Human Evolution

[Jo Bowyer]

Scientists discover genomic ancestry of Stone Age North Africans from Morocco

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0315141221.htm

North Africa is an important area in the history of the evolution of our species. The geography of North Africa also makes it an interesting area for studying how humans expanded out of Africa. It is part of the African continent, but the Sahara desert presents a substantial barrier to travel to and from southern regions. Similarly, it is part of the Mediterranean region, but in the past the sea could have presented a barrier to interaction with others as well. "A better understanding of the history of North Africa is critical to understanding the history of our species," explains co-author Saaïd Amzazi of Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco.

[Jo Bowyer]

Modern humans interbred with Denisovans twice in history

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0315140718.htm

In a paper published in Cell on March 15, scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle determined that the genomes of two groups of modern humans with Denisovan ancestry -- individuals from Oceania and individuals from East Asia -- are uniquely different, indicating that there were two separate episodes of Denisovan admixture.

"What was known already was that Oceanian individuals, notably Papuan individuals, have significant amounts of Denisovan ancestry," says senior author Sharon Browning, a research professor of biostatistics, University of Washington School of Public Health. The genomes of modern Papuan individuals contain approximately 5% Denisovan ancestry."

Researchers also knew Denisovan ancestry is present to a lesser degree throughout Asia. The assumption was that the ancestry in Asia was achieved through migration, coming from Oceanian populations. "But in this new work with East Asians, we find a second set of Denisovan ancestry that we do not find in the South Asians and Papuans," she says. "This Denisovan ancestry in East Asians seems to be something they acquired themselves."

After studying more than 5,600 whole-genome sequences from individuals from Europe, Asia, America, and Oceania and comparing them to the Denisovan genome, Browning and colleagues determined that the Denisovan genome is more closely related to the modern East Asian population than to modern Papuans. "We analyzed all of the genomes searching for sections of DNA that looked like they came from Denisovans," says Browning, whose team relied on genomic information from the UK10K project, the 1000 Genomes Project, and the Simons Genome Diversity Project.

"When we compared pieces of DNA from the Papuans against the Denisovan genome, many sequences were similar enough to declare a match, but some of the DNA sequences in the East Asians, notably Han Chinese, Chinese Dai, and Japanese, were a much closer match with the Denisovan," she says.

What is known about Denisovan ancestry comes from a single set of archaic human fossils found in the Altai mountains in Siberia. That individual's genome was published in 2010, and other researchers quickly identified segments of Denisovan ancestry in several modern-day populations, most significantly with individuals from Oceania but also in East and South Asians.

"The assumption is that admixing with Denisovans occurred fairly quickly after humans moved out of Africa, around 50,000 years ago, but we do not know where in terms of location," Browning says. She theorizes that perhaps the ancestors of Oceanians admixed with a southern group of Denisovans while the ancestors of East Asians admixed with a northern group.

[Jo Bowyer]

Oldest DNA from Africa offers clues to mysterious ancient culture

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...et_cid=1912168

About 15,000 years ago, in the oldest known cemetery in the world, people buried their dead in sitting positions with beads and animal horns, deep in a cave in what is now Morocco. These people were also found with small, sophisticated stone arrowheads and points, and 20th century archaeologists assumed they were part of an advanced European culture that had migrated across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. But now, their ancient DNA—the oldest ever obtained from Africans—shows that these people had no European ancestry. Instead, they were related to both Middle Easterners and sub-Saharan Africans, suggesting that more people were migrating in and out of North Africa than previously believed.

[Jo Bowyer]

Fish accounted for surprisingly large part of the Stone Age diet

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0319120536.htm

"At the Norje Sunnansund settlement, outside Sölvesborg in Sweden, you can see that just over half of the protein intake has come from fish, ten per cent from seals, and around 37 per cent from land mammals, such as wild boar and red deer, and scarcely three per cent from plants such as mushrooms, berries and nuts," says Adam Boethius. "On the island of Gotland, which did not have any land mammals apart from hares, the percentage of fish in total protein consumption was even higher at just under 60 per cent. Here, seals have replaced the land mammals and account for almost 40 per cent of the protein intake, whereas hares and vegetables account for a negligible proportion," he continues.

[Jo Bowyer]

4000 years of human dietary evolution in central Germany, from the first farmers to the first elites

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0194862

Abstract

Investigation of human diet during the Neolithic has often been limited to a few archaeological cultures or single sites. In order to provide insight into the development of human food consumption and husbandry strategies, our study explores bone collagen carbon and nitrogen isotope data from 466 human and 105 faunal individuals from 26 sites in central Germany. It is the most extensive data set to date from an enclosed geographic microregion, covering 4,000 years of agricultural history from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The animal data show that a variety of pastures and dietary resources were explored, but that these changed remarkably little over time. In the human δ¹⁵N however we found a significant increase with time across the different archaeological cultures. This trend could be observed in all time periods and archaeological cultures (Bell Beaker phenomenon excluded), even on continuously populated sites. Since there was no such trend in faunal isotope values, we were able largely to exclude manuring as the cause of this effect. Based on the rich interdisciplinary data from this region and archaeological period we can argue that meat consumption increased with the increasing duration of farming subsistence.

In δ¹³C, we could not observe any clear increasing or decreasing trends during the archaeological time periods, either for humans or for animals, which would have suggested significant changes in the environment and landscape use. We discovered sex-related dietary differences, with males of all archaeological periods having higher δ¹⁵N values than females, and an age-related increasing consumption of animal protein. An initial decrease of δ¹⁵N-values at the age of 1–2 years reveals partial weaning, while complete weaning took place at the age of 3–4 years.

[Jo Bowyer]

Footprints put people on Canada’s west coast 13,000 years ago

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

[Jo Bowyer]

New evidence about the ancient humans who occupied Asia is cascading in: the story of our species needs rewriting again

https://aeon.co/essays/new-evidence-...4df10-69418129

[Jo Bowyer]

Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age – new research

https://theconversation.com/neandert...new%20research

[Jo Bowyer]

The pelvis of Ardipithecus shows the hominid could both walk upright and climb trees

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...=Editors_Picks

[Jo Bowyer]

The evolutionary advantage of having eyebrows

https://theconversation.com/the-evol...ing%20eyebrows

[Jo Bowyer]

Our fossil finger discovery points to earlier human migration in Arabia

https://theconversation.com/our-foss...%20in%20Arabia

[Jo Bowyer]

Dogs lived and died with humans 10,000 years ago in the Americas

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

[Jo Bowyer]

Searching for a Stone Age Odysseus

http://science.sciencemag.org/conten...et_cid=1995647

Summary

Archaeologists assumed until a decade ago that humans skirted the shores of the Mediterranean Sea before the dawn of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Only then did they set out across its wine-dark seas on voyages reflected in Homer's story of the adventurous sailor Odysseus. So when excavators in 2010 claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, they made a big splash. Their colleagues were astonished—but also skeptical. Since then, by exploring that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for early seafaring in the Mediterranean, and, even more surprisingly, that at least some of these adventurers were Neandertal. The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea—and the cognitive and technological means to do so—predates modern humans.

[Jo Bowyer]

Did last ice age affect breastfeeding in Native Americans?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0423155057.htm

[Jo Bowyer]

Ancient humans settled the Philippines 700,000 years ago

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...et_cid=2006724

In what some scientists are calling a “one-in-a-million find,” archaeologists have discovered a cache of butchered rhino bones and dozens of stone tools on the Philippines’s largest island, Luzon. The find pushes back the earliest evidence for human occupation of the Philippines by more than 600,000 years, and it has archaeologists wondering who exactly these ancient humans were—and how they crossed the deep seas that surrounded that island and others in Southeast Asia.

“The only thing missing is the hominin fossil to go along with it,” says archaeologist Adam Brumm, of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia. He’s the one who set the odds for what he calls a “very exciting discovery,” but he wasn’t involved with the work.

So who were these ancient people? They couldn’t have been our own species, Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years later. The most likely bet is H. erectus, an archaic human species that first evolved nearly 2 million years ago and may have been the first member of our genus to expand out of Africa, the team writes today in Nature. H. erectus bones have been found in China and Java, so researchers know they lived in Asia around the time the rhino was butchered on Luzon.