Archaeology

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Ancient temple unearthed in Peru
LIMA — A 4,000-year-old temple filled with murals has been unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, making it one of the oldest finds in the Americas, a leading archeologist said on Saturday.
"It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
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Sanctuary of Rome's 'Founder' Revealed
ROME (AP) -- Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been revered by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the city's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.
"It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
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Post by CovenantJr »

Well, since I'm now an archaeology student, I should probably trawl through this thread at some point. Could be some useful stuff here.
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Congratulations, CovJr!

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'Virtual archaeologist' reconnects fragments of an ancient civilization - 2008-09-26

For several decades, archaeologists in Greece have been painstakingly attempting to reconstruct wall paintings that hold valuable clues to the ancient culture of Thera, an island civilization that was buried under volcanic ash more than 3,500 years ago.

This Herculean task -- more than a century of further work at the current rate -- soon may get much easier, thanks to an automated system developed by a team of Princeton University computer scientists working in collaboration with archaeologists in Greece.

The new technology "has the potential to change the way people do archaeology," according to David Dobkin, the Phillip Y. Goldman '86 Professor in Computer Science and dean of the faculty at Princeton.

Dobkin and fellow researchers will report on their work in a paper they present Friday, Aug. 15, in Los Angeles at the Association of Computing Machinery's annual SIGGRAPH conference, widely considered the premier meeting in the field of computer graphics.

"This approach really brings in the computer as a research partner to archaeologists," said Dobkin, who got the inspiration for the project after a 2006 visit to the archaeological site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera, which in present-day Greece is known as Santorini.

To design their system, the Princeton team collaborated closely with the archaeologists and conservators working at Akrotiri, which flourished in the Late Bronze Age, around 1630 B.C.E.

Reconstructing an excavated fresco, mosaic or similar archaeological object is like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle, only far more difficult. The original object often has broken into thousands of tiny pieces -- many of which lack any distinctive color, pattern or texture and possess edges that have eroded over the centuries.

As a result, the task of reassembling artifacts often requires a lot of human effort, as archaeologists sift through fragments and use trial and error to hunt for matches.

While other researchers have endeavored to create computer systems to automate parts of this undertaking, their attempts relied on expensive, unwieldy equipment that had to be operated by trained computer experts.

The Princeton system, by contrast, uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware and is designed to be operated by archaeologists and conservators rather than computer scientists. The system employs a combination of powerful computer algorithms and a processing system that mirrors the procedures traditionally followed by archaeologists.

"We mimic the archaeologists' methods as much as possible, so that they can really use our system as a tool," said Szymon Rusinkiewicz, an associate professor of computer science whose research team led the Princeton effort. "When fully developed, this system could reduce the time needed to reconstruct a wall from years to months. It could free up archaeologists for other valuable tasks such as restoration and ethnographic study."

In 2007, a large team of Princeton researchers made a series of trips to Akrotiri, initially to observe and learn from the highly skilled conservators at the site, and later to test their system. During a three-day visit to the island in September 2007, they successfully measured 150 fragments using their automated system.

Although the system is still being perfected, it already has yielded promising results on real-world examples. For instance, when tested on a subset of fragments from a large Akrotiri wall painting, it found 10 out of 12 known matches. Further, it found two additional matches that were previously unknown.

"This showed that the system could work in a real-life situation," said Tim Weyrich, a postdoctoral teaching fellow in computer science at Princeton who is the technical lead researcher on the project and who designed many of its components. The team is planning another trip to the site this fall to permanently install the system for the archaeologists' use, said Weyrich, who in September will become an assistant professor of computer science at University College London.

The setup used by the Princeton researchers consists of a flatbed scanner (of the type commonly used to scan documents and which scans the surface of the fragment), a laser rangefinder (essentially a laser beam that scans the width and depth of the fragment) and a motorized turntable (which allows for precise rotation of the fragment as it is being measured). These devices are connected to a laptop computer.

By following a precisely defined and intuitive sequence of actions, a conservator working under the direction of an archaeologist can use the system to measure, or "acquire," up to 10 fragments an hour. The flatbed scanner first is used to record several high-resolution color images of the fragment. Next, the fragment is placed on the turntable, and the laser rangefinder measures its visible surface from various viewpoints. The fragment is then turned upside down and the process is repeated.

Finally, computer software, or algorithms, undertake the challenging work of making sense of this information. The Princeton researchers have dubbed the software that they have developed "Griphos," which is Greek for puzzle or riddle.

One algorithm aligns the various partial surface measurements to create a complete and accurate three-dimensional image of the piece. Another analyzes the scanned images to detect cracks or other minute surface markings that the rangefinder might have missed.

The system then integrates all of the information gathered -- shape, image and surface detail -- into a rich and meticulous record of each fragment.

"This in itself is extremely useful information for archaeologists," said Weyrich.

Once it has acquired an object's fragments, the system begins to reassemble them, examining a pair of fragments at a time. Using only the information from edge surfaces, it acts as a virtual archaeologist, sorting through the fragments to see which ones fit snugly together.

"Having this ability to really exhaustively try everything very quickly could potentially be quite helpful," said Benedict Brown, whose doctoral thesis, completed recently under the direction of Rusinkiewicz, is devoted in large part to the fresco project.

Analyzing a typical pair of fragments to see whether they match is very fast, taking only a second or two. However, the time needed to reassemble a large fresco may be significant, as the system must examine all possible pairs of fragments. To make the system run faster, the researchers are planning to incorporate a number of additional cues that archaeologists typically use to simplify their searching for matching fragments. These data include information such as where fragments were found, their pigment texture and their state of preservation.


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www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=4552067

Good ole Desolation Canyon...A fantastic undisturbed look at the Fremont.
"We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and remember:X never, ever, marks the spot."
- Professor Henry Jones Jr.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

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This is interesting because it predates the Miocene when the majority of primate species have been discovered. And its incrediblyironic.
Fossil Reveals Ancient Primates Took Refuge in Texas
AUSTIN, Texas, October 20, 2008 (ENS) - More than 43 million years ago, when tropical forests and active volcanoes covered west Texas, primates chose to live there in preference to cooler northern climates, according to new fossil evidence discovered by Chris Kirk, physical anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Directing a field project to recover Eocene fossils from West Texas, Kirk and colleague Blythe Williams of Duke University discovered Diablomomys dalquesti, a new genus and species of primate that dates back at least 43 million years.

"After several years of collecting new fossils, reviewing Texas' primate community and comparing it to other places in North America, we found a much more diverse group of primate species in Texas than we expected," Kirk said.


Fossil imprint of ancient primates found at Devil's Graveyard Formation in southwest Texas (Photo by Chris Kirk)
During the early part of the Eocene epoch, primates were common in the tropical forests that covered most of North America, scientists say.

Marking the start of the Eocene, about 55 million years ago, Earth heated up in one of the most rapid and extreme global warming events recorded in geologic history - a time marked by the emergence of the first modern mammals.

Over time, climate cooling caused North American primates to decline in abundance and diversity. By the end of the Eocene, about 33 million years ago, primates and most tropical species had almost disappeared from North America.

Kirk's discovery of late middle Eocene primates at the Devil's Graveyard Formation in southwest Texas reveals new information about how North American primates evolved during this period of animal reorganization.

"It seems that primates stuck around in Texas much longer than many other parts of the continent because the climate stayed warm for a longer period of time," he said.

While primates were disappearing in places like Utah and Wyoming during the late middle Eocene, "west Texas provided a humid, tropical refuge for primates and other arboreal animals," Kirk explained.

The anthropologists named the new primate Diablomomys dalquesti, combining "Diablo" to represent the Devil's Graveyard Formation (sand- and mudstones near Big Bend National Park) with Omomys, a related fossil genus.

The dalquesti species name honors Walter and Rose Dalquest, who donated the land on which the fossil was collected, known as Midwestern State University's Dalquest Research Site.

Walter was a Texas paleontologist and distinguished biology professor at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls until his death in 2000.

The researchers published their discovery in the "Journal of Human Evolution" article, "New Uintan Primates from Texas and their Implications for North American Patterns of Species Richness during the Eocene."
"We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and remember:X never, ever, marks the spot."
- Professor Henry Jones Jr.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

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www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9101
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Native Americans Descended From a Single Ancestral Group, DNA Study Confirms
April 28, 2009

For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.

Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: Virtually without exception the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.

“Our work provides strong evidence that, in general, Native Americans are more closely related to each other than to any other existing Asian populations, except those that live at the very edge of the Bering Strait,” said Kari Britt Schroeder, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and the first author on the paper describing the study.

“While earlier studies have already supported this conclusion, what’s different about our work is that it provides the first solid data that simply cannot be reconciled with multiple ancestral populations,” said Schroeder, who was a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the university when she did the research.

The study is published in the May issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The team’s work follows up on earlier studies by several of its members who found a unique variant (an allele) of a genetic marker in the DNA of modern-day Native American people. Dubbed the “9-repeat allele,” the variant (which does not have a biological function), occurred in all of the 41 populations that they sampled from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile, as well as in Inuit from Greenland and the Chukchi and Koryak people native to the Asian (western) side of the Bering Strait. Yet this allele was absent in all 54 of the Eurasian, African and Oceanian groups the team sampled.

Overall, among the 908 people who were in the 44 groups in which the allele was found, more than one out of three had the variant.

In these earlier studies, the researchers concluded that the most straightforward explanation for the distribution of the 9-repeat allele was that all modern Native Americans, Greenlanders and western Beringians descend from a common founding population. Furthermore, the fact that the allele was absent in other Asian populations most likely meant that America’s ancestral founders had been isolated from the rest of Asia for thousands of years before they moved into the New World: that is, for a period of time that was long enough to allow the allele to originate in, and spread throughout, the isolated population.

As strong as this evidence was, however, it was not foolproof. There were two other plausible explanations for the widespread distribution of the allele in the Americas.

If the 9-repeat allele had arisen as a mutation multiple times, its presence throughout the Americas would not indicate shared ancestry. Alternatively, if there had been two or more different ancestral founding groups and only one of them had carried the 9-repeat allele, certain circumstances could have prompted it to cross into the other groups and become widespread. Say that there was a second allele — one situated very close to the 9-repeat allele on the DNA strand — that conferred a strong advantage to humans who carried it. Natural selection would carry this allele into new populations and because of the mechanics of inheritance, long stretches of DNA surrounding it, including the functionless 9-repeat allele, would be carried along with the beneficial allele.

To rule out these possibilities, the research team, which was headed by Noah Rosenberg at the University of Michigan, scrutinized DNA samples of people from 31 modern-day Asian populations, 19 Native American, one Greenlandic and two western Beringian populations.

They found that in each sample that contained the 9-repeat allele, short stretches of DNA on either side of it were characterized by a distinct pattern of base pairs, a pattern they seldom observed in people without the allele. “If natural selection had promoted the spread of a neighboring advantageous allele, we would expect to see longer stretches of DNA than this with a similarly distinct pattern,” Schroeder said. “And we would also have expected to see the pattern in a high frequency even among people who do not carry the 9-repeat allele. So we can now consider the positive selection possibility unlikely.”

The results also ruled out the multiple mutations hypothesis. If that had been the case, there would have been myriad DNA patterns surrounding the allele rather than the identical characteristic signature the team discovered.

“There are a number of really strong papers based on mitochondrial DNA — which is passed from mother to daughter — and Y-chromosome DNA — which is passed from father to son — that have also supported a single ancestral population,” Schroeder said. “But this is the first definitive evidence we have that comes from DNA that is carried by both sexes.”

Other authors of the study are David G. Smith, a professor of anthropology at UC Davis; Mattias Jacobsson, University of Michigan and Uppsala University in Sweden; Michael H. Crawford, University of Kansas; Theodore Schurr, University of Pennsylvania; Simina Boca, Johns Hopkins University; Donald F. Conrad and Jonathan Pritchard, University of Chicago; Raul Tito and Ripan Malhi, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Ludmilla Osipova, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk; Larissa Tarskaia, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Sergey Zhadanov, University of Pennsylvania and Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk; and Jeffrey D. Wall, UC San Francisco.

The work was supported by NIH grants to Rosenberg and Smith and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Schroeder.
"We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and remember:X never, ever, marks the spot."
- Professor Henry Jones Jr.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

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Two interesting bits of news today:
Ancient Killer Whale Found

London - Scientists have discovered an ancient whale whose bite ripped huge chunks of flesh out of other whales about 12 million years ago - and they have named it after the author of Moby Dick.

The prehistoric sperm whale grew to between 13 and 18 metres long, not unusual by today's standards. But unlike modern sperm whales, Leviathan melvillei, named for Herman Melville, sported vicious, tusk-like teeth some 36cm long.

The ancient beast evidently dined on other whales, researchers said in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. They report finding a skull of the beast in a Peruvian desert.

The researchers named it in tribute to the 19th-century author and his classic tale of the great white whale, which includes frequent digressions on natural history that punctuate the action.

"There is a chapter about fossils," one of the paper's authors, Olivier Lambert of the Natural History Museum in Paris, said. "Melville even mentions some of the fossils that I studied for my PhD thesis."

Unprecedented

Anthony Friscia, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the discovery, said scattered finds of huge fossilised teeth had long hinted at the ancient whale's existence. But without a skull to fit them in, the creature's shape, size and feeding habits remained a mystery.

"The fact that they have found the entire jaw - well, almost the entire skull - is what's pretty unprecedented," he said.

The ancient beasts "were the killer whales of their time, although on a much grander scale," Friscia said. "They were close to the biggest things around."

Friscia said he thought the choice of a name was fantastic.

"You gotta love any time you get a nod to literature in taxonomy," he said. "It was a big whale, so why not?"
And:
Unfinished Tomb Found In Egypt

Cairo - Egyptian archaeologists who have completed excavations on an unfinished ancient tunnel believe it was meant to connect a 3 300-year-old pharaoh's tomb with a secret burial site, the antiquities department said on Wednesday.

Egyptian chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass said it has taken three years to excavate the 174 metre long tunnel in Pharaoh Seti I's ornate tomb in southern Egypt's Valley of the Kings. The pharaoh died before the project was finished.

First discovered in 1960, the tunnel has only now been completely cleared and archaeologists discovered ancient figurines, shards of pottery and instructions left by the architect for the workers.

"Move the door jamb up and make the passage wider," read an inscription on a decorative false door in the passage. It was written in hieratic, a simplified cursive version of hieroglyphics. Elsewhere in the tunnel there were preliminary sketches of planned decorations, said Hawass.

Pharaoh Seti I (1314 - 1304 BC) was one of the founders of the New Kingdom's 19th Dynasty known for its military exploits and considered the peak of ancient Egyptian power. His tomb is famous for its colourful wall paintings.

Seti's son Ramses II built grandiose temples and statues of himself all over Egypt.

Hawass speculated that the tunnel and the secret tomb were not finished because of the pharaoh's death, but may have inspired a similar structure in Ramses II's tomb.
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A couple of guys with a metal detector found a ceremonial bronze Roman helmet with face mask a few months ago in Northern England, near Carlisle. It was only the third of its type ever found, and was in better condition than the others.

It went up for auction this week, expecting to fetch £200,000-£300000, but was sold for £2.2million!

The closest local museum had raised funds to buy it, hoping to keep it in the area - they raised £1.7million! But to no avail....

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www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-11489189
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Use of Fire Pushed Back To 1 Million Years

Scientists said on Monday they have uncovered the earliest evidence of camp fires made by human ancestors in a cave in South Africa, suggesting that the practice may have started one million years ago.

Until now, experts have found little consensus on when our prehistoric cousins figured out how to make sparks for cooking food and keeping warm, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hints of such activity have been found in Africa, Asia and Europe, but the earliest signs of fire were believed to be scorched pot pieces in Israel, dating to around 700 000-800 000 years ago.

Fragments of burnt animal bones and stone tools that appear to be even older have since been found in layers of sediment at the Wonderwerk Cave in north-central South Africa where earlier excavations have shown a significant record of human occupation.

Researchers found "well preserved ashed plant material and burned bone fragments deposited in situ on discrete surfaces and mixed within sediment" in the cave, suggesting small, local fires near the entrance, said the study.

Some of the fragments show evidence of surface discolouration typical of a controlled burn and not a wildfire or other natural event, it added.

"The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300 000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life," said University of Toronto anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project.

Homo erectus is the oldest known early human. With long legs and large brains that resembled modern people they were believed to roam the Earth beginning 1.8 million years ago, long before the Neanderthals.

"The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution," said Chazan.

"The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society. Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human."

The international team of researchers included experts from Boston University, Heidelberg Academy of Science and Humanities in Germany, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and University of Toronto, Canada.
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To this day I remain convinced that our knowledge of extremely early human history is completely wrong. Things happened earlier than we think they did and I also suspect that there was a civilization that predated what we know of as the Ancient World; this explains why pyramids developed in nearly every civilization that built extensively with earth or stone.

Of course, I have absolutely no evidence of this so it is all wild speculation sprinkled with educated guesses. Still...I suspect that some day we will eventually find evidence of this earlier civilization.

Now for the crazy ranting--I suspect this civilization existed on Antarctica before it was covered with ice. How thick is the ice there? 5 to 10 kilometers? That makes it fairly impossible to explore and any remnants that were there have been completely crushed by the ice so we'll never know for sure. Nevertheless, I find the idea fascinating and, quite honestly, I just like it.
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Dates For Use Of Paint Pushed Back

Around 49 000 years ago, someone in what is today South Africa mixed milk with ochre to produce a paint mixture.

What the paint was used for remains unknown. But what is startling is that it was made earlier than the first previously know use of the paint - 47 000 years earlier.

The mixture was preserved on a small stone flake excavated by Lyn Wadley, of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, at a site about 40km north of Durban.

"Our analyses show that this ochre-based mixture was ... a paint medium that could have been applied to a surface or to human skin," Wadley and a group of co-authors wrote in a paper just published in the academic journal 'Plos One.'

The oldest documented use of milk in a pigment mixture was from Greece around 2 200 years ago. It was a technique used as an art medium up to the Renaissance.

The finding is also significant because it long predates the introduction of domesticated cattle into the region, which took place between 1 000 and 2 000 years ago.

Chemical analysis revealed the milk was not from a domestic cow but a wild bovid, such as a buffalo or an antelope species. So it was probably extracted by killing a wild animal that was lactating.

And its use?

"It may have been used as decorative paint. It could have been used to decorate animals hides. We have not found the evidence for the way that they used it, we just know that they used it," Wadley said.
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That's fascinating Av. Thanks for posting it.
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Glad you found it interesting Io. :D

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Ditto Av - informative quote. I wonder if the application could have been as a skin/hair paint of similar nature to the ochre paint still used to this day by some tribes - and most strikingly if I may say, by the ladies! ["No woman is so beautiful that her beauty would not be enhanced by cosmetics." Charles Baudelaire In Praise of Cosmetics 1863. :lol: ]
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Unfortunately far too many people seem to follow Hamlet's advice and paint an inch thick... ;)

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Yes - like Othello, a case of 'not wisely, but too well'! :lol:
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:LOLS:

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Neandertal DNA Redraws Human Migration Timeline

A group of modern humans that arrived in Eurasia far earlier than previously thought also had sex with Neanderthals, according to a study that redraws the migratory timeline for our species.

The new research, published in Nature, provides the first genetic evidence that some Homo sapiens left the African continent at least 100 000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than widely assumed.

The smoking-gun proof came not from human fossils but a single Neanderthal whose remains were found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, near the Russian-Mongolian border.

Embedded in the genome of the ancient caveman - in chromosome 21, to be precise - were traces of human DNA.

This is the earliest known case of inter-species sex between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

More significantly, it also pushes back the departure of our forebear from the cradle of humanity by about 35 000 years, the researchers said.

"It is the first genetic evidence of modern humans outside Africa," Sergi Castellano, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-leader of the study, told AFP.

The findings are bolstered by the discovery, announced last October, of human teeth in southern China dating back 80 000 to 120 000 years, though there is no reason to think the two groups were linked, the researchers said.

In both cases, they speculate, it is likely that these early migrations from East Africa moved across the Arabian Peninsula.

From there, some may have gone north towards central Asia and Siberia, in one case, and across the Middle East towards east Asia, in the other.

Scientists agree that the first truly modern humans emerged in Africa about 200 000 years ago.

The new study also concluded, however, that the humans who interbred with the Altai Neanderthals are not from the same stock that populated Europe and Asia about 65 000 years ago.

Instead, they likely belonged to a group that separated early on from other humans, "about the time present-day Africa populations diverged from one another, around 200 000 years ago," said Ilan Gronau, a researcher at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, and co-author of the study.

In any case, they almost certainly died out and are, therefore, not among the ancestors of present day people outside of Africa, who left the continent much later.

The researchers also examined the DNA of two Neanderthals found in Europe, one in Spain and the other in Croatia.

In addition, they looked at the genetic make-up of another extinct early human called Denisovans, found in the same Altai Mountain cave.

Related to both human and Neanderthal lineages, Denisovans are thought to have split off from the former about 600 000 years ago, and the latter about 400 000 years later. They survived until at least 40 000 years ago.

Neither the European Neanderthals nor the Denisovans carried any modern human DNA.
--A
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Post by peter »

Thanks for posting Av. I need to just re-check my facts in order to consider the significance of this. The article states (perfectly fairly) only the facts, but avoids getting into the politically treacherous area of considering the implications of this find in respect of the origins of the three major types of people found today. It's one of those areas where the direction of our knowledge threatens to become uncomfortable in a PC world - if you are silly enough to allow it to do so! ;)
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