I Knew That They Were Somewhere

I've been looking for my toolbox, and I am not sure how it ended up in southern Greece.

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence.

Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Kewl.

Today in Paleo-Cuisine

And I do not mean the folks who subsist on uncooked food.

This refers to recreating northern and eastern European cuisines from 6,000 to 3,000 BCE. (Original journal article here)

They did detailed analysis of food residues in and an pottery and then attempted to cook some dishes.

I gotta see if there are some good recipes there.

 

More Like Us Every Day

Once again I am talking about Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, more commonly known as Neanderthals, have increasingly been found to have sophisticated capabilities that rivaled those of modern humans.  (H. Sapiens Sapiens)

Case in point, anthropologists have found a fat processing factory that was patronized by Neanderthals from hundreds of miles around.

This is not just a sophisticated process, this is a specialized and sophisticated facility by the standards of the time:

The Neanderthals are our closest extinct relatives, and they continue to fascinate as we peer back through tens of thousands of years of history.

In a new discovery about this mysterious yet often familiar species, researchers have found ancient evidence of a Neanderthal "fat factory" in what is now Germany.

Operational around 125,000 years ago, the factory would've been a place where Neanderthals broke and crushed the bones of large mammals to extract valuable bone marrow and grease, used as a valuable extra food source.

According to scientists, this is the earliest evidence yet for this type of sophisticated, large-scale bone processing, including both bone marrow and grease: the first confirmation Neanderthals were also doing this some 100,000 years before our species made it to Europe.

"This was intensive, organised, and strategic," says archaeologist Lutz Kindler from the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center in Germany.

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We can add this to the long list of studies that have revealed Neanderthals were much smarter than they're often made out to be. Thanks to recent research we know they were adept swimmers, capable brewers, and abstract thinkers – who raised their kids and used speech patterns in a similar way to humans.

 It does make one wonder why modern humans survived and Neanderthals did now.  

My completely uninformed opinion is that it might have been differences in fecundity, which led to modern humans out-breeding Neanderthals, and eventually lead to modern humans being forced to adopt pastoralism and eventually agriculture because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot accommodate too many people in one area.

Another Theory of Neanderthal Extinction

It may have been something very much like what happened when European diseases hit the Americas, resulting the transmission of diseases resulting in massive mortality.

This is not definitive proof, and I'm inclined to believe that the cause was a function of greater fecundity for H. Sapiens Sapiens as versus H. Sapiens Neanderthalis, but we may never know the truth:

Less than a decade ago, the American anthropologist James C Scott described infectious diseases as the “loudest silence” in the prehistoric archaeological record. Epidemics must have devastated human societies in the distant past and changed the course of history, but, Scott lamented, the artefacts left behind reveal nothing about them.

Over the last few years, the silence has been shattered by pioneering research that analyses microbial DNA extracted from very old human skeletons. The latest example of this is a groundbreaking study that identified three viruses in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. These pathogens still afflict modern humans: adenovirus, herpesvirus and papillomavirus cause the common cold, cold sores, and genital warts and cancer, respectively. The discovery may help us resolve the greatest mystery of the Palaeolithic era: what caused the extinction of Neanderthals.

Recent advances in the technology used to extract and analyse ancient DNA has given us incredible insights into the ancient world. With the exception of time travel, it is difficult to imagine a technology capable of so profoundly changing our understanding of prehistory.

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When a team led by Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo sequenced the Neanderthal genome, they realised that modern humans with European, Asian or Native American ancestry inherited about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals. Then, during the pandemic, it became apparent that several Neanderthal gene variants that are particularly common among South Asians influenced the immune response to novel coronavirus, making carriers much more likely to get very sick and die. It is wild to think that inter-species trysts that occurred tens of thousands of years ago impact the health of people alive today.

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While the discovery that Neanderthals were infected by adenovirus, herpesvirus and papillomavirus will not, on its own, change our understanding of the distant past, it hints at a solution to the great mystery of the Palaeolithic era.

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The discovery of the 50,000-year-old viruses points to an alternative explanation for Neanderthals’ demise: deadly infectious diseases carried by Homo sapiens. Having been separated for more than half a million years, the two species would have evolved immunity to different infectious diseases. When they encountered one another during Homo sapiens’ migration out of Africa, pathogens that caused innocuous symptoms in one species would have been deadly to the other, and vice versa.

The reason that Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals disappeared is simple. Our ancestors lived closer to the equator. As more of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth, plant life is more abundant there. This provides a habitat for more dense and varied animal life, which in turn supports more microbes that are capable of jumping the species barrier and infecting humans. Consequently, Palaeolithic Homo sapiens would have carried more deadly pathogens than Neanderthals.

This is no smoking gun, but it does raise interesting questions.

 

Getting Your Paleoanthropology Geek On

This has everything, archaic representatives of the genus Homo, possible sophisticated tool use and sophisticated funerary rites, documents published without peer review, and the involvement of Netflix.

I want to be clear, there are no credible allegations of wrongdoing or academic fraud, but it does appear that the original researchers decided to go Hollywood prematurely.

It gives us a pretty good insight into the science paleoanthropology, as well as the modern anthropology of academe.