Discovery In North China Challenges Theory On Origin Of Man

Xinhuanet ^ | 11-09-2001

[blam]

Archaeological Discovery in N. China Challenges Theory on Origin of Man

Xinhuanet 2001-11-09 16:32:39
SHIJIAZHUANG, November 9 (Xinhuanet)

The latest archaeological discovery at the Old Stone Age ruins in Yangyuan County, north China's Hebei Province, proves that human activities began in east Asia some 2 million years ago, archaeological sources said. Chinese archaeologists unearthed more than 800 stone tools and animal skeletons left over by the ancients at historical ruins in a stratum dating back around 2 million years.

Xie Fei, a research fellow with the Hebei Provincial Relics Research Institute, said that the latest discovery at the Majuangou ruins in the Nihewan Basin proves that the date of the early stage human activities in east Asia is very close to the time of similar ruins discovered in Africa.

Xie, who has conducted archaeological research at Nihewan for 18 years, said that it is a question that deserves discussion among international archaeological circles: whether human beings migrated to east Asia at a fast speed at an early stage, or there was another origin place of man in the world.

Palaeoanthropology materials so far available show that the humans originated from Africa, and the earliest Old Stone Age ruins so far unearthed in the world are located in Ethiopia, dating back some 2.33 million years.

For a long period of time, many scientists believed that it was impossible for east Asia to have human activities some 2 million years ago.

Xie and his colleagues conducted a month-long excavation at the Majuangou ruins from September to October, and unearthed a great number of stone cores, flakes, hammers and scrapers, and bones of elephants, deer, horses and other animals.

More than 100 kilometers from Beijing, the over 9,000-square- kilometer Nihewan basin has very thick deposits of rivers, lakes and yellow earth, which contain rich fossils of mammals and animals of other species. It has been a key excavation area of early man in east Asia since the 1920s.

Chinese scientists have discovered a non-stop list of ruins of the Old Stone Age belonging to the Pleistocene epoch at the basin.
The Majuangou site is divided into three cultural layers. The latest excavation was carried out in the third layer that was discovered in the spring of last year.
Archaeologists said that the ruins unearthed were of a site where the ancient people were preparing food, adding that marks of strikes by stone tools and scrapers were found on most of the animal bones discovered at the site, and a firestone scraper was found on a rib of an animal skeleton.

The excavated stone tools prove that the manufacturers were highly capable of distinguishing stone materials and very skilled at processing stone tools, archaeologist Xie said. The ruins reveal that this group of ancient people had reached a high level, Xie added.

Early this year, Zhu Rixiang, a research fellow with the geological research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), determined that the Xiaochangliang ruins at Nihewan Basin date back 1.36 million years, thus shifting back the known date of the ancients' activities in China by 360,000 years.
Zhu spent three years studying the date of the Xiaochangliang ruins.

The third layer of the Majuangou ruins, where the latest archaeological excavation was conducted, is more than 30 meters lower than the Xiaochangliang ruins. Judging from the comparison between the ancient geomagnetic dating materials and rock formation, researcher Wei Qi, of the ancient vertebrate and the ancients research institute under the CAS, said that the third layer of the Majuangou ruins is at least 1.9 million years old and possibly even more than 2 million years in age.

Beijing University professor Lu Zun'e, who made an on-the-spot investigation at the excavation site, confirmed that the date of the latest unearthed ruins is earlier than the date of the Xiaochangliang ruins.
Based on the latest discovery, archaeologist Xie Fei concluded that more earlier human activities might have existed in the Nihewan Basin.

Next year, Chinese archaeologists will make further and large scale excavations at the Majuangou ruins and other ruins in the Nihewan Basin, according to Xie. End item.

[history_matters]

[Research on neanderthal DNA showed it to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee".]

Would you mind giving your source for this quote? I have heard this several times in the last year, but no one has ever been able to point me to a source.

The "Seven Daughters of Eve' research team at Oxford offer some very interesting interpretations of genetic mapping evidence. Did your quote come from them? That would surprise me.

[history_matters]

Thanks for the welcome, blam, and for posting this article for me to read.

[HiTech RedNeck]

O ye of little faith! Go say a dozen Hail Darwins in repentance.

[medved]

[Research on neanderthal DNA showed it to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee".]

Would you mind giving your source for this quote? I have heard this several times in the last year, but no one has ever been able to point me to a source.

You could take your pick:

http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19970712/19355423.html

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/video/Fate.html

http://www.genum.com/gmo_evolution/gmo_evolution.htm

etc. etc. etc.

Discover Magazine did a big article on neanderthals in 96 or so just before the DNA studies came in and the big question they asked was why, given fact that neanderthals and modern humans had lived in close proximity for long periods of time, there were never any signs of cross breeding; it should have been common, and no clear-cut sign of it has ever turned up. the DNA evidence explains it; we could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with horses.

[Straight Vermonter]

If I remember correctly many Asian archeologists have had this belief for a while based largely on ancient skeletons found in Indonesia.

[moteineye]

from Strongs concordance ,the Hebrew translation of the word used in the book of Genesis 2:19 ADAM- The name of the first man ADAM,comes from the word red or ruddy ,to turn rosy or flush.

[history_matters]

Thanks for the links, medved. They were fun reads. Here are some links I find stimulating:

Neanderthals emancipated On Neanderthal culture

Neanderthal DNA Sequencing

Molecular Analysis of Neanderthal DNA

BBC NEWS SCI/TECH >DNA clues to Neanderthals

Neanderthal DNA A creationist's website

Neanderthal DNA Soup A fun read unless your religion is orthodox Evolutionary Theory.

"The DNA mapping of a few specimens relying upon mitochondrial DNA is not conclusive evidence that Neanderthals did not contribute genes to modern humans."

[blam]

Learning to Love Neanderthals.(25,000-year-old child's body found in Portugal)

Author/s: Robert Kunzig
Issue: August, 1999

Does the 25,000-year-old body of a child found in Portugal make it more likely that they are our ancestors?

What you want, when you hold a pendant fashioned 35,000 years ago by a Neanderthal--a fox's tooth with a tiny hole for a leather string--what you want is something only the movies can give. A close-up, in the lab's neon light, on the mottled canine between your fingers, the focus so tight you can see the scratches made by the stone tool. The picture fades, and next you see the same tooth in different hands, stronger ones with beefy fingers: the hands of the craftsman. He is piercing the tooth with a sharpened piece of flint. Behind him squats a rough tent of hides stretched over mammoth tusks; behind that the dark mouth of a cave. Before and below him a river meanders lazily between birches and willows. Reindeer graze on the far bank. On an early morning in spring, in northern Burgundy during the Ice Age, the light coming in low over the far bluff catches the craftsman's pale, weathered face. It is a human face. The eyes, under the jutting brow, are human eyes, alive with concentration, with memories of other seasons at this place, with intelligence and hope.

No, hold it: Maybe those Neanderthal eyes are blank as a cat's, all surface, with nothing behind them but dumb instinct and a bit of animal cunning--no memories, no plan, no clue.

Back to spring 1999 and the lab, at a modern campus of the University of Paris. An archeologist named Dominique Baffler holds the tooth. For the past few days newspapers the world over have been reporting the discovery in Portugal of the skeleton of a 4-year-old child, dead for 25,000 years. The discoverers, led by Portuguese archeologist Joao Zilhao, are making a ground-breaking claim, that the skeleton shows traces of both Neanderthal and modern human ancestry; evidence that modern humans did not simply extinguish the Neanderthals, as many researchers had come to think. Instead the two kinds of human were so alike that in Portugal, at least, they intermingled--and made love--for thousands of years.

The claim is controversial. So, too, and for similar reasons, is the fox tooth Baffler is holding. A collection of such ornaments is arrayed on the table in front of her, along with delicate bone tools--awls for punching through animals hides, needles for sewing or perhaps for pinning up hair. All these artifacts were dug from the mouth of a limestone cave four decades ago at Arcy-sur-Cure, a hundred miles southeast of Paris. Just in the past year, though, the Arcy artifacts have become the subject of heated debate. Zilhao, Baffler, and several French colleagues claim the artifacts show that Neanderthals were not inferior to our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons. Independently; they underwent the same leap into modernity, the same emergence of symbolic thought that millennia later allowed Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.

A fox-tooth pendant is not a cave painting, as Baffler well knows, for she studies those paintings too. But it is a symbolic statement. "Oh, it's beautiful," she says quietly; turning the Neanderthal pendant in her fingers, peering at it over her glasses. "It's beautiful and it's moving. A 35,000-year-old bijou--isn't that moving?"

[blam]

NEANDERTAL-CRO-MAGNON HYBRID?

Analysis of the skeletal remains of this four-year-old boy has revealed that he may be a Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrid. (Courtesy João Zilhão)

nalysis of the skeletal remains of a four-year-old child buried in a Portuguese rock-shelter 25,000 to 24,500 years ago has yielded startling evidence that early modern humans and Neandertals may have interbred. While the boy's prominent chin, tooth size, and pelvic measurements marked him as a Cro-Magnon, or fully modern human, his stocky body and short legs indicate Neandertal heritage, says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Interbreeding could answer the vexed question of the fate of the Neandertals, the last of whom disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula 28,000 years ago.

Trinkaus was summoned to Portugal after archaeologists searching for rock art in the Lapedo Valley, 85 miles north of Lisbon, found the burial this past December. João Zilhão of the University of Lisbon, the excavation's director, described the skeleton's preservation as "miraculous"--only the skull and right arm were badly broken. The boy is the first Palaeolithic burial ever excavated on the Iberian Peninsula, and among the oldest modern humans ever scientifically excavated.

Trinkaus, who compared the boy's limb proportions with those of Neandertal skeletons, including some children, says that the body is the first definite evidence of a mixture between Neandertal and early humans. While full Neandertals are thought to have been extinct for 4,000 years before the boy was born, he appears to be a descendant of generations of Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrids. Neandertals belong to our species and contributed their genes to European ancestry, he says.--SPENCER P.M. HARRINGTON

[blam]

"If I remember correctly many Asian archeologists have had this belief for a while based largely on ancient skeletons found in Indonesia."

Java Man and Peking Man?

[medved]

are making a ground-breaking claim, that the skeleton shows traces of both Neanderthal and modern human ancestry; evidence that modern humans did not simply extinguish the Neanderthals, as many researchers had come to think. Instead the two kinds of human were so alike that in Portugal, at least, they intermingled--and made love--for thousands of years.

They could make love all they want; there is no real evidence of interbreeding or of mixed offspring other than the one freak skeleton which could be a birth defect or an indicatation that the one or two children ever born of such unions never lived any longer than that.

The problem is that given the proximity of the two groups over long time spans, there should be LOTS AND LOTS of evidence of interbreeding and mixed skeletons of all ages and, as usual, all they can ever find is the one freak skeleton and they want to claim a victory for evolution on that basis.

Likewise, I could show you a skeleton of a snake with two heads. That does not mean that all snakes of that generation of snakes had two heads, or that two headed snakes were common then, or that two headed snakes are terribly viable.

[blam]

"The problem is that given the proximity of the two groups over long time spans, there should be LOTS AND LOTS of evidence of interbreeding and mixed skeletons of all ages and, as usual, all they can ever find is the one freak skeleton and they want to claim a victory for evolution on that basis."

There are not LOTS AND LOTS of skeletons of anything, especially human.

[blam]

Bump for you.

[Ada Coddington]

I lean very heavily in that direction

When do you date Adam from?

[blam]

"When do you date Adam from?"

I expect there have been many Adams. Knowing that there have been five, what some call 'near-extinction', catastrophic events in the last 10k years alone, it just stands to reason that humans have had many 'in the beginnings.'

[max61]

I refuse to argue with those who claim they can trace thier ancestry back to a bunch of monkeys. My parents are of a somewhat higher lineage

Then don't argue.

---max

[Ada Coddington]

I expect there have been many Adams. Knowing that there have been five, what some call 'near-extinction', catastrophic events in the last 10k years alone, it just stands to reason that humans have had many 'in the beginnings.'

What date do you put on the latest Adam?

[blam]

"What date do you put on the latest Adam?"

A WAG, 15,500 years ago. Now you?

[Ada Coddington]

A WAG, 15,500 years ago. Now you?

What's a WAG?

Your date would be when the last ice age was still in place. The Adam of Genesis lived in an Eden watered by 4 rivers but where rain was unknown--this is consistent with an ice age.

I've seen speculation that the Sphinx is older than that, maybe 30,000 B.C. but most archaelogists won't buy that. If so, though, it would be just about the only evidence we have of a pre-Adamic civilization.

[mercy]

Sitchin is an Art Bell allied 'new age warlord'. It's a whole constellation of nut balls who have figured out there is a ready market for 'stranger than fiction' scenarios. The wierder the better. HOWEVER there have been many 'impossible' anomolies discovered that established anthropologists will not even look at or aknowledge. It is a fact that the same mindset that forced Galileo to 'recant' is just as active today as then.