ArchaeoBlog

Sometimes it takes awhile for greatness to be truly recognized.  A metatarsal, found in Callao Cave in 2007 was just confirmed to be human, and 67,000 years old.  And that’s not all – it belonged to a very small adult living in the Philippines.  This metatarsal pushes back the chronology of human settlement of the Pacific back another 27,000 years, bolsters claims of ancient small-bodied humans found on Flores Island (nicknamed “hobbits” by the media), and predates the currently-accepted arrival of morphologically modern humans into Asia.  That’s a lot for one little bone to accomplish!

 Archaeologist Armand Mijares was in a digging site in northern Philippines when he got an e-mail informing him that human toe bone his team found in 2007 was at least 67,000 years old. Mijares and his colleagues were so happy to have received the e-mail that they celebrated that night, drinking cold bottles of beer.

Mijares has every reason to celebrate, as the discovery of a 67, 000 year-old human remains in Callao Cave in the province of Cagayan is perhaps one of the biggest recent discoveries in the field of archaeology.

“This breaks up all standards. This discovery (of the toe bone in Callao cave) put the Philippines in the global scientific map,” Mijares declared in an interview with Xinhua.

(PS:  I like how they had to specify that the beer was COLD).

Earliest Northern European Settlement Discovered in Britain

Ancient humans braved the cold in Britain over 800,000 years ago to create the first known settlement in northern Europe, according to researchers.

Their finding predates past evidence of prehistoric humans in Britain by at least 100,000 years. It also suggests that the early humans managed to survive in the cold northern climate, contrary to past thinking.

“We have found stone tools in several horizons, so they were there for at least several generations, if not longer,” said Nick Ashton, an archaeologist and curator at the British Museum in London.

They’re thinking it was Homo antecessor, something along the lines of H. erectus.

Flores ‘hobbits’ weren’t malformed humans

CASE closed – the “hobbits” that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores only 13,000 years ago were a unique species of hominin.

This was the first thought when the remains of a tiny, 18,000-year-old female were uncovered in 2003. Then in 2008 Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, claimed the remains were of a modern human with cretinism, a disease caused by iodine deficiency.

“I have put that claim to rest,” says Colin Groves of the Australian National University in Canberra.

I doubt any skeletal metrics will really put anything to rest; DNA will end up being the true arbiter.

Lucy fossil gets jolted upright by Big Man

An older guy has sauntered into Lucy’s life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species.

Excavations in Ethiopia’s Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago.

The controversy is largely over the degree of bipedalism. Then there’s this:

So despite chimps’ close genetic relationship to people, he says, this new fossil evidence supports the view that chimps have evolved a great deal since diverging from a common human-chimp ancestor roughly 7 million years ago and are not good models for ancient hominids.

I’ve been saying that for years.

Hawks has a post on the Koobi Fora aquatic fauna. I think I posted on something similar a while ago, but can’t find it.

National Geographic has an article up on the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia.

Male voices reveal owner’s strength

You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake, but his voice may give away even more. Both men and women can accurately assess a man’s upper body strength based on his voice alone, suggesting that the male voice may have evolved as an indicator of fighting ability.

A team led by Aaron Sell at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recorded the voices of more than 200 men from the US, Argentina, Bolivia and Romania, who all repeated a short phrase in their native tongue. Sell’s team also put the men through a battery of tests of upper body strength.

Hmmmm. See, I was going to suggest that deeper voices indicated larger, more robust bodies which would necessarily translate into greater strength but the article notes that “there was no correlation between a man’s strength and the pitch or timbre of his voice”. Rick Astley would throw that correlation out of whack!

Me, I’m sure my voice puts me in the 98-pound weakling group, which is why I work out so I can, in actuality, go into the 130-pound weakling group.

Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World

Using large samples of Early American crania, we: 1) calculated the rate of morphological differentiation between Early and Late American samples under three different time divergence assumptions, and compared our findings to the predicted morphological differentiation under neutral conditions in each case; and 2) further tested three dispersal scenarios for the colonization of the New World by comparing the morphological distances among early and late Amerindians, East Asians, Australo-Melanesians and early modern humans from Asia to geographical distances associated with each dispersion model. Results indicate that the assumption of a last shared common ancestor outside the continent better explains the observed morphological differences between early and late American groups.

Free paper so you may read the whole thing.
I’m tossing it onto the ol’ Nook and hopefully I can read it tomorrow. . . .(and it worked! I shall read it tomorrow)

Stone Age Color, Glue ‘Factory’ Found

The Stone Age version of successful businessmen like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might have been involved in the color and glue trade.

A once-thriving 58,000-year-old ochre powder production site has just been discovered in South Africa. The discovery offers a glimpse of what early humans valued and used in their everyday lives.

The finding, which will be described in the Journal of Archaeological Science, also marks the first time that any Stone Age site has yielded evidence for ochre powder processing on cemented hearths — an innovation for the period. A clever caveman must have figured out that white ash from hearths can cement and become rock hard, providing a sturdy work surface.

See previous link, as this one is at 58k. (via Hawks)

UPDATE: Hawks has several posts on Ardipithecus as well.

Did Dining on Seafood Help Early Humans Grow These Big Brains?

Your brain is hungry. That big gray calculating machine in your head is an energy hog that needs lots of calories—more than the diet of fruits and plants that our distant hominin ancestors probably ate could provide. It’s a mystery, then, just how human ancestors like Homo erectus—who were around when our craniums started to expand in a hurry—ate enough to start growing big brains. But buried in Kenya, a two-million-year-old hint has emerged: Those hominins started eating seafood way back then, archaeologists say.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals. He and his colleagues report the find of our ancestors’ ancient feast in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

IIRC, something like this was floated earlier, but in South Africa if memory serves.