Archaeologists have uncovered the ancient remains of a young man in northern Vietnam who could be the oldest known paraplegic in the world. According to a report in The Canberra Times, the discovery has astounded researchers, showing the long-term survival of a man with a severe disability in a community where almost 50 per cent of people died before they turned five.
In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists has analysed the dental wear of the fossils of herbivorous animals hunted by Homo heidelbergensis. It is the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed.
Source : FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
A Swiss archaeological mission has found pre-historic flints and skeletons dating back 200,000 years in the desert of Palmyra in Syria, local media reported Sunday. The joint Swiss-Syrian team, which has now finished its dig at Al Koum, near Palmyra, said it had found a series of items dating back between 100-200,000 years, including peculiarly-moulded flints, which prove the ability of the Transitional Age Homo Sapien to properly use flint tools, al Thawra Daily reported.
Central Europe's prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today's hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served. The site, called Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic near the Austrian and Slovak Republic borders, provides a homespun look at the rich culture of some of Europe's first anatomically modern humans.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism expects to spend Tsh.600 million on an excavation and preservation project of the famous ancient Laetoli footsteps in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The Laetoli footsteps in Ngorongoro were discovered in 1979 on rocks and were expertly "sheltered" by researchers from Getty Foundation of the United States of America.
Researchers in England have presented conclusive evidence that the world was populated by Africans. Geneticists and archaeologists have tracked the origin of homo sapiens (or modern man) to a single tribe in Africa. The Telegraph reports that the group of people crossed the Red Sea and travelled to Arabia and went on to colonise the rest of the world.
Ancient humans might have used animal bones to grind fruit smoothies as well as dig up termites, a new analysis of mysterious 1 to 2 million-year-old tools suggests. Researchers discovered the bones belonging to large mammals at several sites in South Africa, and their intended use has been the subject of equal parts contention and speculation. Early 20th-century anthropologists who first uncovered the bones contended they were genuine tools and evidence for a bone-based tool culture in hominin species that predated early humans such as Paranthropus. Those interpretations fell out of fashion after researchers discovered that scavenging animals and natural wear can create marks resembling those on purported tools. However, in the last 20 years, researchers have employed electron and light microscopy as well as computer image analysis to compare marks on the bones to tools created experimentally. Unrooting vegetables called tubers looked like a good match, and a recent paper proposed termite digging.
Imagine a group of Home erectus, the earliest members of our family genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that island, but ideas about how to do so? Could this period of creative thought conclude with the invention of a raft large enough to hold several people, food and water? If we can find evidence of this situation in the dim past, in the early days of Homo erectus, then archaeologists are fixing the time and place for one of the extraordinary events in all human history, a major advance in the evolution of the human mind.
Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human - and not modern pygmies. The one metre tall, 30kg humans roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago. Since the discovery, researchers have argued vehemently as to the identity of these diminutive people.
UPDATE: A team of archaeologists has uncovered some of the worlds earliest shell ornaments in a limestone cave in Eastern Morocco. The researchers have found 47 examples of Nassarius marine shells, most of them perforated and including examples covered in red ochre, at the Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt. The fingernail-size shells, already known from 82,000-year-old Aterian deposits in the cave, have now been found in even earlier layers. While the team is still awaiting exact dates for these layers, they believe this discovery makes them arguably the earliest shell ornaments in prehistory.