Archaeologica.org

In a discovery with profound implications for the study of early human history, scientists digging in the republic of Georgia have found 1.7-million-year-old fossil human skulls that show clear signs of African ancestry and so may represent the species that first migrated out of Africa.

The two relatively complete skulls, being described today in the journal Science, begin to put a face, in a sense, to the ancestors who responded to opportunity and necessity by leaving Africa and spreading out over much of the rest of the world. Many paleoanthropologists hailed the discovery as a major advance in their field, and said the skulls were probably the most ancient undisputed human fossils outside Africa.

"It's the first good physical evidence we have of the identity of the first emigrants out of Africa," said Dr. Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

new study of human fossils asks, what if we are the odd ones?

Most people think of humans as the top, the apex of the family tree. But new research suggests this quintessentially human infatuation with ourselves may have impaired our judgment. Erik Trinkaus, a paleontologist and Neandertal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, believes that modern human features are unusual enough, compared with ancestral members of the genus Homo, to make us a side branch of the family tree

The whole purpose [of the article] was to get some balance into all of this. Whereas if you look at what people do--and you see this in the professional literature and you see this in the media--the balance is very much toward documenting and sometimes trying to explain why Neanderthals are weird. I hate to say it, but I think we're the weirdoes

Minimalist wrote:How're you feeling, my dear?

The first comparison of human and Neanderthal DNA shows that the two lineages diverged about 400,000 years ago and that Neanderthals may have had more DNA in common with chimps than with modern humans.

There is ongoing debate over whether the Neanderthals were a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis, or a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The first Neanderthals are thought to have emerged about 350,000 years ago, so the new findings from this DNA analysis strongly favour the theory that modern humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor but are not more closely related than that.

Genetic analysis of Neanderthals is very tricky because mere fragments of nuclear DNA have been recoverable from fossils. Previous analyses have focused on mitochondrial DNA samples, which survive better.

James Noonan at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US, and colleagues compared human, chimpanzee and Neanderthal nuclear DNA samples. The newly compiled DNA dataset was derived from the remains of a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil.

“This is a hint of exciting things to come as more Neanderthal sequence is produced,” says David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US.

I have changed my name to Dave and am now wrapped in lucite and propped up in the safest corner of the house. (Had to use my Jedi mind powers to post today and they are not working right)

Only a handful of modern human remains older than 28,000 years old are known from Europe.

Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis and colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates directly from the fossils and analysed their anatomical form.

The results showed that the fossils were 30,000 years old and had the diagnostic features of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

But Professor Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features that were characteristic of our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).

Neanderthals appear in the European fossil record about 400,000 years ago. At their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east.

The bottom line? The Pestera Muierii bones are "basically modern human fossils with these characteristics that are very easy to derive from Neanderthals through some kind of interbreeding, but are very difficult to derive -- if not impossible -- from what we know of the anatomies of early modern humans out of Africa," Trinkaus said.

Because you could always get a throw back to the wolf, if its in the blood