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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.