WASHINGTON - A study of the skulls of Neanderthals, comparing them with early and modern humans, concludes that that ancient group is unlikely to have been the ancestor of people today.
Scientists have long debated whether modern people are related to Neanderthals, the squat, powerful hunters who dominated Europe for 100,000 years before dying out on the arrival of modern humans.
The new study, led by anthropologist Katerina Harvati of New York University, measured 15 standard landmarks on the face and skull of Neanderthals, early modern humans, current humans as well as other primate species. The results are published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Frozen in time This was sent in by an intrepid reader via email. I couldn't find a link to the story so I shall risk violating copyright laws by posting the message in its entirety here:
Melting ice in Yukon reveals artifacts, clues to ancient life
Juneau Empire
Friday, January 16, 2004
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WHITEHORSE, Yukon - Melting in the alpine last summer revealed the oldest
artifact recovered from what is now an inventory of 18 archaeological ice
patches on Yukon Territory mountains.
The shaft of a hunting dart used with an atlatl - a throwing board - has
been radiocarbon dated at 9,300 years old.
It was on display this week with other artifacts recovered by scientists
and students scouring the melting ice patches for clues into the way of
life thousands of years ago.
The recovery of an atlatl dart from a receding ice patch near Kusawa Lake
in 1997 began what has become an archaeological success story. A team of
researchers from England's Oxford University have made the ice patches and
the Yukon's gold fields their special focus, as they have found the quality
of preserved archaeological material is second to none, said Yukon
archaeologist Greg Hare.
Diane Strand, heritage officer for Champagne and Aishihik First Nations,
said the artifacts have a profound effect on the aboriginal students who
have helped discover them.
On display with the atlatl was a 1,400-year-old leather hunting pouch sewn
with sinew. Both were recovered by Cody Joe, an 18-year-old student with
the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.
"We have had students go out there and they have had a real profound change
about who they are and where they come from," said.
Strand pointed to one artifact that is not unusual because of its age, but
because it provides her with an insight into the level of sophistication
her ancestors possessed. Down both sides of the 1,260-year-old atlatl dart
are two feathers running parallel, sewn to the side of the shaft with sinew
that's threaded through the quill of the feathers.
It is amazing, Strand said, to think that well over a millennium ago, her
ancestors had the tools to pierce the quill with such a fine hole without
damaging the aerodynamics of the feather.
The dart is the youngest of the atlatl artifacts. Its date of 1,260 years
old comes just after the first artifact from the beginning of the
bow-and-arrow era in the Yukon, dated at 1,300 years old.
Bow-and-arrow technology, Hare said, swept North America 1,500 years ago.
Available evidence suggests the technology began in the North and quickly
moved south.
"It stuck within two generations," Hare said. "That is a really remarkable
change in the archaeological record."
The oldest shaft is evidence, Hare said, that soon after the ice age ended
10,000 years ago, people already had adapted to hunting caribou high up on
the ice patches. The caribou used the ice patches to escape flies in
summer.
Unlike glaciers that move and grind archaeological evidence into dust,
artifacts encased in ice patches remain stable and preserved, only to
surface when summer heat melts away their cover.
The Oxford University team last summer scraped samples from the inside of
the leather pouch to conduct DNA research. They also bored hole samples
from soil immediately in front of the ice patches, from which they will
search for DNA evidence of animals and people, from things as minute as a
dried scale of skin that was shed thousands of years ago.
© Copyright 1997-2003 Juneau Empire, Morris Digital Works & Morris
Communications Corporation
Whenever organic material is preserved it's a big deal, though the sample sizes (numbers of artifacts) usually preserved don't let you do much in the way of quantitative analysis. They still provide more of a tangible link to the past, much in the way that mummies fascinate us more than simple skeletons do. It's an old saying among archaeologists that we only discover 5% of the artifacts ancient people used because the only things that preserve are non-organic remains (stone tools, pottery, etc.). This can have important consequences for how we interpret the archaeological record. For example, all of the earliest tools recovered are stone and many of these were used in hunting and preparation of game animals for consumption. This led many researchers to conclude that most of what our earliest ancestors did was hunt for food -- the origin of the "man the hunter" idea. Nowadays, most archaeologists will agree that, while the addition of hunting to the diet may have provided a crucial source of added nutrition to the early Homo species, it was probably not their main source of food. But still, you work with what you've got so most of what you see written about early hominid subsistence will have to do with animal hunting and processing.
Added note #1: Another reason hunting is studied is because the animal bones also preserved in early sites retain evidence of butchery marks.
Added note #2: Not all early stone tools were used in hunting. Many apparently had use in plant processing activities, but without the plants (unlike the case with animal bones) our ability to glean subsistence information from them is far more limited.