Anthropologists Hail Romania Fossil Find (35K Y.O. Humans)

BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday.

International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press.

"We are very excited about it," said Trinkaus on the telephone, adding that the discovery of in a cave in southwestern Romania "is already changing perceptions about modern humans."

Romanian recreational cavers unearthed the remains of three facial bones last year, and gave them to Romanian scientists.

Romanian scientists asked Trinkaus to analyze the fossils, and he traveled to the Romanian city of Cluj this week with Portuguese scientist Joao Zilhao, a fossil specialist.

Trinkaus said a jawbone belonged to a man aged about 35. He said part of a skull and remains of a face including teeth belonged to a 14- to 15-year-old male and a temporal bone to a woman of unspecified age.

"This was 25,000 years before agriculture. Certainly they were hunters," said Trinkaus. He said the bones were discovered in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.

Trinkaus said the humans would have had religious beliefs, used stone tools, and a well-defined social system and lived in a period in during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neanderthals in Europe, Trinkaus said.

Scientists will not give the exact location for the cave, but Trinkaus said it the humans survived because the area was "ecologically variable."

"It was close to the Banat plain and close to the mountains. They didn't have to travel more than 50 kilometers (30 miles)," to hunt, he said.

A team of international scientists from the United States, Norway, Portugal and Britain will carry out more field work in the summer in the cave and surrounding area this summer, Trinkaus said.

Hey, I took it easy, but...

Earliest Modern Humans Found in Romanian Cave
by Maggie Fox
Mon Sep 22, 6:02 PM ET
The jawbone, found in southwestern Carpathian Mountains of Romania, was carbon-dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago, said Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study... "The jawbone is the oldest directly dated modern human fossil," Trinkaus, a leading expert on early humans, said in a telephone interview... "They are all dirty and smelly and all that sort of stuff. The basic facial shape would have been like ours but from the cheeks on down they would have looked very large... The specimens suggest that there have been clear changes in human anatomy since then," said Trinkaus. "The bones are also fully compatible with the blending of modern human and Neanderthal populations," he said.
The Lapedo Child:
Lagar Velho 1 and our
Perceptions of the Neandertals
by Erik Trinkaus,
João Zilhão
and Cidália Duarte
Abstract: After a period of increasingly seeing the transition from Neandertals to early modern humans as involving significant behavioral changes, a series of discoveries and reanalyses of human fossils, archeological remains and absolute chronology during the late 1990s have highlighted the mosaic and subtle nature of this Late Pleistocene human behavioral transition. In the context of this, a largely complete early Upper Paleolithic (ca.24,500-25,000 B.P.) child's skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) provides further insight into the nature of the shift from Neandertals to early modern humans in Europe. Discovered in late 1998, Lagar Velho 1 exhibits a mosaic of European early modern human and Neandertal morphological features, with a) the mentum osseum, dental proportions, thumb anatomy indicating derived modern human affinities, b) the maxillary incisors, mandibular symphyseal retreat and crural proportions aligning it with the Neandertals, and c) other features approaching it to one group or the other. This morphological mosaic in a 25,000 year old human indicates significant population admixture between Iberian late Neandertals and early modern humans dispersing southward through Iberia after ca.28,000 B.P. In addition to rejecting a phylogenetic hypothesis of total Neandertal replacement in Europe, this skeleton provides further evidence that the behavioral differences between these two groups of humans were sufficiently subtle to permit the integration of their populations.
Meet the ancestors
by Helen Sewell
Friday, 20 July, 2001
Experts recreated the head of the boy known as El Nino de la Dolina, who lived in northern Spain 800,000 years ago and was eaten by other humans, the Spanish news agency Efe said. He is thought to have been aged 10 or 11, Efe added. The skull of El Nino de la Dolina was found in 1995, at Gran Dolina, in the Atapuerca archaeological site in Burgos Province... Also on show is a replica head of Homo heidelbergensis - one of 32 people found in Atapuerca and dating back 300,000 years... Some scientists think Homo heidelbergensis was the last common ancestor of the Neanderthals and today's humans.
Evidence of earliest human burial
by Paul Rincon
Wednesday, 26 March, 2003
Scientists claim they have found the oldest evidence of human creativity: a 350,000-year-old pink stone axe.... Spanish researchers found the axe among the fossilised bones of 27 ancient humans that were clumped together at the bottom of a 14-metre- (45 feet) deep pit inside a network of limestone caves at Atapuerca, near Burgos... "It's a great discovery. This is an interpretation, but in my opinion and the opinion of my team, the axe could be the first evidence of ritual behaviour and symbolism in a human species," Professor Carbonell said. "We conclude it could be from a funeral rite," he added... The human remains belong to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which dominated Europe around 600,000-200,000 years ago and is thought to have given rise to both the Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens)... Previously, the earliest funeral rituals were thought to be associated with Neanderthal remains dated 100,000 years ago. But some researchers dispute the significance of these sites, preferring to believe that abstract thinking began around 50,000 years ago in modern humans.
Pipeline to the Past Is a Gift From Oil to Archaeology
by Douglas Frantz
September 19, 2001
Shirvan Steppe Journal
The site, about 70 miles south of Baku, the capital, appears to be the remains of a village from the 11th or 12th century. It is where the Kura meandered its way to the Caspian Sea a millennium ago, and its discovery heartened the team trying to redraw history's greatest trade route, the Silk Road.

Cave dwellings dating to 12,000 B.C. have been discovered in Azerbaijan and its earliest inhabitants are credited with domesticating grapes, cherries and apples. Some believe that horses were domesticated here 5,000 years ago. But much of the region's ancient history has been unexplored.

Azerbaijani archaeologists and a few others from outside the country think that the country had a thriving civilization in the Bronze Age, dating to about 2,500 B.C., and that its traders and herdsmen eventually migrated to Mesopotamia and beyond.
Animal-headed humans appear in earliest art
by Leigh Dayton
Together with Christopher Chippindale at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Paul Taçon of the Australian Museum in Sydney conducted the first rigorous worldwide survey of prehistoric therianthrope images and has found that in Australia and South Africa there are dozens of animal-headed people in rock paintings and carvings more than 10,000 years old. Some may be far older. The oldest was an androgynous feline-headed statuette from Germany, thought to be around 32,000 years old.

Sven Ouzman of the National Museum of South Africa in Bloemfontein says it is notoriously difficult to date rock art, so he is sceptical of the claim that therianthropes were the first beings ever portrayed. "[But] what Paul and Chris's paper does do is set up a testable hypothesis," he says.
Ancient cave etchings reveal unusual figures
by Nicola Jones
Cave drawings discovered in September 2000 at Cussac in south-west France cover more than half a kilometre of caverns and include more than 200 separate drawings. Experts believe they could be up to 30,000 years old. That would make them the second oldest examples of cave art, after the 32,000-year-old drawings found in the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, in the Ardèche region of France. There is only one other good example of cave art older than 20,000 years, at Cosquer, also in France. Dating etchings can be a tricky task, adds Lawson. Unlike some primitive paints, there are no flakes of charcoal that can be radiocarbon dated. Etchings are dated using assumptions about how the rock would weather over time, altering the rock crystals and changing their chemistry. Microbes on the rock surface also form a veneer known as "rock varnish" that adds to the alteration.
Ancient cave etchings reveal unusual figures
by Nicola Jones
15:37 05 July 01
Experts believe they could be up to 30,000 years old. That would make them the second oldest examples of cave art, after the 32,000-year-old drawings found in the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, in the Ardèche region of France. There is only one other good example of cave art older than 20,000 years, at Cosquer, also in France... Dating etchings can be a tricky task, adds Lawson. Unlike some primitive paints, there are no flakes of charcoal that can be radiocarbon dated. Etchings are dated using assumptions about how the rock would weather over time, altering the rock crystals and changing their chemistry. Microbes on the rock surface also form a veneer known as "rock varnish" that adds to the alteration. Experts are still analysing the dating evidence from Cussac, along with seven graves that were also found in the cave. If the skeletons turn out to be Palaeolithic, it will be the first evidence that people buried their dead in caves that were decorated by their contemporaries.
Cool Neanderlinks
by Anne Gilbert
The links have been further divided into links concerning Neandertals and human evolution, and links which concern environment and ecology, especially where it concerns old growth forests... Most of these deal with Neandertals and human evolution, and many of these are academic papers which I found useful. Don't let this discourage you, if you are interested in finding out more about human evolution or Neandertals. There are often many good ideas hidden away in academic papers.

*LOL* "often many good ideas hidden away in academic papers." Heh heh heh... anyway, this Gilbert link page was arrived at through the "Neandertal flute" page linked in my previous post. The following thing pertains to the PProf's claim that Europeans had hats. Imagine that -- the landscape covered with hundreds or thousands of feet of ice, and someone invented the hat! Why, it's as if Einstein already walked the Earth. Oops, Einstein was Jewish. Now I've done it. ;')

World's oldest hat revealed
Tuesday, 25 April, 2000
Previously it had been thought that weaving had been invented by settled farmers just 5,000 to 10,000 years ago... The new information means features on figurines thought to be prehistoric hairstyles are actually the first known hats. The clues came from 90 fragments of clay found in the Czech Republic, at well-known sites including Dolni Vestonice and Tavlov. They reveal the impressions of interlaced fibres... According to Dr Soffer, twining can be done by hand but plain weave requires a loom - impressive technology at such an early date... After discovering the impressions on the clay fragments, the archaelogists re-examined a number of "Venus" figurines found in Europe, which date from the same time. Many appeared to be wearing clothing including basket hats and caps, sashes and belts. Previously the hats had been interpreted as elaborate hairstyles.

Heh heh... of course, the Neandertal didn't go extinct:

The Neandertal Enigma
by James Shreeve
Frayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]
Neanderthals Like Us
by Karen Wright
"The Neanderthals... [l]ike Homo sapiens... had big brains, used tools, lit fires, and buried their dead. They thrived for 200,000 years in severe ice age climates, from Britain to Uzbekistan. When H. sapiens began to arrive from the south, the two species dwelled alongside each other for thousands of years... Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor... is the most vocal advocate of the multiregionalism theory, which submits that the Cro-Magnons who left Africa got on rather well with the natives they encountered in their travels. In this view, Neanderthals weren't so much driven to extinction as seduced... Even today, features thought to be Neanderthal are as familiar as the portraits in a grandparent's home: the sloping forehead, the heavy brow, the stocky, big-boned physique... many Neanderthal features persist in European visages today: a unique hole in the jawbone, the shape of a suture in the cheek, a highly angled nose... Meanwhile, archaeologists are questioning their assumptions about the Neanderthal lifestyle. In particular, it has become less clear exactly who invented the Upper Paleolithic. One assemblage in France, dated between 39,000 and 34,000 years ago, has bone and shell pendants, carved teeth and beads, as well as finely worked tools like the Cro-Magnons used. But the only bones found with this technology are Neanderthal. Archaeologist Steve Kuhn of the University of Arizona in Tucson says a confusing array of transitional technologies is now emerging from sites in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East... And researchers have never found any signs of warfare between the groups... In the Middle East, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons seem to have occupied much of the same territory for 60,000 years. So far, their cultures there are indistinguishable... Tattersall says studies that use DNA from contemporary populations to reconstruct human genealogy support the idea of a single, small source of Homo sapiens... The mtDNA extracted from Neanderthal bones doesn't match anything in the modern world. But last year, when geneticists compared mtDNA from an early modern Australian with contemporary mtDNA, it didn't match either."

Once upon a time I found a website that had a bunch of Neandertal stuff on it, including links to Jew-hating sites, including at least one version of this story:

Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals
by Dr Damian Carrington
BBC News Online
Monday, 12 June, 2000
The extinction of the Neanderthals could have been caused by their choosy appetites - they ate virtually nothing but meat... "They were picky eaters," says Dr Paul Pettitt, at the University of Oxford, UK. "And this tells me that they are really unchanging - doing the same old thing year after year... Neanderthals were excellent hunters," Dr Petitt told BBC News Online. "But the issue that was at stake was whether they hunted every day of their lives or whether it was just a summer outing." ...The early humans themselves may have been better hunters than the Neanderthals, depriving them of their kills. Or the hunted animals may have been struck by disease or migrated away.

Yeah, that's right! Neandertal WENT EXTINCT because he ate too much meat. Nothing political about that, eh? As Joel Mabus sings, "Hitler was a Vegetarian, Too"...

What the Hominid Ate
by Kenneth Chang
Analyzing carbon atoms locked up in tooth enamel, two researchers challenge the widely held belief that Australopithecus africanus -- an upright, walking pre-human hominid that lived in southern Africa -- ate little more than fruits and leaves. Matt Sponheimer, an anthropology graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Julia Lee-Thorp of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, looked at four A. africanus fossil skeletons unearthed from South Africa. Living about 3 million years ago, A. africanus may be a direct ancestor of modern humans. A. africanus teeth were large and blunt with thick enamel, ideal for crushing nuts and chewing fruit as opposed to the sharp incisors one would want to rip into meat. The first stone tools, which would help in eating meat, didn't appear until about half a million years later. Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp took a new approach, looking at the chemical composition of the tooth enamel. After chipping about two milligrams of enamel with a diamond-tipped dental drill, the researchers analyzed the samples for the isotope carbon-13, which contains one extra neutron in the nucleus compared to the usual form of carbon. What Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp found was that the teeth of A. africanus had an in-between amount carbon-13 -- more than the fruit eaters, less than the grass eaters.

Hey, Henry Ford tried feeding his employees grass sandwiches. Maybe that was during his vegetarian fanatic phase, not unlike that of Paul and Linda who threatened to fire anyone working for their last tour who ate meat for the duration:

Veggies Really Are Brain Food
Fire helped early humans evolve and become more intelligent not because it allowed them to barbecue meat, but because it allowed them to cook vegetables, researchers said on Tuesday. Learning how to cook probably also allowed humans to develop their unique monogamous society. Gregory Laden of the University of Minnesota, Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and colleagues noted that very early pre-humans, including the australopithecines such as "Lucy," had huge teeth and powerful jaws. By 1.9 million years ago, when Homo erectus appeared, teeth became smaller and jawbones less robust. Females got bigger—closer in size to males. Brains and bodies both grew. While some anthropologists argue it was because meat entered the diet, Laden and a team of anthropologists, nutritionists and primatologists said the changes occurred because the pre-humans had discovered fire and learned how to make roots and other vegetables easier to eat and more nutritious.

Laden and Wrangham wouldn't be vegetarians by any chance, would they?

Shift In Eating Habits Of Early Modern Humans
2 May 2001
Compared to Neanderthals living in inland Europe up to 100,000 years earlier, who relied primarily on land animals for their protein, early modern humans supplemented their diets with a significant amount of fish and waterfowl. The evidence has been outlined in a paper entitled 'Stable isotope evidence for increasing dietary breadth in the European mid-Upper Paleolithic', which is scheduled to appear in the May 22 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Dr Michael Richards, of the Department of Archaeological Sciences, at the University of Bradford, said: "This new information highlights the differences in diets between Neanderthals and early modern humans and shows that modern humans were more flexible and adaptable in their dietary choices. This ability to adapt and use a range of resources could perhaps have given us, as a species, a competitive edge over the Neanderthals."
A Rumination on the Invention of Soup
March 1, 2002
It was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of the Wurm glaciation that killed off so much of their food and so many species. It was every man for himself as they ran fearfully from--and ran hungrily after--woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet elderly Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum level--and deeply crippled skeletons have been found too. Implication: They could only have been kept alive through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of some nouvelle cuisine chef who could find food alternatives to incredibly indigestible plants, meat tougher than my old aunt's shoes, and all of it cold. I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water...putting food bits in it and noticing them soften or swell...marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warm broth from the 98.6 degree Fahrenheit mother's milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy. That's when it hits me: Soup! It's an unbelievable achievement.

I guess Neandertal didn't invent bouillabaisse? ;')

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