Bruce Bower
VerifiedArticles by Bruce Bower
Ancient southern Africans took genetic evolution in a new direction
Important, previously unrecognized genetic changes common to all ancient and modern Homo sapiens spread in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, a new study finds. After that, the same investigation concludes, human evolution experienced a regional twist. Ancient southern Africans evolved an impressive array of genetic tweaks largely independently of humans in other parts of the continent.
A clay figurine unveils a storytelling shift from 12,000 years ago
A roughly 12,000-year-old clay figurine unearthed in northern Israel has unveiled a surprisingly ancient turning point in storytelling and artistic techniques. This tiny item, which fits in the palm of an adult’s hand, represents the oldest known figurine to depict an encounter between a human and a nonhuman animal, say archaeologist Laurent Davin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues.
Peru's Serpent Mountain sheds its mysterious past
New evidence may resolve a longstanding archaeological puzzle in Peru. A vast line of thousands of holes dug into a ridge in the foothills of the Andes Mountains served as a regional marketplace for pre-Inca groups more than 600 years ago, researchers report November 10 in Antiquity. Inca rulers later repurposed the 1.5-kilometer-long earthwork, known as the Band of Holes, as a place for receiving and distributing taxes, say archaeologist Jacob Bongers of the University of Sydney and colleagues.
Smoke-dried mummies found in Southeast Asia are the oldest known
ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved. For instance, ancient dinosaurs are the ancestors of today's birds. (antonym: descendant) Borneo: The largest island in Asia and third largest in the world. It is mountainous, covered by vast expanses of rainforest and sparsely populated by people.
DNA reveals Neandertals traveled thousands of kilometers into Asia
A fossil unearthed on Eastern Europe’s Crimean Peninsula has divulged the strongest genetic clues yet about Neandertals’ long-distance journeys into the heart of Asia. After identifying a bone fragment previously excavated at Crimea’s Starosele rock-shelter as Neandertal, researchers extracted bits of mitochondrial DNA from the find.
DNA reveals Neandertals traveled thousands of kilometers into Asia
New research suggests two surprise pathogens were among the diseases that laid waste to the emperor’s vaunted Grande Armée. When Napoleon marched into Russia in 1812, he brought with him the largest army Europe had ever seen. When he limped back out, he’d met his match — not in muskets or cannon …
Fossil hand bones point to tool use outside the Homo lineage
Newly discovered African fossils lend a hand to suspicions that an ancient hominid outside our own genus, Homo, made and used stone and bone tools. Partial remains of a roughly 1.5-million-year-old Paranthropus boisei individual, including hand and wrist bones, indicate that this extinct hominid species could have made basic cutting and pounding implements, say paleoanthropologist Carrie Mongle of Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues.
Noticia: Los huesos fósiles de las manos apuntan al uso de herramientas fuera del linaje del Homo
Fósiles africanos recién descubiertos dan cuenta de las sospechas de que un antiguo homínido fuera de nuestro género, el Homo, fabricaba y utilizaba herramientas de piedra y hueso.
What Jane Goodall taught me about bones, loss and not wasting anything
Jane Goodall died on October 1 at the age of 91. When I heard the news, my mind raced back 35 years to a conversation I had with the pioneering observer and student of chimpanzee behavior. As the ‘90s began, Goodall had been studying chimps in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park for nearly 30 years. Her work illuminated the previously unknown complexity of these apes’ social lives.
An ancient Chinese skull might change how we see our human roots
A roughly 1-million-year-old Chinese hominid skull has long vexed efforts to nail down its evolutionary identity. Fossil comparisons using a new digital reconstruction of this specimen, dubbed the Yunxian 2 skull, indicate that it belonged to an early member of an Asian hominid line that culminated in a now-extinct species called Homo longi, researchers report in the Sept. 25 Science.
The oldest known mummies have been found - in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asians created the oldest known human mummies roughly 7,000 years before Egyptian mummies debuted, researchers say. From around 12,000 to 4,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers across southern China, Southeast Asia and islands to the south and east bound the dead in crouched postures. They then slowly dried the bodies over smoky, low-temperature fires for several months, say archaeologist Hsiao-chun Hung of Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues.
Venice’s iconic winged lion statue originated in ancient China Original
Venice’s famous bronze statue of a winged lion, which stands atop a pedestal in St. Mark’s Square, took an intercontinental trip to Italy. This symbol of medieval Venetian statehood started out as a tomb guardian sculpture in China’s Tang Dynasty, say archaeologist Massimo Vidale of the University of Padua in Italy and colleagues. Tang rulers held power from A.D. 618 to 907.
Ancient hominids made long road trips to collect stone for tools
Starting at least 2.6 million years ago, East African toolmakers became tech-savvy road warriors. Those hominids, perhaps early members of the Homo genus or a dead-end lineage dubbed Paranthropus, traveled up to 13 kilometers from a lakeshore site to obtain and bring back rocks suitable for fashioning into durable stone tools. The finding pushes back the timing of hominids’ long-distance retrieval of any resource by roughly 600,000 years, the scientists report August 15 in Science Advances.
7 stone tools might rewrite the timeline of hominid migration in Indonesia
Stone tools unearthed on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that ancient human relatives arrived there between about 1 million and 1.5 million years ago — far earlier than previously known. The discovery, described August 6 in Nature, pushes back the timeline for hominid occupation of Sulawesi by hundreds of thousands of years.
‘Dragon Man’ skull may be the first from an enigmatic human cousin
Meet the new face, and braincase to boot, of Asia’s mysterious Stone Age denizens, the Denisovans. The nearly complete, roughly 146,000-year-old skull of an adult male was found nearly a century ago, possibly during bridge construction in Harbin, China. An earlier study claimed that the Harbin skull, nicknamed Dragon Man, represented a new species called Homo longi.
‘Dragon Man’ skull may be the first from an enigmatic human cousin
Now Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque. When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go …
DNA confirmed Chaco Canyon ties for a Pueblo tribe
ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved. For instance, ancient dinosaurs are the ancestors of today's birds. (antonym: descendant) artifact: Some human-made object (such as a pot or brick) that can be used as one gauge of a community’s culture or history.
Roman gladiators really fought big cats, ancient bite marks suggest
3-D: Short for three-dimensional. This term is an adjective for something that has features that can be described in three dimensions — height, width and length. anthropologist: A social scientist who studies humankind, often by focusing on its societies and cultures. Britain: A shortened form for Great Britain, which is the collective name for England, Scotland, Wales and their associated islands.
Precolonial farmers thrived in one of North America’s coldest places Original
A laser eye-in-the-sky has uncovered vast, ancient farm fields in an unlikely place — the frosty forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ancestors of present-day Menominee people, a federally recognized Native American tribe, grew maize and other crops in densely clustered earthen ridges from around 1,000 to 400 years ago, researchers report in the June 5 Science.
Males weren’t always bigger than females in this hominid species
An ancient, distant human cousin from southern Africa called Paranthropus robustus has for the first time revealed molecular clues to its evolutionary status. Protein sequences preserved in four partial P. robustus teeth from different individuals that lived roughly 2 million years ago indicate that larger and smaller fossils of this hominid species cannot always be classed as male or female, as previously thought, researchers report in the May 29 Science.
Humans used whale bones to make tools 20,000 years ago
Western Europeans crafted hunting weapons out of bones from whales stranded on the Atlantic shoreline between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, researchers report May 27 in Nature Communications.
Neandertals may have hunted in horse-trapping teams 200,000 years ago
Neandertals formed sophisticated hunting parties that drove wild horses into fatal traps around 200,000 years ago. At Germany’s Schöningen site, wooden spears, double-pointed sticks, stone artifacts and butchered remains of more than 50 horses of various ages are some 100,000 years younger than previously thought, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Excavations of this material, now linked to a time when Neandertals inhabited Europe, occurred in the 1990s along an ancient lakeshore.
British tin might have fueled the rise of some Bronze Age civilizations
Where Bronze Age civilizations got large amounts of tin, a scarce metal, to mix with copper into the era’s namesake gold-colored metal has long puzzled archaeologists. A big part of the answer lies in Cornwall and Devon, two counties in southwestern England, a new study concludes. Farming communities began mining large tin ore deposits there around 4,200 years ago, say archaeometallurgist Alan Williams of Durham University in England and his colleagues.
A Pueblo tribe recruited scientists to reclaim its ancient American history
Members of New Mexico’s Picuris Pueblo Tribal Nation have long told stories about having descended from ancient North American ancestors. Genetic evidence now backs up what Picuris people — but not archaeologists — knew all along and fleshes out lost pieces of the tribe’s past. The new results, published April 30 in Nature, came out of a collaborative study between Picuris Pueblo representatives and scientists.
A lion’s bite marks a fatal fight with a possible Roman-era gladiator
As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in Europe, say forensic anthropologist Timothy Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland and colleagues.
Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of ‘modern’ human behavior
On a bright, late-summer day in north-central Europe around 300,000 years ago, a team of perhaps a couple dozen hunters got into their assigned positions for a big kill. Little did they know that remnants of this lethal event would someday contribute to a scientific rethink about the social and intellectual complexity of Stone Age life. Some of the hunters ascended a ridge where they gazed across a vast, marshy grassland below.
Denisovans inhabited Taiwan, new fossil evidence suggests
A fossil jaw originally netted by fishermen off the ocean floor near Taiwan’s west coast belonged to a member of a mysterious hominid population known as Denisovans, scientists report in the April 11 Science. Their new findings indicate that Denisovans, known from their ancient DNA and a handful of bones found at a couple of Asian sites, spread over a larger area than previously thought.
Ancient Arabian cymbals ring up Bronze Age musical connections
Ritually important musical practices resounded across Bronze Age cultures from Arabia to South Asia, a pair of unusual discoveries suggest. Excavations at a roughly 4,000-year-old settlement near the modern village of Dahwa in Oman have uncovered two copper cymbals with far-reaching cultural implications, say archaeologist Khaled Douglas of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, and colleagues.
Neandertal-like tools found in China present a mystery
Stone tools traditionally attributed to European and western Asian Neandertals have turned up nearly a continent away in southern China. Artifacts unearthed at a river valley site called Longtan include distinctive stone cutting and scraping implements and the rocks from which these items were struck. Until now, such items have been linked only to geographically distant Neandertals, says a team led by archaeologists Qi-Jun Ruan and Hao Li of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing.
Neandertal-like tools found in China present a mystery
Now They likely never saw a second of actual battle. A metal detectorist recently discovered not one, but two bronze and wood daggers that experts dated to over 3,000 years ago. • Only the bronze portions of the instruments survived for so long buried in a German field. • Scholars believe the daggers weren’t …
Western Europe’s oldest face adds new wrinkles to human evolution
A Spanish cave has divulged the oldest known fossil remains of human ancestors in Western Europe. Excavations at a site known as Sima del Elefante produced several fossil fragments that, when pieced together, form a partial left upper jaw and cheek bone dated to between 1.4 million and 1.1 million years old, say zooarchaeologist Rosa Huguet of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, and colleagues.
Human ancestors made the oldest known bone tools 1.5 million years ago
Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say. Discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, represent the oldest known evidence of systematic bone tool production by hominids, according to archaeologist Ignacio de la Torre of CSIC-Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and colleagues.
Humans moved into African rainforests at least 150,000 years ago
Humans lived under the leafy canopy of a West African rainforest by at least 150,000 years ago. Previously, the oldest secure evidence for humans living in African rainforests dated to about 18,000 years ago. The earliest human rainforest presence in the world had been placed at about 70,000 years ago in Southeast Asia.
Here’s how ancient Amazonians became master maize farmers
Water engineers in ancient South America turned seasonally flooded Amazonian savannas into hotbeds of year-round maize farming. Casarabe people built an innovative, previously unrecognized network of drainage canals and water-storing ponds that enabled two maize harvests annually, say geoarchaeologist Umberto Lombardo of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and colleagues.
Iron Age Celtic women’s social and political power just got a boost
Celtic women’s social and political standing in Iron Age England has received a genetic lift. DNA clues indicate that around 2,000 years ago, married women in a Celtic society, known as Durotrigians, on the coast of south-central England stayed in their home communities while their partners came from outside the area, say paleogeneticist Lara Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin and colleagues.
Britain's largest ancient massacre may have included cannibalism Original
A 4,000-year-old murder mystery began with a massacre in what’s now southwestern England. Then came dismemberment, possibly accompanied by cannibalism. At least 37 men, women and children suffered this violent fate, ending up dumped into a 15-meter-deep natural shaft by unknown attackers, say archaeologist Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford and colleagues.
The oldest known ritual chamber in the Middle East has been found Original
An ancient ritual compound has come to light in the deepest, darkest part of a cave located in what’s now northern Israel. Homo sapiens groups assembled at the cave to hold torchlit ceremonies, probably inspired by mythological or religious beliefs, as early as around 37,000 years ago, researchers report December 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
50 years on, Lucy offers lessons for achieving fossil fame
anatomy: (adj. anatomical) The study of the organs and tissues of animals. Or the characterization of the body or parts of the body on the basis of structure and tissues. Scientists who work in this field are known as anatomists. ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved.
Footprints offer a rare look at ancient human relatives crossing paths Original
Two ancient hominid species with slightly different gaits crossed paths in East Africa. Footprints preserved on what was once a muddy lakeshore indicate that the two species, each built to walk in its own way, hung out there around 1.5 million years ago.
Ancient Central Americans built a massive fish-trapping system Original
Starting around 4,000 years ago, an elaborate fish-trapping system nourished expanding human populations in lowland Central America, a new study finds. The discovery of this massive construction project indicates that aquatic foods at least partly supported the rise of Maya civilization roughly a millennium later.
Fossil teeth hint at a surprisingly early start to humans’ long childhoods Original
An extended childhood, a hallmark of human development, may have gotten off to an ancient and unusual start. One of the earliest known members of the Homo genus experienced delayed, humanlike tooth development during childhood before undergoing a more chimplike dental growth spurt, a new study concludes. The fossil teeth of a roughly 11-year-old individual reveal slowed development of premolar and molar teeth up to about age 5, followed by speeded development of those same teeth.
How does a fossil become a superstar? Just ask Lucy.
Inside a specially constructed safe at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa sit the fragile remains of the world’s most celebrated human ancestor. She was once a hardy survivor in an unforgiving environment, but now her partial skeleton receives round-the-clock protection in a temperature-controlled setting. In her prime, nearly 3.2 million years ago, this ancient female roamed East Africa’s landscape.
A digital exam reels in engraved scenes of Stone Age net fishing
Rare depictions of Stone Age net fishing have surfaced on engraved stones thanks to an imaging technique that gives magnification a digital boost. Previously unnoticed lines etched into eight stones found at Gönnersdorf, a roughly 16,000-year-old German site, form scenes of fish caught in large nets, researchers report November 6 in PLOS ONE.
An Egyptian mummy’s silent ‘scream’ hints at her violent death
anthropologist: A social scientist who studies humankind, often by focusing on its societies and cultures. chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H2O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.
Silk Road cities reached surprising heights in Central Asia’s mountains
Two high-altitude, medieval cities built by mobile herders along Silk Road trade routes in Central Asia have been hiding in plain sight — until now. Mountainous regions typically have been seen as obstacles to trade and communication. But these ancient settlements, located roughly 2,000 meters above sea level, show that herding communities developed a distinctive form of urban life where such activities thrived, archaeologist Michael Frachetti and colleagues report October 23 in Nature.
Ancient Scythians had cultural roots in Siberia
Horse-riding Scythian herders and warriors, who inhabited Central Asia and Eastern Europe around 2,500 years ago, may have had cultural roots several thousand kilometers to the east in Siberia, a new study suggests (SN: 7/27/23).
Fossils of an extinct animal may have inspired this cave art drawing Original
African rock art depicting a mythical tusked creature may mirror the look of fossils of real-life ancient mammal relatives called dicynodonts. Abundant, exposed fossils in South Africa’s Karoo Basin include dicynodont skulls with tusks that curve down and back, like those of the long-bodied animal depicted in roughly 200-year-old rock art by the region’s San hunter-gatherers, says paleontologist Julien Benoit.
LINKS - September 11th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments. By Ted Chiang, The New Yorker “Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical.
Ancient DNA unveils a previously unknown line of Neandertals Original
Science News is collecting reader questions about how to navigate our planet's changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events?
Did builders of Egypt’s first pyramid use a water-powered elevator? Original
archeologist: (also archaeologist) The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. Those remains can range from housing materials and cooking vessels to clothing and footprints. The field these people work in is known as archeology. average: (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group.
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