bodied animals. Exactly what happened to these megafauna is unknown. Indeed, researchers have puzzled over their disappearance for decades. Traditional explanations hold that either dramatic climate shifts, or human hunting (overkill) extinguished these species. But in recent years a new hypothesis has emerged. According...