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TOPIC: Homo Sapiens
Blobrana


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Australopithecus afarensis
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Lucy, the world's most famous fossil human ancestor, has gone digital in 3D. A new high-resolution CT scan of the 3.2 million year-old skeleton will provide scientists around the globe with information that may help settle debates about human evolution.
The virtual Lucy could prove invaluable to scientists by giving them their first glimpse inside her fossilised bones. The scans reveal microscopic details of the internal structure of Lucy's bones and teeth that give clues to how she moved and ate.

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Blobrana


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RE: Homo Sapiens
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In a press conference this morning, The Centre for Archaeological Research Malaysia (CARM) announced evidence of human existence in Malaysia from approximately 1.83 million years ago. This new evidence demolishes earlier findings that early humans were in Java from 1.2 - 1.7 million years ago. The new results also suggests that the "Out of Africa" theory should be a lot earlier than 1.8 million years ago.
The advance study at Bukit Bunuh of Lenggong in the state of Perak, Malaysia was conducted in 2008. This new evidence consists of stone tools artefacts such as hand axe and flake tools. Those artefacts were found cemented in a rock called suevite, a type of rock formed by the impact of meteorite. The rock has been dated using a fission track dating method in Geochronology Lab in Japan, Tokyo, and discloses a date of approximately 1.83 ± 0.61 million years old.

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Blobrana


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Evidence of 1.83 million-year human existence discovered
Universiti Sains Malaysia's Centre for Archaeological Research Malaysia has found evidence of early human existence in the country dating to 1.83 million years ago.

The centre director Associate Professor Mokhtar Saidin said the evidence found included stone-made tools such as handaxe and chopping tools.
The artefacts were found embedded in suevite rock, formed as a result of the impact of meteorite crashing down at Bukit Bunuh.
The suevite rock, reputedly the first found in Southeast Asia, was sent to the Geochronology Japan Laboratory three months ago and carbon dated using the Fission Track dating method.
Mokhtar said the results were sent back to USM two weeks ago and it showed the rock was dated to 1.83 million years ago.

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Blobrana


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Homo floresiensis
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 In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the "Hobbit," is not human. They used  3-D shape analysis to study the LB1 skull of the hobbit and found the shape of the skull to be consistent with a scaled down human ancestor but not modern humans. Their findings, reported in the current online edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, add to the evidence that the hobbit is a new species.
The question as to whether the hobbit was human or another species remains controversial. Some scientists claim the hobbit was a diminutive human that suffered from some type of disease that causes microcephaly, which results in abnormal growth of the brain and causes the cranium to be much smaller than the normal human cranium. But Dr. Baab and co-author Kieran McNulty, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, believe their findings counter the microcephaly theory.

"A skull can provide researchers with a lot of important information about a fossil species, particularly regarding their evolutionary relationships to other fossil species. The overall shape of the LB1 skull, particularly the part that surrounds the brain (neurocranium) looks similar to fossils more than 1.5 million years older from Africa and Eurasia, rather than modern humans, even though  Homo floresiensis is documented from 17,000 to 95,000 years ago" - Dr. Karen Baab.

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Homo ergaster
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New evidence has suggested that human ancestors in southern Africa were making hand axes as early as 1.6 million years ago, which is nearly twice as long ago as previously believed.
According to a report in Science News, these artefacts, which consisted of hand axes and two cleavers, were recovered from a diamond-mining pit in South Africa.
Estimates by archaeologist Ryan Gibbon and his colleagues, indicate that human ancestors in southern Africa fashioned these teardrop-shaped stone hand axes 1.6 million years ago, nearly twice as long ago as many researchers thought and about the time such tools are known to have first appeared in eastern Africa.

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RE: Homo Sapiens
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A new genetic study has revealed that men probably outnumbered women in the mass exodus 60,000 years ago, when modern humans left Africa.
Researchers believe that the particular migration was responsible for nearly all of the human population that exist outside Africa today.
Now, researchers have revealed that men and women weren't equal partners in that exodus.
By tracing variations in the X chromosome and in the non-sex chromosomes, the researchers found evidence that men probably outnumbered women in that migration.

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Title: Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa
Authors: Alon Keinan, James C Mullikin, Nick Patterson & David Reich

Comparisons of chromosome X and the autosomes can illuminate differences in the histories of males and females as well as shed light on the forces of natural selection. We compared the patterns of variation in these parts of the genome using two datasets that we assembled for this study that are both genomic in scale. Three independent analyses show that around the time of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, chromosome X experienced much more genetic drift than is expected from the pattern on the autosomes. This is not predicted by known episodes of demographic history, and we found no similar patterns associated with the dispersals into East Asia and Europe. We conclude that a sex-biased process that reduced the female effective population size, or an episode of natural selection unusually affecting chromosome X, was associated with the founding of non-African populations.

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Blobrana


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Homo floresiensis
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University of Minnesota anthropology professor Kieran McNulty (along with colleague Karen Baab of Stony Brook University in New York) has made an important contribution toward solving one of the greatest paleoanthropological mysteries in recent history -- that fossilised skeletons resembling a mythical "hobbit" creature represent an entirely new species in humanity's evolutionary chain.
Discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, controversy has surrounded the fossilised hominid skeletons of the so-called "hobbit people," or Homo floresiensis ever since. Experts are still debating whether the 18,000-year-old remains merely belong to a diminutive population of modern-day humans (with one individual exhibiting "microcephaly," an abnormally small head) or represent a previously unrecognised branch in humanity's family tree.

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RE: Homo Sapiens
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Humans upright far longer than thought
Humans may have been walking upright far longer than previously thought, on feet that look much like a gibbon's.

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Blobrana


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Modern humans may have evolved more than 80,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of sophisticated stone tools found in Ethiopia.
The tools were uncovered in the 1970s at the archaeological site of Gademotta, in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. But it was not until this year that new dating techniques revealed the tools to be far older than the oldest known Homo sapien bones, which are around 195,000 years old.

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Blobrana


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A stone-age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family. The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children.

"Their unity in death suggests unity in life," researchers said in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The earliest evidence of a nuclear family, dating back to the Stone Age, has been uncovered by an international team of researchers, including experts from the University of Bristol.
The researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005.  The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.

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