Free Republic

"One of the individuals - a little boy actually - ...had three copies of Chromosome 21. So, he would have had Down syndrome. And, yeah, that was unexpected and quite a moving little glimpse into the world of somebody with a disability in the very, very deep past," Cassidy said. The research team puts the discovery at between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, making it the oldest known case of Down's Syndrome in the world... "What we do, basically, is we powderise that [the petrous temporal bone in the inner ear] and we put the powder in solution and try...

"The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit," said Jean-Jacque Hublin, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology where Zavala first began this work. "This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe."