Return of the Anthropology Thread

[Ivanhoe]

Since my original anthropology thread got eaten by the IPS Monster, its time for v2.0.

 

https://www.sciencealert.com/gut-bugs-reveals-more-about-early-humans-movements-across-siberia-and-into-the-americas
 

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New insights into the peopling of Siberia and human migration into the Americas have been found in what might seem like an unlikely place: gut bugs.

Helicobacter pylori is a type of bacterium that lives in people's digestive tracts and can cause stomach ulcers. It has evolved alongside (and inside) humans for at least the past 100,000 years, accompanying people out of Africa, on cross-continental migrations and beyond.

Now an international team has added more detail to the patchy fossil record of how and when people migrated from Siberia into the Americas, by reconstructing H. pylori's own evolutionary journey as it moved about in the stomachs of early humans.

 

Despite the horsecrap that Rousseau concocted re: Noble Savages, if early man in Africa already had ulcers, bottom line is that life is hard all over.

 

 

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-skulls-in-a-mexican-cave-reveal-some-surprises-about-early-north-americans

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Four ancient skulls discovered in a submerged Mexican cave system have archaeologists wondering if they were right about the earliest humans on the American continents.

 

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Compared to modern humans, researchers were surprised to find the oldest skull looked similar to modern peoples in Greenland and Alaska, while the second oldest held stronger affinities with modern Europeans - something that hasn't been observed before in Paleoamericans.

Meanwhile, the third skull possessed more South American features, and the final resembled a jumbled fusion of modern Asians and Native Americans.

 

The obvious explanation is that, 20 or 30 millennia ago, the continents were interconnected by Stargates.

 

 

[R011]

43 minutes ago, Ivanhoe said:

https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-skulls-in-a-mexican-cave-reveal-some-surprises-about-early-north-americans

 

The obvious explanation is that, 20 or 30 millennia ago, the continents were interconnected by Stargates.

 

 

Nah.  Cargo ships with ring transporters.

[Adam Peter]

It is in the search, but truncated. Maybe a reindexing helps.

There is no Zuck-safe place

[Ivanhoe]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

It is in the search, but truncated. Maybe a reindexing helps.

There is no Zuck-safe place

It's just the nature of web apps; the database behind the dynamic web content is going to get corrupted, that's what databases do.

 

[Adam Peter]

Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study

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Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) – and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 – scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.

But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.

The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the “invariant rate of ageing” hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood.

 

[Rick]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study

 

Old, very old news. Genesis 6:3.

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/25/massive-human-head-in-chinese-well-forces-scientists-to-rethink-evolution
 

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The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution.

Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals.

The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or “Dragon man”, by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation.

 

 

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The researchers believe the skull belonged to a male, about 50 years old, who would have been an impressive physical specimen. His wide, bulbous nose allowed him to breathe huge volumes of air, indicating a high-energy lifestyle, while sheer size would have helped him withstand the brutally cold winters in the region. “Homo longi is heavily built, very robust,” said Prof Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at Hebei. “It is hard to estimate the height, but the massive head should match a height higher than the average of modern humans.”

 

[BansheeOne]

Similarly:

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New type of ancient human discovered in Israel

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent

Published 2 days ago

Researchers working in Israel have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human that lived alongside our species more than 100,000 years ago.

They believe the remains uncovered near the city of Ramla represent one of the "last survivors" of a very ancient human group.

The finds consist of a partial skull and jaw from an individual who lived between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Details have been published in the journal Science.

The team members think the individual descended from an earlier species that may have spread out of the region hundreds of thousands of years ago and given rise to Neanderthals in Europe and their equivalents in Asia.

The scientists have named the newly discovered lineage the "Nesher Ramla Homo type".

Dr Hila May of Tel Aviv University said the discovery reshaped the story of human evolution, particularly our picture of how the Neanderthals emerged. The general picture of Neanderthal evolution had in the past been linked closely with Europe.

"It all started in Israel. We suggest that a local group was the source population," she told BBC News. "During interglacial periods, waves of humans, the Nesher Ramla people, migrated from the Middle East to Europe."

The team thinks that early members of the Nesher Ramla Homo group were already present in the Near East some 400,000 years ago. The researchers have noticed resemblances between the new finds and ancient "pre-Neanderthal" groups in Europe.

"This is the first time we could connect the dots between different specimens found in the Levant" said Dr Rachel Sarig, also from Tel Aviv University.

"There are several human fossils from the caves of Qesem, Zuttiyeh and Tabun that date back to that time that we could not attribute to any specific known group of humans. But comparing their shapes to those of the newly uncovered specimen from Nesher Ramla justify their inclusion within the [new human] group."

Dr May suggests that these humans were the ancestors of Neanderthals.

"The European Neanderthal actually began here in the Levant and migrated to Europe, while interbreeding with other groups of humans."

Others travelled east to India and China, said Prof Israel Hershkovitz, suggesting a connection between East Asian archaic humans and Neanderthals in Europe.

"Some fossils found in East Asia manifest Neanderthal-like features as the Nesher Ramla do," he said.

The researchers base their claims on similarities in features between the Israeli fossils and those found in Europe and Asia, though their assertion is controversial. Prof Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, has recently been assessing Chinese human remains.

"Nesher Ramla is important in confirming yet further that different species co-existed alongside each other in the region at the time and now we have the same story in western Asia," he said.

"However, I think it's a jump too far at the moment to link some of the older Israeli fossils to Neanderthals. I'm also puzzled at suggestions of any special link between the Nesher Ramla material and fossils in China."

[...]

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57586315

[Ivanhoe]

5 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

Similarly:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57586315

Quote

Dr May suggests that these humans were the ancestors of Neanderthals.

"The European Neanderthal actually began here in the Levant and migrated to Europe, while interbreeding with other groups of humans."

So the ancestors of Neanderthals were from the Levant, and the ancestors of Europeans included Neanderthals. Therefore, Europeans are partly Semitic.

The lost tribes of Israel weren't really lost, they simply learned to eat cheese with meat.

 

 

[Ivanhoe]

I usually hate the way these sorts of things are written, all to often a strawman-bashing exercise;

https://razib.substack.com/p/here-be-humans

the reality of homo sapiens sapiens is that there isn't a hierarchical family tree, but rather a partial mesh involving a variety of intermediate species. And it doesn't make sense to me to refer to "primitive" and "modern" since primitive implies crude. Better to just say ancestor and descendant.

One thing that always amuses me is the vast dogma that develops in response to a set of artifacts that could fit in a steamer trunk. All it takes is one skull to collapse the house of cards. Now that the world, and most nations, are wealthy enough to afford anthropologists, I have no doubt they will be finding bones and DNA that will continue to upset the apple cart again and again.

 

 

[DB]

Is thee a kind of Lysenko-like cachet from being home to the earliest hominid? I suspect so.

[Ivanhoe]

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/15/malthusian-myth-busting-easter-island-edition/

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While it is true that the Easter Islanders deforested their island, forensic historians have now determined that by converting the forest to farmland and innovatively adapting to prolonged Little Ice Age droughts, they avoided collapse.

 

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Why, then, does the popular narrative of Easter Island’s collapse persist? It likely has less to do with the ancient Rapa Nui people than ourselves, Lipo explained.

Here is the original paper;

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24252-z

[lucklucky]

Does it present an alternative solution to collapse?

[sunday]

The point is to better explain a phenomenon.

[Ivanhoe]

5 hours ago, lucklucky said:

Does it present an alternative solution to collapse?

Not in my reading, the main theme of the paper is that the prevailing wisdom is based on slender amounts of data tortured by statistical models.

The implied theme is that people have been trying to attribute the collapse to; climate change, deforestation, European arrival, etc. All seemingly intended to be used in the pulpit to rail against capitalism or whatever.

 

[lucklucky]

Thanks. It seem  that we see the past trough our contemporary lens and and science can only in some cases nullify that bias.

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/923583

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Blood group analyses for three Neandertals and one Denisovan by a team from the Anthropologie Bio-Culturelle, Droit, Éthique et Santé research unit (CNRS / Aix-Marseille University / EFS) confirm hypotheses concerning their African origin, Eurasian dispersal, and interbreeding with early Homo sapiens. The researchers also found further evidence of low genetic diversity and possible demographic fragility. Their findings are published in PLOS ONE (28 July 2021).

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The findings bolster previous hypotheses but also offer new surprises. While it was long thought that Neandertals were all type O—just as chimpanzees are all type A and gorillas all type B—the researchers demonstrated that these ancient hominins already displayed the full range of ABO variability observed in modern humans. Extensive analysis covering other blood group systems turned up alleles that argue in favour of African origins for Neandertals and Denisovans.

Especially surprising is the discovery that the Neandertals harboured a unique Rh allele absent in modern humans—with the notable exceptions of one Aboriginal Australian and one Papuan. Do these two individuals bear testimony to interbreeding of Neandertals and modern humans before the migration of the latter into Southeast Asia?

 

Man, our distant ancestors sure had no problem gettin' freaky.

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-confirms-neanderthals-created-ancient-spanish-cave-art-60-000-years-ago

 

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Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

 

[Corinthian]

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-people-philippines-denisovan-dna.html?fbclid=IwAR1W8XzQ8ihzAvZ-Wit5DXW7YBN_cOdC4BlUU-h9JeN79XN3H13HY7DCEto

 

The aeta mentioned here are located at the Bataan peninsula. There are many aeta groups scattered around the Philippines.

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/mind-blowing-grizzly-bear-dna-maps-indigenous-language-families

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The bears and Indigenous humans of coastal British Columbia have more in common than meets the eye. The two have lived side by side for millennia in this densely forested region on the west coast of Canada. But it’s the DNA that really stands out: A new analysis has found that the grizzlies here form three distinct genetic groups, and these groups align closely with the region’s three Indigenous language families.

 

[JWB]

Paywalled:

Unearthed idol may have been a pagan deity, researchers say, and could hold clues to Ireland’s past.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/20/ireland-pagan-deity-bog-idil/

[Ivanhoe]

28 minutes ago, JWB said:

Paywalled:

Unearthed idol may have been a pagan deity, researchers say, and could hold clues to Ireland’s past.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/20/ireland-pagan-deity-bog-idil/

No mention of mead, beer, or whiskey, so safe to assume it was a foreign deity.

[Ivanhoe]

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.livescience.com/iron-age-sandal-mountain-norway
 

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The discovery of an Iron Age sandal on an icy Norwegian mountain provides more evidence that the mountain served as a travel route about 1,700 years ago.

A mountain hiker found the sandal in an area known as the Horse Ice Patch in late August 2019. The hiker contacted researchers at Secrets of the Ice, who study archaeology preserved within glaciers and ice patches.

"He sent us GPS coordinates and photos, and left the discovery in the ice. Well done," Espen Finstad, the archaeologist responsible for the fieldwork and report from the site, told Live Science in an email.