African Khoisan: A unique ancient tribe

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) and Penn State University in the United States have successfully discovered one of modern humans’ ancient lineages through the sequencing of genes.

A geneticist from NTU, Professor Stephan Christoph Schuster, who led an international research team from Singapore, United States and Brazil, said this is the first time that the history of humankind populations has been analysed and matched to Earth’s climatic conditions over the last 200,000 years.

Their breakthrough findings were published in Nature Communications the 4th of December.

The team has sequenced the genome of five living individuals from a hunter/gatherer tribe in Southern Africa, and compared them with 420,000 genetic variants across 1,462 genomes from 48 ethnic groups of the global population.

Through advanced computation analysis, the team found that these Southern African Khoisan tribespeople are genetically distinct not only from Europeans and Asians, but also from all other Africans.

The team also found that there are individuals of the Khoisan population whose ancestors did not interbreed with any of the other ethnic groups for the last 150,000 years and that Khoisan was the majority group of living humans for most of that time until about 20,000 years ago.

Their findings mean it is now possible to use genetic sequencing to reveal the ancestral lineage of any ethnic group even up to 200,000 years ago, if non-admixed individuals are found, like in the case of the Khoisan. This will show when in history there have been important genetic changes to an ancestral lineage due to intermarriages or geographical migrations that may have occurred over the centuries.

Find more information at:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141204074144.htm

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141204/ncomms6692/full/ncomms6692.html

Becoming Human

How do we become humans? Where do we come from?

Those and much more questions will be clarified in this fascinating documentary about us, about our roots and about our evolution in life history.

Enjoy it!

Bones, Stones and Genes: The Origin of Modern Humans

Are you really interested in anthropology and human evolution?

If it is the case, don’t hesitate more! You can’t loose this chance watching those interesting and unique on-line videos given by Howard Hughes Medical Institute of USA.

This Institute focused on biomedical scientific researches, yearly organices Holiday lectures on science, and in 2011 they talked about human evolution the origin of our species.

To do so, different remarkable scientits,such as Tim White, Jhon Shea or Sarah Tishkoff uncover us the mysteries behind the evolution history in an amount of talks called “Bones, Stones and Genes: The Origin of Modern Humans”

In this webpage you will find over 100 videos keeping 4 different lectures, later discussion and even intervews with the scientist.

Here you have a little introduction to the topic, DON’T WAIT MORE and HAVE A NICE JOURNEY THROUGH ANCIENT TIMES!

http://media.hhmi.org/hl/11Lect1.html

Our colleagues closer from you!

As it can be seen in our blog-page, in addition to scientific information about physical anthropology written here, you can get more interesting posts and multimedia means from other pages in the section of “Our colleagues” at the left side of the index page. Enjoy yourself and get steeped in anthropology!!

Human ancestor Lucy celebrates 40th anniversary

Donald Johanson recalls pivotal discovery of A. afarensis fossil in 1974. As he was looking at the ground four decades ago, in a region called Hadar, named for a dry riverbed in Ethiopia, he saw something a lot more exciting than a quarter. It was a fossil bone. By two weeks later, Johanson and his colleagues had collected enough bones to reconstruct about 40 percent of a skeleton. Those bones belonged to a primitive human forerunner now known as Lucy…

Full article at:

Human ancestor Lucy celebrates 40th anniversary

Hobbit mystery endures a decade on

Small remains still pose big problems. In 2004, researchers announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small relative of modern humans that lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. The ‘hobbit’ is now considered the most important hominin fossil in a generation. The remains of the tiny hominin Homo floresiensis (nicknamed the ‘hobbit’) still raise supersize questions ten years after the publication in Nature of their discovery in a cave on the remote island of Flores in Indonesia. The thought that only modern humans (Homo sapiens — like us) had travelled beyond southeast Asia in the past 60,000 years was questioned. People had devised sea-going watercraft essential for such a journey. It seemed unlikely that more-ancient humans could have made such a voyage.

Read full article at:

http://www.nature.com/news/human-evolution-small-remains-still-pose-big-problems-1.16170

You can read the comments and stories of the scientists who took part in the discovery if you click here!

http://www.nature.com/news/the-discovery-of-homo-floresiensis-tales-of-the-hobbit-1.16197

Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia

This paintings are among the oldest in the world, a window into the minds of our ancestors. They were found decades ago in caves in indonesia. But recently, scientist have managed to date them. The paintings are much older than anybody expected causing scientist to rethink the history of early human creativity

Read the new at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13422.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureMagazine

Did they co-exist in our lands?

The meeting between a Neanderthal and one of the first humans, which we used to picture in our minds, did not happen on the Iberian Peninsula.

That is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers from the Australian National University, Oxford University, the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, University of Maryland, Universitat de Girona and the University of Oviedo, after redoing the dating of the remains in three caves located on the route through the Pyrenees of the first beings of our species: L’Arbreda, Labeko Koba and La Viña.

[…]Using purifying collagen method in DNA tests, the portion of the original organic material is obtained and all the subsequent contamination is removed. And by using this technique, scientists have been arriving at the same conclusions at key sites across Europe: “We can see that the arrival of our species in Europe took place 8,000 years earlier than what had been thought and we can see the earliest datings of our species and the most recent Neanderthal ones, in which, in a specific regional framework, there is no overlapping,” explained Alvaro Arrizabalaga, professor of the department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology, and one of the UPV/EHU researchers alongside María-José Iriarte and Aritza Villaluenga.

[…]The three caves chosen for the recently published research are located in Girona (L’Arbreda), Gipuzkoa (Labeko Koba) (see Fig.1) and Asturias (La Viña)”The Labeko Koba curve is the most consistent of the three, which in turn are the most consistent on the Iberian Peninsula,” explained Arrizabalaga. 18 remains were dated at Labeko Koba and the results are totally convergent with respect to their stratigraphic position, in other words, those that appeared at the lowest depths are the oldest ones.

Fig.1: Scientist working at “Labeko koba” cave and one of the samples taken.

The main conclusion — “the scene of the meeting between a Neanderthal and a Cro-magnon does not seem to have taken place on the Iberian Peninsula” — is the same as the one that has been gradually reached over the last three years by different research groups when studying key settlements in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and France.

“For 25 years we had been saying that Neanderthals and early humans lived together for 8,000-10,000 years. Today, we think that in Europe there was a gap between one species and the other and, therefore, there was no hybridation, which did in fact take place in areas of the Middle East,” explained Arrizabalaga.

Source:

1) Julià Maroto, Manuel Vaquero, Álvaro Arrizabalaga, Javier Baena, Enrique Baquedano, Jesús Jordá, Ramon Julià, Ramón Montes, Johannes Van Der Plicht, Pedro Rasines, Rachel Wood. Current issues in late Middle Palaeolithic chronology: New assessments from Northern Iberia. Quaternary International, 2012; 247

2) R.E. Wood, A. Arrizabalaga, M. Camps, S. Fallon, M.-J. Iriarte-Chiapusso, R. Jones, J. Maroto, M. de la Rasilla, D. Santamaría, J. Soler, N. Soler, A. Villaluenga, T.F.G. Higham. The chronology of the earliest Upper Palaeolithic in northern Iberia: New insights from L’Arbreda, Labeko Koba and La Viña. Journal of Human Evolution

Enjoy the new at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140414092000.htm

The importance of the thumb

The production of stone tools requires the thumb on the non dominant hand to be significantly stronger and more robust than the fingers.

[…] It is well known that one of the main distinctive features between humans and our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes, is the morphology and manipulative capabilities of their hands. Key to this is the substantially larger, stronger and more robust thumb displayed by humans with such a thumb allowing humans to forcefully and yet dexterously manipulate objects within the hand, a trait first thought to have evolved alongside the earliest stone tool use between 2.6 — 1.4 million years ago.

Although PhD student Alastair Key and his research associate Christopher Dunmore, of the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation, showed that the production of stone tools requires the thumb on the non-dominant hand to be significantly stronger and more robust than the fingers, thei results demonstrated that the thumb on the non-dominant hand it was also recruited significantly more often. Those with a more robust thumb were more capable stone tool producers and thus have an evolutionary advantage.

Source:

Alastair J.M. Key, Christopher J. Dunmore. The evolution of the hominin thumb and the influence exerted by the non-dominant hand during stone tool production. Journal of Human Evolution, 2014

Read the new at:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140910102914.htm

Get the full text at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248414001845 (Note: Not freely available)

The cerebellum, the small key of the brain’s evolution

While the neocortex of the brain has been called “the crowning achievement of evolution and the biological substrate of human mental prowess,” newly reported evolutionary rate comparisons show that the cerebellum expanded up to six times faster than anticipated throughout the evolution of apes, including humans.

[…]”Our results highlight a previously unappreciated role of the cerebellum in ape and human brain evolution that has the potential to refocus researchers’ thinking about how and why the brains in these species have become distinct and to shift attention away from an almost exclusive focus on the neocortex as the seat of our humanity,” says Robert Barton of Durham University in the United Kingdom.

[…]”In humans, the cerebellum contains about 70 billion neurons — four times more than in the neocortex,” Barton says. “Nobody really knows what all these neurons are for, but they must be doing something important.”

[…]Researchers say that the cerebellum seems to be particularly involved in the temporal organization of complex behavioral sequences, such as those involved in making and using tools, for instance. Interestingly, evidence is now emerging for a critical role of the cerebellum in language, too.

Source:

Barton et al. Rapid evolution of the cerebellum in humans and other great apes. Current Biology, 2014

Read the new at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141002123629.htm

Get the full text at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/aip/09609822