Results of tests on a jawbone excavated from Torquay's Kents Cavern are being eagerly awaited to see if the piece is Britain's first example of Neanderthal remains.
The piece has been analysed by the University of Hull's Centre for Medical Engineering and Technology and all that is awaited now is the findings of a detailed CT scan.
The fragment of maxilla (upper jaw) containing three teeth was first unearthed 80 years ago in 1927 within Kents Cavern by the Torquay Natural History Society.
Interesting discovery on a jawbone that has been in a museum since the 1920s.
Man, news sources for archaeology have really dried up over the holidays.
Anybody here ever been into the storage areas of a museum? They don't actually know what they have got in many cases, all sorts of treasure could await a second discovery.
Digit wrote:Anybody here ever been into the storage areas of a museum? They don't actually know what they have got in many cases, all sorts of treasure could await a second discovery.
Hey Digit - what time will the New Year come to the UK relative to our EST ?
Thank you Beagle that is a great site, I already have it bookmarked but haven't been there in a while. Just spent a fascinating 40 minutes following the links.
To the extent that we can compare with living and prehistoric humans, there is no support for the idea that Neandertals went extinct because their women spent too much time hunting. There are positive reasons that refute this idea -- most importantly, the demonstrated dietary flexibility of Neandertals and other archaic humans, which would have enabled Neandertal women to exploit a systematic plant and small animal collection strategy if it actually had increased their fitness. The fact that they did not do so is probably a reflection of their ecology, not their social organization.
It remains difficult or impossible to refute mere possibilities on the basis of the archaeological and fossil record. But we should remember that such mere possibilities are not testable hypotheses.
Certainly, some Neandertal women may have hunted along with Neandertal men. Maybe they were Neandertal Amazons who severed a breast to better thrust spears into roaming bison. After all, we know that they were capable of amputating limbs, so why not?
The "why not" in this case is, obviously, that Neandertal Amazons are a product of fantasy. Sure, the fossil record cannot rule out the possibility that they existed. But comparisons with our everyday experience and our knowledge of variation in other species both tend to indicate that such a curious adaptation would be unlikely.
The same is true of Kuhn and Stiner's model. A deerstalking Neandertal woman is by no means impossible. Maybe they spent a lot of time hunting, who knows? The problem is that there is no evidence that they did so.
I love this guys style.
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
"Give us the timber or we'll go all stupid and lawless on your butts". --Redcloud, MTF
Star and Digit, Hawks is a favorite with a lot of people - me included. As an anthropologist, he brings a welcome perspective to the Neandertal discussion.
Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome - ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify "primes": DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.
"It's like looking for a needle that's not actually in the haystack," says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. "There must be some DNA or protein sequences that are not compatible with life, perhaps because they bind some essential cellular component, for example, and have therefore been selected out of circulation. There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We're looking for those sequences."
No plans on Neandertal, but could be interresting if they try it on HN. They got a million dollar grant from the military,
Hampikian believes the applications of his work could be wide-ranging. He has already received a $1 million grant from the US Department of Defense to develop a DNA "safety tag" that could be added to voluntary DNA reference samples in criminal cases to distinguish them from forensic samples. Such tags would not necessarily have to consist of lethal sequences, but could be based on primes that would be easy to detect using a simple kit.
Further down the line there is the possibility of constructing a "suicide gene" to code for deadly amino acid primes. It could be attached to genetically modified organisms and activated to destroy them at a later date if they turned out to be dangerous, Hampikian suggests.
Pääbo's team, which has been sequencing Neanderthal DNA2, continually faces these problems. "When you want to study ancient human and Neanderthal remains, there's a big issue of contamination with contemporary human DNA," he says.
This doesn't mean that all museum specimens are fatally flawed, notes Pääbo. The Neanderthal fossils that were recently sequenced in his own lab, for example, had been part of a museum collection treated in the traditional way. But Pääbo is keen to see samples of fossils from every major find preserved in line with Geigl's recommendations - just in case.
Reliably dated fossils are critical to understanding the course of human evolution. A human skull discovered over fifty years ago near the town of Hofmeyr, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, is one such fossil. A study by an international team of scientists led by Frederick Grine of the Departments of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York published today in Science magazine has dated the skull to 36,000 years ago. This skull provides critical corroboration of genetic evidence indicating that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa and migrated about this time to colonize the Old World. (Science January 12, 2007)
This supposedly supports the Out of Africa theory
The field of paleoanthropology is known for its hotly contested debates, and one that has raged for years concerns the evolutionary origin of modern people. A number of genetic studies (especially those on the mitochondrial DNA) of living people indicate that modern humans evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then left between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago to colonize the Old World. However, other genetic studies (generally on nuclear DNA) argue against this African origin and exodus model. Instead, they suggest that archaic non-African groups, such as the Neandertals, made significant contributions to the genomes of modern humans in Eurasia. Until now, the lack of human fossils of appropriate antiquity from sub-Saharan Africa has meant that these competing genetic models of human evolution could not be tested by paleontological evidence.
These new studies on nuclear DNA support the Multi-regional Theory.
Might be of interest gentleman. D.J. is well known in the field but appears here to make two totally opposing statements.
He states,
Although in its infancy, such genetic studies support the view that Neanderthals did not interbreed with Homo sapiens who migrated into Europe. It is, therefore, highly likely that modern humans do not carry Neanderthal genes in their DNA.
Further on he states,
This is theoretically unlikely since Neanderthal traits would have been genetically swamped by the Homo sapiens genes over such a protracted period of time.
If the second statement is correct it would seem to imply that the first one is incorrect.
A strange ancient skull recently uncovered adds to mounting evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred and suggests that humans evolved considerably after settling the European continent some 40,000 years ago.
Modern humans emerged from Africa about 150,000 years ago, according to the leading theory (which has been challenged in recent years). The newfound skull is thought to be from sometime in the first 5,000 years of human habitation of Europe.
The skull [image] is unlike anything previously dug up.
