Posted on 06/19/2016 7:15:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Maltese prehistory may have just been extended by 30,000 years.
The verdict of experts from the London Natural History Museum has revived the theory that a tooth discovered in Għar Dalam in 1917 may prove Neanderthals once roamed the island.
The claim is not new. It was made in the 1920s by two British anthropologists, but four decades later the theory no longer had credence.
Anyone who wrote a history book from 1964 till today will say there were never any Neanderthals on Malta. According to them, the first people to come here were Sicilian farmers around 7,000 years ago, said Anton Mifsud, a retired pediatrician and avid archaeology buff.
Well, the presence of Neanderthals pushes that back some 30,000 years. Its a complete game changer, he told the Sunday Times of Malta yesterday. Dr Mifsud believes features recently identified as being exclusively Neanderthal by international experts are present in at least one molar found during the dig in Għar Dalam in 1917.
With their distinctly receding forehead and prominent brow, Neanderthals are our closest extinct human relatives, dating as far back as 300,000 years ago.
In a recently published book entitled Dossier Malta Neanderthal Dr Mifsud lays out his study of the crowns of these teeth using the same principles adopted by world leaders in the field of geometric morphometrics the quantitative analysis of shapes and sizes in nature....
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofmalta.com ...
A problem with the truth, your silliness notwithstanding.
If there is skewed orthogonality, you’ve got it.
I prefer a perpendicular one.
Ok. “Meh” and enough, as a few others are wont to reply......
Interesting. They apparently had poor border control.
Wasn’t Malta connected to the mainland when ice age sea levels were lower?
Thanks To Hell With Poverty.
up to 17 times, but it’s been quite a while.
http://www.shadowservices.com/nature/Maltese/Geomorph/geograp.htm
What a sweetie!
Thank you, he really is. I haven't told him yet that he's a Neanderthal...I hope he won't be too upset.
I was reading something about Malta, and it said that thousands of skulls were found in a “temple”, but authorities in the last centuries threw them all out.
During the ice age the Malta islands would have been much larger before the Atlantic rushed through Gibralter and some of the now separate islands would have been strung together.
http://tinyurl.com/hrqbb7w
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