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Author Topic: portugal oldest human cranium found  (Read 3512 times)

Offline space otter

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portugal oldest human cranium found
« on: March 15, 2017, 03:25:42 pm »

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170313192729.htm

400,000-year-old fossil human cranium is oldest ever found in Portugal
Date:
March 13, 2017
Source:
Binghamton University, State University of New York
Summary:
Researchers have found the oldest fossil human cranium in Portugal, marking an important contribution to knowledge of human evolution during the middle Pleistocene in Europe and to the origin of the Neanderthals.


The Aroeira 3 cranium.
Credit: Javier Trueba.


A large international research team, directed by the Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão and including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam, has found the oldest fossil human cranium in Portugal, marking an important contribution to knowledge of human evolution during the middle Pleistocene in Europe and to the origin of the Neandertals.

The cranium represents the westernmost human fossil ever found in Europe during the middle Pleistocene epoch and one of the earliest on this continent to be associated with the Acheulean stone tool industry. In contrast to other fossils from this same time period, many of which are poorly dated or lack a clear archaeological context, the cranium discovered in the cave of Aroeira in Portugal is well-dated to 400,000 years ago and appeared in association with abundant faunal remains and stone tools, including numerous bifaces (handaxes).

"This is an interesting new fossil discovery from the Iberian Peninsula, a crucial region for understanding the origin and evolution of the Neandertals," said Quam, an associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. "The Aroeira cranium is the oldest human fossil ever found in Portugal and shares some features with other fossils from this same time period in Spain, France and Italy. The Aroeria cranium increases the anatomical diversity in the human fossil record from this time period, suggesting different populations showed somewhat different combinations of features."

The cranium was found on the last day of the 2014 field season. Since the sediments containing the cranium at the Aroeira site were firmly cemented, the cranium was removed from the site in a large, solid block. It was then transported to the restoration laboratory at the Centro de Investigacion sobre la Evolucion y Comportamiento Humanos, a paleoanthropology research center in Madrid, Spain, for preparation and extraction, a painstaking process which took two years.

"The results of this study are only possible thanks to the arduous work of numerous individuals over the last several years," said Quam. "This includes the archaeologists who have excavated at the site for many years, the preparator who removed the fossil from its surrounding breccia, researchers who CT scanned the specimen and made virtual reconstructions and the anthropologists who studied the fossil. This study truly represents an international scientific collaboration, and I feel fortunate to be involved in this research."

"I have been studying these sites for the last 30 years and we have recovered much important archaeological data, but the discovery of a human cranium of this antiquity and importance is always a very special moment," said Zilhão.

The new fossil will form the centerpiece of an exhibit on human evolution in October at the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia in Lisbon, Portugal.

The study, titled "New Middle Pleistocene hominin cranium from the Gruta da Aroeira (Portugal)," appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Binghamton University, State University of New York. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


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http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/evolution/a-400000yearold-skull-fragment-found-in-portugal-points-to-mystery-people/news-story/a88fc4dba073ab34967ef2fc958d3423

A 400,000-year-old skull fragment found in Portugal points to mystery people
MARCH 15, 20173:38PM

A skull fragment from nearly half a million years ago points to the possibility of a previously unknown species of early humans.
Nick Whigham and AFP
news.com.au
THE discovery of a skull fragment from nearly half a million years ago points to a previously unknown subspecies of early humans and offers tantalising hints about a possible ancestor of the Neanderthals, scientists say.
The 400,000-year-old fossil was unearthed from a cave site in Portugal in 2014 using ancient stone hand axes, and marks the oldest human cranium fossil ever found in the country.
Researchers don’t know if it was from a male or female, how the person died, or even what form of early human it was.
The large piece of skull displays a new mix of features not seen before in fossil humans, reported Science.
It has traits that link it to Neanderthals, such as their famous fused brow ridge, as well as some primitive traits that resemble other extinct fossils in Europe.
“There is a lot of question about which species these fossils represent. I tend to think of them as ancestors of the Neanderthals,” co-author Rolf Quam, an anthropologist at New York’s Binghamton University told French press agency AFP.
“It is not a Neanderthal itself,” he added. “It has some features that might be related to the later Neanderthals,” including a lump of bone near the ear called the mastoid process, the exact purpose of which is unclear.

https://twitter.com/josetron/status/841377461191471109/photo/1


“There is a lot of debate currently in the anthropological literature about what species to call these fossils. There is not a lot of agreement,” said Mr Quam, who authored the study with Portuguese archaeologist Joao Zilhao and colleagues.



Its location is the furthest west of any human fossil ever found in Europe during the middle Pleistocene period.
It is also one of the earliest in Europe to be associated with the Acheulean stone tool industry, a more advanced kind of toolkit than used among the earliest humans in Europe.
It took a full week for excavators to cut out the block of Earth which contained the skull and then two and a half painstaking years to extract the skull itself from the block.
In the coming years, experts will dive into the details of the skull and its surroundings “to give a more complete picture of life in the area, life in the cave and the evolutionary place of this human in our ancestry,” said Mr Quam.

pic

Modern humans (the subspecies of Homo sapiens to which all humans alive today belong) first appeared in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. It’s believed their first migration out of Africa began some 100,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals occupied Europe and Asia from 200,000 to 40,000 years ago.
The time period of about 100,000 years ago is particularly important for researchers studying the evolution of Homo sapiens, however the fossil record for the time is relatively sparse.
In recent decades, unusual discoveries have suggested the presence of other forms of ancient hominid living in Europe and Asia.
There’s the still largely unexplained Dmanisi hominins, the earliest human fossils found on the border of Asia and Europe. And there’s the mystery of the Denisovans, which is yet to be established as a separate species or subspecies of human in the genus Homo.
Two 100,000-year-old skulls unearthed in China in 2007 and 2014 have also raised interesting questions about human evolution. They appear to be hybrids of humans, Neanderthals and a third mysterious race.



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and lots more



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400000-year-old fossil human cranium is oldest ever found in Portugal
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Offline space otter

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Re: portugal oldest human cranium found
« Reply #1 on: August 22, 2018, 08:26:14 pm »

some photos at link..ahhhh  dna..what will they find next?



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-stunned-by-a-neanderthal-hybrid-discovered-in-a-siberian-cave/ar-BBMi9aL?li=BBnbfcL

Scientists Stunned By a Neanderthal Hybrid Discovered in a Siberian Cave
Sarah Zhang  10 hrs ago

Quote
A single cave in the mountains of Siberia has produced a string of remarkable archaeological discoveries. In 2008, scientists there found a 41,000-year-old pinky bone, whose DNA matched neither humans nor Neanderthals. Instead, it belonged to a previously unknown group of hominins they named Denisovans. Three Denisovan teeth also turned up in the cave. Since then, traces of Denisovan DNA have been found in humans living today in Asia and Melanesia—suggesting that long ago, humans and Denisovans met, had sex, and had children.

That was, until now, the sum total of our knowledge on the mysterious Denisovans.

A remarkable new discovery—also in the Denisova cave—paints an even more interesting more picture, telling us that Denisovans also interbred with Neanderthals. The evidence is as direct as it can be: a bone fragment in the cave that, according to DNA analysis, belonged to the daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

“It’s an amazing, lucky thing to find this individual, wow!” says David Reich. “Who could have imagined we could have been able to witness the hybridization of these two groups basically as it was happening.” Reich, an ancient DNA researcher at Harvard, was not involved in the study, though he has collaborated with the group on other samples from Denisova cave.

So surprising was the find that Viviane Slon didn’t believe her results at first. “My first reaction was, ‘What did I do wrong?’” says Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. Ancient DNA is notoriously finicky. Because the old genetic material is so degraded and fragmented, it is easy to get tantalizing but false results. She repeated her experiments, again and again, extracting DNA six separate times. “It’s really when we saw this over and over again we realized, in fact, it was mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry,” she says.

Neanderthals and Denisovans split off from each other some 400,000 years ago, making them far more distinct than any two groups of modern humans living today. Yet both appeared to have lived in or around Denisova Cave. In 2010, excavators also found a Neanderthal toe bone in Denisova Cave. This new bone fragment—from the daughter of a Neanderthal and Denisova—suggests the two groups not only inhabited the same place but at the same time.

It wasn’t just Neanderthals: Ancient Humans Had Sex with Other Hominids

Russian scientists first excavated this sliver of bone in 2012. It was one of more than 2,000 fragments that Slon’s collaborators at Oxford analyzed using a protein called collagen. The collagen in this one, they realized, was of human-like origin, so then sent it to the ancient DNA lab at Max Planck for extraction. The inch-long fragment is too small to even tell to which bone it came from. Nevertheless, it yielded a wealth of genomic information.

The daughter herself was a mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan. Her mother’s half of the genome most resembled DNA from a Neanderthal found in Croatia. It did not particularly match DNA from the Neanderthal actually found right in the Denisova cave in 2010, suggesting that Neanderthals migrated west to east in multiple waves. Her father’s Denisovan half of the genome actually had a touch of Neanderthal DNA—suggesting he too had a Neanderthal ancestor hundreds of generations ago. And somehow, 50,000 years ago or more, her mother and father met. The proof is in her DNA.

The discovery has stunned scientists, but it also has them questioning whether it is so stunning at all. Svante Pääbo, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, recalls sequencing a 40,000-year-old human in Romania, which turned out to have a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations back. Interbreeding is so rare, he thought at the time, that the discovery of such a recent ancestor must just be a fluke. But after sequencing just six individuals from Denisova cave, they have already found a direct hybrid offspring. Maybe it was not so uncommon after all.

“When you find a needle in a haystack, you have to start wondering if what you’re really looking at is a needlestack,” John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in an email. “This genome shows that hybrids were nowhere near as rare as people have been assuming. They must have been really common.”

Prior to the advent of ancient DNA, the idea that humans and Neanderthals mated was controversial. Now, ancient DNA shows that humans not only mated with Neanderthals but also Denisovans, and Denisovans and Neanderthals with each other. As these groups roamed Eurasia hundreds of years ago, they met and had children—over and over again, it seems.

After the discovery of the bone fragment, a colleague of Slon’s who dabbles in graphic design, drew an illustration of a girl holding hands with her Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father looking out of the cave. The study’s authors conceded that there is no way to know if this peaceful coexistence is an accurate representation. When I asked Pääbo about it, he said, “I will try to avoid the question by saying how we speculate about back then says much more about our ideas about humans and our fantasies and fascinations than anything about what happened back then.” But he added, when humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, their children survived and passed on their genes. “It can’t be they were total outcasts,” he says, because their descendants still walk among us today.


Offline zorgon

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Re: portugal oldest human cranium found
« Reply #2 on: August 23, 2018, 02:37:21 am »
The discovery of a 400000-year-old half skull in Portugal has offered ... marks the oldest human cranium fossil ever found in Portugal, said the ...



Offline ArMaP

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Re: portugal oldest human cranium found
« Reply #3 on: August 23, 2018, 05:39:19 am »
Sometimes I think Neanderthals are still part of the Portuguese population. :)

 


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