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Study co-author Margherita Mussi, an archaeologist at Sapienza University in Rome, and colleagues combined two techniques: argon-argon dating and a recently completed paleomagnetic dating analysis to fine-tune the site's ages. The fossil and Oldowan artifacts with it had previously been dated to 1.7 million to 1.8 million years ago, but revised ages now place them at some two million years old. The team also used advanced imaging technology to study the fossil and suggest which species it represents..."Now we know, back to two million years ago, it's part of the array of environments that H. erectus occupied in Africa at...

...It's not the first time stone tools have been found with fossils of Paranthropus, a genus with several species that lived from about 2.8 million to 1.2 million years ago across Africa. In 1955, Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the Nutcracker Man, a skull with a robust jaw and teeth now classified as Paranthropus boisei, in the same 1.8-million-year-old layer of sediments as Oldowan tools. But Mary Leakey soon found a skull of Homo habilis (Latin for "handyman") in the same layer and thought that species, in our own genus, was a better fit as the principal toolmaker. Paranthropus, with...

An Acheulean handaxe. (Didier Descouens/CC BY-SA 4.0) ================================================================== Figuring out when the earliest human species first developed and used stone tools is an important task for anthropologists, since it was such an important evolutionary step. Remarkably, the projected date of early stone technology just got pushed back by tens of thousands of years. Using a recently introduced type of statistical analysis, researchers estimated the proportion of stone tool artifacts that might be lying undiscovered based on what has been dug up so far. In turn, this gives us clues about how old the tool remnants we don't yet know about...

The late Early Pleistocene site near Untermassfeld, in Germany, is now well known for a rich array of fauna dating back to about 1.07 million years ago, including simple 'Mode 1' (or Oldowan-type) stone tools evidencing early human occupation. Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple 'Mode 1' stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of...

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, published this week in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology. Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found,...

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, recently published in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology. Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but...

September 20, 2006 · Scientists in Ethiopia have discovered the skeleton of a 3.3 million years old child, the oldest child fossil on record. The fossil is known as the Dikika child, after the region where it was found. Though not a human, the apelike creature could walk upright. The child is from the same species as the famous fossil Lucy, which was also discovered in Ethiopia over 30 years ago. It was probably female, and about three when it died. The child lay within a sandstone tomb for over 3 million years. Six years ago, an Ethiopian scientist saw...

Abstract The description of a new skull (D4500) from the Dmanisi site (Republic of Georgia) has reopened the debate about the morphological variability within the genus Homo. The new skull fits with a mandible (D2600) often referred as ‘big’ or ‘enigmatic’ because of its differences with the other Dmanisi mandibles (D211 and D2735). In this report we present a comparative study of the variability of the Dmanisi mandibles under a different perspective, as we focus in morphological aspects related to growth and development. We have followed the notion of modularity and phenotypic integration in order to understand the architectural differences...

Researchers suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus, a human species that existed between 1.8 million and 143,000 years ago. It is considered the first human species to go global --- geographically, Home erectus fossil remains have been found in East Africa, Georgia, India, Sri Lanka, China and Java. The bone was found near sites where the earliest Acheulian tools have appeared. Acheulian tools are ancient, shaped stone tools that include stone hand axes more than 1.6 million years old. They are most often associated with the presence of Homo erectus. "What makes this bone so...

Fossil Tooth Belonged to Earliest Western European, Experts Say James Owen for National Geographic News July 2, 2007 A fossil tooth discovered last week in Spain belonged to the oldest known western European, scientists have announced. The early-human molar was discovered last Wednesday at the Sierra Atapuerca archaeological site in the Burgos Province of northern Spain. Caves at the site, which lies about 15 miles (25 kilometers) east of the provincial capital of Burgos, have previously yielded other prehistoric human remains (map of Spain). Early human fossils found at the nearby Gran Dolina site in 1994 indicated that humans had...

MADRID, Spain - A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say. The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern...

Contact: Ann Cairns acairns@geosociety.org 303-357-1056 Geological Society of America Debate heats up on role of climate in human evolution Boulder, Colo.- Scientists at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Seattle next week are taking a comprehensive new look at drivers of human evolution. It now appears that climate variability during the Plio-Pleistocene (approximately 6 million years in duration) played a hugely important role. Astronomically controlled climate forcing on scales ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 years down to El Niños (5-7 years) made a highly unpredictable environment in which generalists with intelligence, language, and creativity were best able to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The earliest-known human ancestors to migrate out of Africa possessed a surprising mix of human-like and primitive features, according to scientists who studied remains dug up at a fossil-rich site in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.Writing on Wednesday in the journal Nature, the scientists described remains of three adults and one adolescent dating from about 1.77 million years ago, excavated at Dmanisi, about 55 miles southwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.The remains shed light on a little-understood but critical period in human evolution -- the transition from the more ape-like creatures known as australopithecines to the...

Rewriting Human HistoryDiscoveries In Georgia Are Transforming Our View Of Human Evolution Looking out across a verdant lake valley alive with game, in a land to be known as Georgia at some remote future time, the diminutive, small-brained, ape-faced creature seems hardly destined for planetary conquest. Yet, from 1.75 million years ago, the slender little hominid – pre-human – is rewriting the story of who we are, where we came from and how we got here. Translating this epic tale is an energetic and enthusiastic Georgian scientist, David Lordkipanidze, who has waged a decade-long struggle to uncover, substantiate and protect...

Evolutionary Back Story: Thoroughly modern spine supported human ancestor Bruce Bower Bones from a spinal column discovered at a nearly 1.8-million-year-old site in central Asia support the controversial possibility that ancient human ancestors spoke to one another. WIDE OPEN. A recently discovered Homo erectus vertebra from central Asia (left) displays a larger spinal cord canal than does a corresponding bone (right) from a skeleton that had been found in Kenya. Meyer Excavations in 2005 at Dmanisi, Georgia, yielded five vertebrae from a Homo erectus individual, says anthropologist Marc R. Meyer of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The finds occurred...

Did Early Humans First Arise in Asia, Not Africa? Nicholas Bakalar for National Geographic News   December 27, 2005 -----snip------They believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth. New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia. -----snip------"What seems reasonably clear now," Dennell said, "is that the earliest hominins in Asia did not need large brains or bodies." These attributes...

October 13, 2003 Stranger in a New Land Stunning finds in the Republic of Georgia upend long-standing ideas about the first hominids to journey out of Africa By Kate Wong We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: "Little Gidding" In an age of spacecraft and deep-sea submersibles, we take it for granted that humans are intrepid explorers. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, the propensity to colonize is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our...

August 6, 2002 Skulls Found in Africa and in Europe Challenge Theories of Human OriginsBy JOHN NOBLE WILFORD wo ancient skulls, one from central Africa and the other from the Black Sea republic of Georgia, have shaken the human family tree to its roots, sending scientists scrambling to see if their favorite theories are among the fallen fruit. Probably so, according to paleontologists, who may have to make major revisions in the human genealogy and rethink some of their ideas about the first migrations out of Africa by human relatives. Yet, despite all the confusion and uncertainty the skulls...

ARCHAEOLOGY: New human fossils found in Georgia, north of Africa, have some rethinking migration of early man. DMANISI, Georgia - The forested bluff that overlooks this sleepy Georgian hamlet seems an unlikely portal into the mysteries surrounding the dawn of man. Think human evolution, and one conjures up the wind-swept savannas and badlands of east Africa's Great Rift Valley. Georgians may claim their ancestors made Georgia the cradle of wine 8,000 years ago, but the cradle of mankind lies 3,300 miles away, at Tanzania's famed Olduvai Gorge. But it is here in the verdant uplands of southern Georgia that David...

Early members of the genus Homo, possibly direct ancestors of people today, may have evolved in Asia and then gone to Africa, not vice versa... new evidence shows the species occupied a West Asian site called Dmanisi from 1.85 million to 1.77 million years ago, at the same time or slightly before the earliest evidence of this humanlike species in Africa, say geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton and his colleagues... Evidence remains meager for the geographic origins of the Homo genus, says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University... and it's possible that humankind's...