Scientists have depicted early humans as wimps who couldn’t hack it
in chilly northern climates, but a newly discovered cache of stone
tools is forcing archaeologists to revise their opinions. Scientists reported at a news conference here today that creatures
much like us managed to carve out a living at a spot on the coast of
England roughly 900,000 years ago, when the area would have resembled
today’s southern Scandinavia in climate and landscape. Never before
have early humans been shown to live so far north.
The finding, which will be published in Thursday’s edition of
Nature, is the latest to show that scientists have perpetually
underestimated the humans who lived thousands and millions of years
ago. Accumulating evidence shows, for example, that Neanderthals were
not the stupid brutes of public image but beings capable of symbolic
thought.
The people whose tools were found in coastal England probably moved
there during a warm period, but they proved their toughness when the
weather cooled off, says Chris Stringer, an author of the new study.
“The remarkable thing is they don’t just give up when it starts
getting cold,” says Stringer, of London’s Natural History Museum.
“They’re hanging on here, at least for a while.”
Also remarkable is that these people apparently lived on the edge of
a vast spruce-pine forest, which is a hard place to survive even for
today’s hunter-gatherers. “What is really interesting here is that
these guys were living in a coniferous forested environment, which
would have had few resources in winter,” says Robin Dennell of the
University of Sheffield. Other scientists harbor doubts about the new findings or its
significance. Richard Potts of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Natural History said in an e-mail from Kenya, where he’s doing research,
that though the paper is “intriguing,” he’s concerned about the methods
used to claim that the site dates back nearly a million years.
Other new discoveries showing that ancient humans weren’t as simple
as once believed:
* Early humans who lived 500,000 years ago could hunt big game, says
Stringer, “leading more complex lives than I would’ve thought.” more
So the next time your called a Neanderthal or Caveman, smile and say thank you.
We have met Neanderthal
and he is us — at least a little. The most detailed look yet at the
Neanderthal genome helps answer one of the most debated questions in
anthropology: Did Neanderthals and modern humans mate?
The answer is yes, there is at least some cave man biology in most
of us. Between 1 percent and 4 percent of genes in people from Europe
and Asia trace back to Neanderthals.
“They live on, a little bit,” says Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Researchers led by Paabo, Richard E. Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School compared the genetic material collected from the bones of three Neanderthals with that from five modern humans.
Their findings, reported in Friday’s edition of the journal Science,
show a relationship between Neanderthals and modern people outside Africa, Paabo said.
That suggests that interbreeding occurred in the Middle East, where both modern humans and Neanderthals lived thousands of years ago, he said.
“People are interested in the question: ‘By what route did I get
here?’ And the idea that there is a faint echo of Neanderthals” is
interesting, reflected Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
Humans trace their origins out of Africa into the Middle East and then on to other parts of the world. The genetic relationship with Neanderthals was found in people from Europe, China and Papua-New Guinea, but not people from Africa.more thank you Erick
