- Ancient Hip Bone in a French Cave Unveils a ‘Mystery’ Lineage of Homo Sapiens! | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Anthropologists discovered a bone in the Grotte du Renne cave in France that could indicate the presence of a previously unknown lineage of Homo sapiens arkeonews
- 45,000-year-old pelvic bone indicates unknown human lineage Interesting Engineering
- Neanderthals Built Weird Structures Inside This Cave And We Don’t Know Why IFLScience
- Hip bone found in cave in France may represent a previously unknown lineage of Homo sapiens Phys.org
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: sapiens
Anthropologists discovered a bone in the Grotte du Renne cave in France that could indicate the presence of a previously unknown lineage of Homo sapiens – arkeonews
- Anthropologists discovered a bone in the Grotte du Renne cave in France that could indicate the presence of a previously unknown lineage of Homo sapiens arkeonews
- How The Oldest Ever Human Bones Were Found Buried In A Moroccan Cave IFLScience
- 45,000-year-old pelvic bone indicates unknown human lineage Interesting Engineering
- Researchers claim hip bone of an infant in France who lived 45,000 years ago belonged to an unknown human line Daily Mail
- Neanderthals Built Weird Structures Inside This Cave And We Don’t Know Why IFLScience
- View Full Coverage on Google News
How to See the ‘Green Comet’ Everyone’s Talking About
Deep in the Stone Age, when Neanderthals still lived alongside Homo sapiens, our ancestors might have been agog at a green light in the night sky. Now, that light—C/2022 E3 (ZTF) (more familiarly, the Green Comet)—is back.
The Green Comet’s highly elliptical orbit means it will take a long time for it to swing past Earth again—about 50,000 years, to be specific. And that’s if it repeats its 50,000-year sojourn, which it may not.
Astronomers discovered the comet in March 2022 using the Samuel Oschin robotic telescope at the Zwicky Transient Facility. It passed perihelion (when it is closest to the Sun) on January 12.
Observers in the U.S. can see the comet now through early February, potentially with the naked eye if you’re in a dark viewing area, but your chances will be better using binoculars or a telescope. The best time to see the comet is in the predawn hours, according to NASA.
The comet will make its closest approach to our planet on February 2. The closest approach will take it about 0.29 AU (about 27 million miles) from Earth, according to EarthSky.
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Currently, the comet is toward the constellation Boötes and near Hercules, EarthSky reports. (If you’re having trouble finding the comet’s position, you can consult a handy interactive sky chart.) The comet’s location makes it difficult for observers in the Southern Hemisphere to see. From its current location in the night sky, its projected path charts it past Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper), with it passing by Camelopardis at the time of its closest approach.
Comets glow thanks to a combination of their chemical composition and sunlight. Comets that pass near the Sun are illuminated and warmed by its energy, causing molecules on their surface to evaporate and fluoresce. Comet heads glow green when they contain cyanogen or diatomic carbon, according to NASA.
The Green Comet may get as bright as magnitude 5 by the time it’s closest to Earth, according to EarthSky. The lower the number, the brighter the object. The full Moon’s apparent magnitude is about -11, and the faintest objects seen by the Hubble Space Telescope are about magnitude 30, according to Brittanica. The dimmest stars that our naked eye can see are about magnitude 6.
While the comet may reach a brightness of magnitude 5, it’ll probably be helpful to use a pair of binoculars or a telescope if you’re having difficulty spotting the object on a clear night.
The incoming space rock is not the only recent green comet; in 2018, the comet 46P/Wirtanen was bright enough for observers to see with the naked eye, and in 2021, the Comet Leonard glowed green as the ice-ball made its cosmic trajectory.
So keep your eyes up on the clear nights to come. If you see something with a faint green glow, it’s probably our newest cosmic visitor.
More: Mega Comet Arriving From the Oort Cloud Is 85 Miles Wide
Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: Tooth discovery is upending what we know about early humans
The discovery of the molar from Grotte Mandrin, near Malataverne in the Rhône Valley in southern France, along with hundreds of stone tools dating back about 54,000 years ago, suggests that early humans lived in Europe about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists had previously thought.
What’s more, the Homo sapiens tooth was sandwiched between layers of Neanderthal remains, showing that the two groups of humans coexisted in the region. These findings challenge the narrative that the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe triggered the extinction of Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and parts of Asia for about 300,000 years before disappearing.
“We’ve often thought that the arrival of modern humans in Europe led to the pretty rapid demise of Neanderthals, but this new evidence suggests that both the appearance of modern humans in Europe and disappearance of Neanderthals is much more complex than that,” said study coauthor Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London.
It’s the first time archaeologists have found evidence of alternating groups of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals living in the same place, and they rotated rapidly, even abruptly, at least twice, according to the study that published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
Previously, the arrival of early humans in Europe was dated to between 43,000 and 45,000 years ago, according to remains found in Italy and Bulgaria — not long before the last surviving Neanderthal remains dating back 40,000 to 42,000 years ago were found. This time frame had led many to think the arrival of Homo sapiens and the disappearance of Neanderthals were inexorably linked.
Humans and Neanderthals, who we know from genetic analysis encountered one another and had babies, resulting in Neanderthal traces in our DNA, overlapped for a much longer period in Europe, this study suggests.
Clues from ancient stone tools
Did humans and Neanderthals hang out together in this French cave overlooking the Rhône valley? The researchers don’t have any hard evidence of interaction between the two groups.
The tools found in the layers representing the Homo sapiens and Neanderthal occupations are distinct in style and don’t show any sign that they taught one another knapping or flaking stonework techniques. The stone tools associated with humans, known as Neronian tools, are smaller than those used by Neanderthals, known as Mousterian tools.
But the authors feel that it’s likely that the two groups must have bumped into one another in the neighborhood — even if direct contact didn’t take place in this particular cave.
The hundreds of stone tools found at the site suggest that the rock shelter was occupied intensively by both groups of humans — and was not just a place for an occasional stopover.
Astonishingly, the team was able to determine that the period between the Neanderthals relocating and the first modern humans moving into the cave 56,000 years ago was just one year. The researchers did this by mapping and analyzing soot deposits from fires made by humans in the cave.
“The soot is deposited to the roof of the rock shelter, and when there was a period of no one living there, there’s no soot deposition,” explained Stringer.
Lead author Ludovic Slimak, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse who has been working on the site for 30 years, said he believed the two groups must have exchanged knowledge in some way.
Right from the beginning of their occupation, Slimak said, the modern humans were using flint sourced from hundreds of kilometers away, the stone tools found in the cave show. That knowledge likely came from the indigenous Neanderthals, Slimak explained.
“The territory appears to be immediately well known by Homo sapiens, and they immediately know flint sources that are very localized,” he said.
“What precisely was the interaction? We just don’t know. We have no idea whether it was good relationship or a bad relationship. Was it a group exchange or did they have (Neanderthal) scouts to show and guide them?”
The researchers dated the site’s layers using radiocarbon and luminescence techniques, which measure the last time grains of mineral in rock were exposed to sunlight. The layer containing the Homo sapiens child’s tooth spans 56,800 to 51,700 years ago. In different layers, the scientists discovered eight other teeth that belonged to Neanderthals.
Untangling the human story is a complicated endeavor, but it’s largely accepted that modern humans originated in Africa and made their first successful migration to the rest of the world in a single wave between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.
Different ancient hominins existed and coexisted before Homo sapiens emerged as the lone survivor, and there was interbreeding between different groups of early humans. Some of these groups — like Neanderthals — are easily identified through the fossil record and archaeological remains, but others — like the Denisovans — have been largely identified by their genetic legacy.
DNA could flesh out the story
Marie-Hélène Moncel, a research director at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, said that the discovery of just one modern human tooth wasn’t enough to definitively push back the dates of the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe. She said other fossilized human remains were needed to be sure of this paper’s findings.
“Teeth are not enough, we must find post-cranial or cranial remains to be sure,” said Moncel, who wasn’t involved in the research.
It’s possible that DNA — either directly from the teeth or through groundbreaking new techniques that allow DNA found in sediment to be sequenced — could flesh out the story and tell us how the pioneering group of early modern humans were related to the ones that arrived later and whether the Neanderthals who lived in the cave had the same origins.
The DNA might show evidence of interbreeding between the two groups. In Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, where the previously oldest evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe was found, the DNA of those early modern humans was about 3% Neanderthal.
Teeth preserve well in the fossil record, and their bumps and groves are a bit like fingerprints for archaeologists, giving clues to ancestry and behavior. The shape of the tooth and its internal structure strongly suggested it belong to a modern human child even though the tooth was damaged, the researchers said.
Beautiful Bone Carving From 51,000 Years Ago Is Changing Our View of Neanderthals
As humans, we like to think we have some pretty unique traits in the animal kingdom. Language enables us to communicate efficiently with one another. Culture preserves and accumulates knowledge through generations. Technology and tools help us solve problems. Symbols and art reveal clues about our complex experiences.
A growing body of evidence suggests the traits we tend to assume are unique to modern humans, may once have been present in our hominin cousins, too.
Scientists have now announced the discovery of a 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer bone which was produced by Neanderthals in the Harz Mountains, now northern Germany. The carvings on the deer bone are precisely and artistically arranged into chevron patterns.
Previous evidence of symbolic and artistic traits in Neanderthals has been scarce, but the new findings raise exciting questions about how complex Neanderthal behavior might truly have been.
The findings add to previous research already pointing to Neanderthals having complex behavioral traits, such as their capacity to produce and hear the speech sounds of modern humans, their production of tools and technology, and their mourning of the dead.
Archaeologists Dirk Leder, Thomas Terberger and their colleagues carbon dated the deer bone, placing it at 51,000 years old. Microscopic analysis and experimental replication suggests the bone was actually boiled to soften before the engraving took place.
Up until now, Neanderthal artistic evidence amounted to minimalistic motifs and hand stencils on cave walls at three Spanish sites – La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales.
The authors of the new study believe the engraving of individual lines in the chevron design combined with the fact that these giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) were rare north of the alps at that time, strengthens the idea that the engravings have symbolic meaning and show evidence for conceptual imagination in Neanderthals.
“Archaeological finds of artist engravings are rare and, in some cases, ambiguous. Evidence of artistic decorations would suggest production or modification of objects for symbolic reasons beyond mere functionality, adding a new dimension to the complex cognitive capability of Neanderthals,” writes Silvia Bello from the Natural History Museum in London, in an accompanying News & Views article published in Nature.
“The choice of material, its preparation before carving and the skillful technique used for the engraving are all indicative of sophisticated expertise and great ability in bone working,” adds Bello.
A question at the heart of this research is whether these Neanderthals were influenced by ancient H. sapiens contemporaries in the production of this type of carved bone.
Leder, who works at the State Service for Cultural Heritage Lower Saxony, and colleagues believe that Neanderthals had the manual and intellectual capabilities to produce the artifact independently of any modern human influence.
They support their hypothesis with archaeological evidence that suggests H. sapiens arrived in Central Europe several millennia after the engraved bone was dated.
However, given recent evidence for the exchanging of genes between Neanderthals and modern humans over 50,000 years ago, Bello thinks we can’t rule out the possibility H. sapiens had some influence on Neanderthals producing these types of artifacts.
“Given this early exchange of genes, we cannot exclude a similarly early exchange of knowledge between modern human and Neanderthal populations,” she writes.
“The possibility of an acquired knowledge from modern humans doesn’t undervalue, in my opinion, the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals. On the contrary, the capacity to learn, integrate innovation into one’s own culture and adapt to new technologies and abstract concepts should be recognized as an element of behavioral complexity.”
The research was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Bone carving suggests neanderthals had the capacity for symbolic thought
Patterns deliberately etched onto a bone belonging to a giant deer is further evidence that Neanderthals possessed the capacity for symbolic thought.
Neanderthals decorated themselves with feathers, drew cave paintings, and created jewelry from eagle talons, so it comes as little surprise to learn that Neanderthals also engraved patterns onto bone. The discovery of this 55,000-year-old bone carving, as described in Nature Ecology & Evolution, is further evidence of sophisticated behaviour among Neanderthals.
“Evidence of artistic decorations would suggest production or modification of objects for symbolic reasons beyond mere functionality, adding a new dimension to the complex cognitive capability of Neanderthals,” as Silvia Bello, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum in London, explained in an associated New & Views article.
The carving was found at the Einhornhöhle archaeological site in the Harz mountains of northern Germany, and it features a line pattern consisting of six etchings that form five stacked chevrons. The “parallel and regularly spaced engravings have comparable dimensions and were very probably created in a uniform approach suggesting an intentional act,” according to the study, led by archaeologist Dirk Leder from the State Service for Cultural Heritage Lower Saxony in Hannover, Germany.
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Radiocarbon dating places the 2.2-inch-long toe bone to the Middle Paleolithic, and shortly before the arrival of Homo sapiens to the region. Microscopic analysis of the fossil suggests it was boiled prior to etching, which was likely done to soften the bone prior to carving, according to the research. The markings don’t resemble cuts typically associated with butchering, and the decorated item is of “no practical use,” as the researchers write in the study. The carving likely held significant symbolic meaning given the rarity of giant deer north of the alps during this time period. The exact meaning of the patterns, however, is anyone’s guess.
That the bone carving was produced by Neanderthals is not a certainty. Genetic evidence presented earlier this year places the arrival of anatomically modern humans to central Europe at around 45,000 year ago, which post-dates the carving by around 6,000 years. This apparent temporal gap points to the artifact as belonging to Neanderthals, but it’s not entirely implausible to suggest that Homo sapiens produced, or possibly influenced, the creation of this artwork.
Bello, who was not involved in the new study, said “we cannot exclude a similarly early exchange of knowledge between modern human and Neanderthal populations, which may have influenced the production of the engraved artefact from Einhornhöhle.” This possibility, that Neanderthals learned this skill from modern humans, doesn’t diminish their cognitive capacities, however.
“On the contrary, the capacity to learn, integrate innovation into one’s own culture and adapt to new technologies and abstract concepts should be recognized as an element of behavioural complexity,” wrote Bello. “In this context, the engraved bone from Einhornhöhle brings Neanderthal behaviour even closer to the modern behaviour of Homo sapiens.”
Of course, it’s also possible that the authors of the new study are completely right—that Neanderthals were indeed responsible for the bone carving, and that modern humans had nothing to do with it. Neanderthals, in addition to their aforementioned cultural contributions, engaged in many other sophisticated behaviors, such as caring for disabled loved ones, burying their dead, and taking care of their teeth. That Neanderthals carved patterns onto bone is thus hardly a stretch.
Dragon Man may be Homo sapiens’ closest relative
In 1933, bridge construction workers in Harbin, a city in Northeastern China, discovered a large and nearly intact skull. The skull was brought to paleoanthropologists in 2018, and after many studies, the researchers announced in late June 2021 that the cranium belonged to a male who lived approximately 146,000 years ago. This skull represents a new human species, the researchers said. They named it Homo longi, or Dragon Man, and said it might be the closest relative to modern humans, Homo sapiens. If so, Dragon Man would replace Neanderthals as the closest kin in our lineage and change what we know of human evolution.
Scientists published their findings in three different studies in the peer-reviewed journal The Innovation on June 25, 2021.
The Harbin cranium
The new species’ name of Homo longi derives from the province where the Harbin cranium was discovered, Heilongjiang. Heilongjiang translates into English as Black Dragon River, which gives the species its nickname of Dragon Man.
The cranium is the largest Homo skull ever found. The large size puts it in the range of modern humans, while other characteristics still separate it from us. The skull has larger, nearly square eye sockets, thick ridges along the brow, a wider mouth and larger teeth. Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology at Hebei GEO University, explained:
The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world. This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens … While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously named Homo species.
A day in the life of Dragon Man
According to dating methods, Dragon Man walked the Earth at least 146,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene. He was a large individual, approximately 50 years old, and lived in a small community in a forested, floodplain area. Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University, said:
Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish.
Dragon Man’s large size might have allowed it to adapt to harsh conditions, making it easier for the species to travel and spread throughout Asia. Homo longi and Homo sapiens might have mingled on the continent. Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London, said:
We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations coexisting in Asia, Africa and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don’t know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well.
A closer relative than the Neanderthals
The discovery of Dragon Man pushes the Neanderthals farther away from us in lineage and moves our common ancestor even farther back in time. Ni said:
It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens … The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years.
It’s possible Homo sapiens diverged from Neanderthals 400,000 years earlier than scientists originally thought.
The discovery of Dragon Man adds another piece of the puzzle to the mystery of evolution on Earth. Ni said:
Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations. We found our long-lost sister lineage.
Bottom line: Scientists have determined that a skull found in China is a new species, which they named Homo longi, or Dragon Man. They believe Dragon Man is the closest relative to modern humans, Homo sapiens.
Source: Geochemical provenancing and direct dating of the Harbin archaic human cranium
Source: Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species
Source: Massive cranium from Harbin in northeastern China establishes a new Middle Pleistocene human lineage
Via EurekAlert
Neanderthals used stone tool tech once considered exclusive to Homo sapiens
Blinkhorn et al. 2021
The entangled history of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in the Levant (the area around the eastern end of the Mediterranean) just got even more complicated. Paleoanthropologists recently identified a tooth from Shukbah Cave, 28km (17.5 miles) northwest of Jerusalem, as a Neanderthal molar. That makes Shukbah the southernmost trace of Neanderthals ever found, and it also links our extinct cousins to a stone tool technology previously considered an exclusive trademark of Homo sapiens.
The Levant was one of the first areas hominins reached when they began to expand beyond Africa, and the archaeological record suggests that early expansion happened in a series of waves. At some sites, layers of artifacts show that members of our species lived there for a while before being replaced by Neanderthals, and vice versa. It was a geographical crossroads, and like all such places, its story is dynamic and complex—and it can be hard to piece together from the bits of bone and stone left behind.
Often, stone tools are archaeologists’ best clue about who lived at a site and when. There are many ways to shape a piece of flint into something useful like a scraper or a hand ax, and archaeologists recognize different cultures based on subtle differences in those methods and the shape of the resulting tools. One approach to toolmaking, which produces distinctive stone points, is called Nubian Levallois. It’s one of several variations on a general theme of chipping flakes off a prepared stone core to produce a tool. Another variation on that theme is Mousterian technology, which is usually found at Neanderthal sites in western Europe. Nubian Levallois tools tend to turn up at sites from southern Africa to northeastern Africa.
Until recently, archaeologists have assumed that Nubian Levallois was a trademark of our species in Africa and the Levant, while Mousterian was a trademark of Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal molar (uncovered by archaeologist Jimbob Blinkhorn of Royal Holloway, University of London and his colleagues) was buried in a layer of sediment alongside a mixture of Mousterian and Nubian Levallois tools. “This is the first time they’ve been found in direct association with Neanderthal fossils, which suggests we can’t make a simple link between this technology and Homo sapiens,” said Blinkhorn.
Making a mountain from a molar
The lone tooth from Shukbah—a lower first molar—spent most of the last century in the private collection of Sir Arthur Keith. It was eventually donated to the Natural History Museum in London, so archaeologists are only recently getting to take a close look at it. “Broadly, hominin fossils are rare, and so this was a fantastic opportunity to study this find in greater detail and open up wider comparisons on the Neanderthal populations of southwest Asia,” Blinkhorn told Ars.
Blinkhorn and his colleagues used computed tomography (CT) scans to measure the internal and external shape and structure of the tooth. They compared those shapes and measurements to other Neanderthal and Homo sapiens molars from southwest Asian sites. In the end, the tooth clearly belonged in a category with the Neanderthal molars.
And the Neanderthal in question seems to have been a young child, probably around 9 years old, just getting their first permanent teeth in. The first molar is usually one of the first permanent teeth to grow in, and this one showed hardly any signs of wear, which suggests that it was fairly new. So far, efforts to get ancient DNA from the tooth haven’t succeeded:
“A previous team have tried this, and the drill hole is evident on the image of the tooth, but as far as I am aware this was unsuccessful,” Blinkhorn told Ars.
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Nubian Levallois tools from Shukbah Cave.
Blinkhorn et al. 2021 -
The Neanderthal child’s molar from Shukbah Cave.
Blinkhorn et al. 2021
In the same layer of sediment as the tooth, the archaeologists who excavated at Shukbah in 1928 found ancient hearths and stone tools. Blinkhorn and his colleagues took a closer look at those earlier archaeologists’ notes and the tools they had found, and many of them turned out to have been made in the Nubian Levallois style.
“Illustrations of the stone tool collections from Shukbah hinted at the presence of Nubian Levallois technology, so we revisited the collections to investigate further,” said Blinkhorn. “In the end, we identified many more artifacts produced using the Nubian Levallois method than we had anticipated.”
Finding fossils alongside stone tools is relatively rare, but when it happens, it links ancient hominins directly with the things they made and used. Archaeologists rely on those rare links to identify the makers of stone tools at other sites where no fossils remain. Stone tool technologies linked to a particular hominin species or culture help archaeologists track how, where, and when early humans moved through the world.
But the Shukbah Cave molar suggests it’s actually not that simple. “This study… issues a timely note of caution that there are no straightforward links between particular hominins and specific stone tool technologies,” said study co-author Simon Blockley, an archaeologist at Royal Holloway, University College of London.
Same idea, different times and places
Blinkhorn, who specializes in stone tools, told Ars that Neanderthals probably figured out the Nubian Levallois method on their own, separately from groups of H. sapiens who also invented the technology at different times and places. If he’s right, it’s similar to how human cultures around the world have independently arrived at the same solutions for other technological challenges, from pyramids to bows and arrows to fishing.
“Within Africa, there is evidence for multiple, independent innovations of Nubian Levallois technology. Its identification in southern Africa appears disconnected from its appearance in northern/eastern Africa,” Blinkhorn told Ars. “Given the common background in using other Levallois methods, the simplest explanation is that Neanderthals also separately developed Nubian Levallois methods.
Other scenarios are also possible, of course, especially given the overlapping and mingling of hominin species in the Levant at the time. As always in archaeology, additional evidence is needed to draw more detailed conclusions.
Scientific Reports, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-001-822576 (About DOIs).