Neanderthals were not less intelligent than modern humans, scientists find

Researchers say there is no evidence that modern humans' cognitive superiority led to demise of Neanderthals


Ian Sample, science correspondent
         

Neanderthal and modern human skulls. Photograph: Sabena Jane Blackbird/Alamy

Scientists have concluded that Neanderthals were not the primitive dimwits they are commonly portrayed to have been.
The view of Neanderthals as club-wielding brutes is one of the most enduring stereotypes in science, but researchers who trawled the archaeological evidence say the image has no basis whatsoever.
They said scientists had fuelled the impression of Neanderthals being less than gifted in scores of theories that purport to explain why they died out while supposedly superior modern humans survived.
Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands said: "The connotation is generally negative. For instance, after incidents with the Dutch Ajax football hooligans about a week ago, one Dutch newspaper piece pleaded to make football stadiums off-limits for such 'Neanderthals'."
The Neanderthals are believed to have lived between roughly 350,000 and 40,000 years ago, their populations spreading from Portugal in the west to the Altai mountains in central Asia in the east. They vanished from the fossil record when modern humans arrived in Europe.
The reasons for the demise of the Neanderthals have long been debated in the scientific community, but many explanations assume that modern humans had a cognitive edge that manifested itself in more cooperative hunting, better weaponry and innovation, a broader diet, or other major advantages.
Roebroeks and his colleague, Dr Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, trawled through the archaeological records to look for evidence of modern human superiority that underpinned nearly a dozen theories about the Neanderthals' demise and found that none of them stood up.
"The explanations make good stories, but the only problem is that there is no archaeology to back them up," said Roebroeks.
Villa said part of the misunderstanding had arisen because researchers compared Neanderthals with their successors, the modern humans who lived in the Upper Palaeolithic, rather than the humans who lived at the same time. That is like saying people in the 19th century were less intelligent than those in the 21st because they didn't have laptops and space travel.
"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," said Villa. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true." The study is published in the journal Plos One.
So what did kill off our equally intelligent extinct cousins? Roebroecks said that the reasons must have been complex, and that recent genetic studies that have decoded the Neanderthal genome might reveal some clues. Those studies show that Neanderthals lived in small, fragmented groups, and interbred to some extent with modern humans. Some of their inbred male offspring were infertile. The arrival of modern humans may simply have swamped and assimilated them.
"Stereotypes help people to order their world, but the stereotype of the primitive Neanderthal is now gradually eroding, at least in scientific circles," said Roebroecks.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/30/neanderthals-not-less-intelligent-humans-scientists

Indie Scribe Magazine - Mary Ann Bernal - featured author

 

 

Click on the link to read the article in its entirety

 

http://www.joomag.com/magazine/indie-scribe-magazine-may-2014/0621510001396992082

'Mummy Lake' Used for Ancient Rituals, Not Water Storage

 

Far View refers to the group of archaeological structures located on the northern part of the park's Chapin Mesa ridge, where Mummy Lake is also situated. Shown here, one of the last structures built on Chapin Mesa. Credit: Larry Benson View full size image

In Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, a large 1,000-year-old structure long thought to be an Ancestral Puebloan water reservoir may not have been built to store water after all, a new study suggests.
Instead, the so-called Mummy Lake — which isn't a lake and has never been associated with mummies — likely held ancient ritual ceremonies, researchers say.
Mummy Lake is a sandstone-lined circular pit that was originally 90 feet (27.5 meters) across and 22 feet (6.65 m) deep. In 1917, American naturalist Jesse Walter Fewkes pegged the structure as a prehistoric water reservoir. Several subsequent studies of Mummy Lake have also supported this view, leading the National Parks Service to officially name the structure "Far View Reservoir" in 2006. (Far View refers to the group of archaeological structures located on the northern part of the park's Chapin Mesa ridge, where Mummy Lake is also situated.)


In the new study, researchers analyzed the hydrologic, topographic, climatic and sedimentary features of Mummy Lake and the surrounding cliff area. They concluded that, contrary to what previous research had determined, the pit wouldn't have effectively collected or distributed water. [See Images of Mummy Lake in Mesa Verde]

A panorama of Mummy Lake in Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park.
Credit: Carl Bowser, Silver Pixel Images

View full size image

"The fundamental problem with Mummy Lake is that it's on a ridge," said study lead author Larry Benson, an emeritus research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey and adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. "It's hard to believe that Native Americans who understood the landscape and were in need of water would have decided to build a reservoir on that ridge."
A supposed reservoir
Far View Village lies on a ridgeline that decreases in elevation from north to south, and includes Far View House, Pipe Shrine House, Far View Tower, Mummy Lake and other buildings. Previously, scientists had thought Mummy Lake — the northernmost structure — was a key part of a large water collection and distribution system that transported water between these structures to areas south of the reservoir.
They proposed that a gathering basin was once located uphill from Mummy Lake, and that a hypothetical "feeder ditch" connected the two locations. Studies have shown that another shallow, foot-paved ditch runs south from Mummy Lake to Far View House and Pipe Shrine House, and a third ditch connects Far View Village to Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace (two structures built centuries after the Far View group) farther south. [Image Gallery: Lake Natron Gives Up Its Dead]

Far View Village lies on a ridgeline that decreases in elevation from north to south, and includes Far View House (shown in background), Pipe Shrine House (shown in foreground), Far View Tower, Mummy Lake and other buildings.
Credit: Benson et al./Elsevier

View full size image

The prevailing idea was that precipitation would first collect in the basin, and then travel down to Mummy Lake along the ditch; from there, some of it could then travel to the rest of the village, providing water for drinking and irrigating crops.
"I think it's appealing to think of Mummy Lake as a reservoir," Benson told Live Science, noting that the Ancestral Puebloans of Mesa Verde lived in a region without any natural bodies of water. "[Scientists] naturally want to find structures that hold or convey water, to explain how the people got their water."
Testing the theory
To test this reservoir theory, Benson and his colleagues first analyzed the topography and hydrology of the ridge using GPS surveys, high-resolution imagery and digital elevation models.
They found that the ditches leading from Mummy Lake to the southern structures couldn't have functioned as water canals or irrigation distribution systems. The ditches would have easily spilled water over the canyon edge at various points if it didn't have walls controlling the water flow (which don't appear to have existed).
Next, the team used climate models to investigate Mummy Lake's potential to store water. They found that even in the wettest year on record, 1941, the pit would have gotten less than a foot of water from winter and spring precipitation by the end of April. This water would have completely evaporated by the end of July, when it's most needed for crops.
The researchers then tested if a hypothetical feeder ditch could actually provide Mummy Lake with water. "The engineering and sediment transport work showed that any water in the ditch would start moving so much dirt that it would block the path," Benson said. That is, soil would have quickly clogged the ditch after regular rainfall, preventing the water from reaching Mummy Lake.
A ceremonial structure?
Benson and his colleagues propose Mummy Lake is an unroofed ceremonial structure, not unlike the ancient kivas and plazas elsewhere in the Southwest. They noted that the structure is similar in size to a great kiva found at a Pueblohistorical site near Zuni, N.M. It also resembles a ball court and amphitheater at the Puebloan village of Wupatki in Arizona — interestingly, Fewkes also thought these two structures were reservoirs.
Furthermore, the ditches connecting Mummy Lake to Far View Village, Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace aren't canals to transport water, but rather Chacoan ceremony roads with similar dimensions to Chacoan roads that exist at other sites in the San Juan Basin, the researchers argue.
Two decades ago, researchers studying the Manuelito Canyon Community of New Mexico discovered the Ancestral Puebloan population had an evolving ritual landscape. Over the centuries, the Manuelito people relocated the ritual focus of their community several times. Each time they moved, they built ceremonial roads to connect their retired great houses and great kivas to the new complexes.
Benson and his colleagues suspect the same thing happened at Mesa Verde. Mummy Lake was built as early as A.D. 900, around the same time as the rest of the Far View group of structures; Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, on the other hand, date to the early 1200s. The researchers think the community relocated to the latter structures between A.D. 1225 and 1250, and connected their past with their present using the ceremonial roads.
If the Far View Reservoir really had nothing to do with water, then it may be time for another name change. "I think [the structure] needs new signage," Benson said. "We could probably call it 'Mummy Lake' again."
The study was detailed in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Follow Joseph Castro on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

http://www.livescience.com/45178-mummy-lake-used-for-rituals.html

    

Cold War images spill new secrets: Lost cities

 

By Kate Seamons

 

The Middle East is home to 4,500 archaeological sites, or so we thought. An in-depth review of Cold War-era photos taken by spy satellites has pulled back the veil on as many as 10,000 more lost cities, roads, and other ruins in the region.
As Gizmodo reports, CORONA served as the code name for America's first use of photographic spy satellites, and was in operation from 1960 to 1972.

 

Its name lives on in the new CORONA Atlas of the Middle East, which made its debut Thursday at the annual gathering of the Society for American Archaeology and revealed "completely unknown" sites via some of the 188,000 declassified photos taken during the mission's final five years, reports National Geographic.
Archaeologist Jesse Casana of the University of Arkansas describes some of the sites as "gigantic," with two sprawling over more than 123 acres; Casana suspects the largest, which appear to include aged walls and citadels, were Bronze Age cities.
And as he explains, the photos' age matters. Though current satellites produce images superior to these grainy decades-old ones, "we can't see a site that someone has covered up with a building," and the fact that they were taken before cities like Iraq's Mosul and Jordan's Amman swelled makes them invaluable.
The CORONA site explains that the mission's satellites snapped images "of most of the Earth’s surface" (images whose film strips were, in a great detail noted by National Geographic, sent back to Earth via parachute-topped buckets) and archaeologists plan to also review areas like Africa and China.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/04/29/cold-war-images-spill-new-secrets-lost-cities/

Mr. Chuckles is Fearless! On Walpurgisnacht - The NEW Ritual e-book series

 

"Incredible! Step aside Anne Rice, Mark Barry describes places and events like you only wish you could. A nail biter, on the edge of your seat, page turner if I've ever read one. I am usually pretty good at figuring out who, what, when and where, but I was surprised time and time again. Incredibly erotic! Gruesome! Perverted, twisted and sick! Exactly as it should be! It makes no sense that this is not on the best seller list! Not a slow point in it anywhere."

 

 

http://greenwizardpublishing.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/on-walpurgisnacht-new-ritual-e-book.html?view=classic

The Wizard of Notts Recommends: Notts County vs Swindon Town - League One 2013/2014

History Trivia - Edward Bruce crowned King of Ireland

May 1

Festival of Juno occurred on this day.

193 Pertinax became emperor.

305 Diocletian and Maximian retired from the office of Roman Emperor.

408 Theodosius II succeeded to the throne of Constantinople. 

1045 Pope Benedict IX sold the papacy to John Gratianus, Gregory VI.

1316 Edward Bruce was crowned King of Ireland.

1328 Wars of Scottish Independence end: Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton - the Kingdom of England recognized the Kingdom of Scotland as an independent state.

History Trivia - Roman emperor Licinius unifies the entire Eastern Roman Empire

April 30

311 Emperor Galerius legal recognition of Christians in the Roman Empire.

313 Roman emperor Licinius unified the entire Eastern Roman Empire under his rule.

1513  Edmund de la Pole, Yorkist pretender to the English throne, was executed on the orders of Henry VIII.

1527 Henry VIII of England and King Francis of France signed the treaty of Westminster.

History Trivia - Hugh of Cluny dies

April 29

 1109 Hugh of Cluny died. Hugh was the driving force in bringing the monastery of Cluny to preeminence in medieval France.

1347 Catherine of Siena was born. Catherine, the patron saint of Italy, played a significant role in returning the Papacy from Avignon to Rome. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

1429 Joan of Arc led French forces to victory over English at Orleans.

History Trivia - Battle of Dunbar - Scots defeated

April 27

1124 David I became King of Scots. 1296 Battle of Dunbar: The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England. This battle was the only significant field action in the campaign of 1296 when King Edward I of England had invaded Scotland to punish King John Balliol for his refusal to support English military action in France.

Ancient Chisel Used to Build Western Wall Found

 

Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

 

A 2,000-year-old stonemason’s chisel that may have been used in the construction of Jerusalem’s Western Wall has been unearthed at the bottom of the structure along with a number of Second Temple-era objects, claims an Israeili archaeologist.

Some of the artifacts, which include a Roman sword, cooking vessels, a gold bell, coins and a ceramic seal, would suggest the Western Wall, a holy site for both Muslims and Jews, had not been built by King Herod at all.
Eli Shukron, an archaeologist working for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), found the chisel last summer during a dig near a tunnel at the lower base of the Western Wall.

Also known as the Wailing Wall, the massive structure is venerated by Jews as the sole remnant of their Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. To the Muslims, the Western Wall is revered as the Wall of Buraq, the place where Muhammad tethered his winged horse Buraq after being transported from Mecca to Jerusalem.
Shukron, who has been working in the area with archaeologist Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa for the past 19 years, believes the chisel fell from a stonemason’s hand as he was working on scaffolding in the higher sections of the wall. The builder did not bother to get down and retrieve it.
“The chisel was found inside rubble of stone chips that fell from the stonemasons working on the rocks comprising the Western Wall,” Shukron told Israel’s daily Haaretz.
Evidence of 2000-Year-Old Famine Found in Jerusalem
About 6 inches long, the metal tool features a flattened head, as a result of being repeatedly banged on rock.
“People pray and kiss these holy stones every day, but somebody carved them, somebody chiseled them, somebody positioned them,” Shukron was reported as saying.
“They were workers, human beings, who had tools. Today for the first time we can touch a chisel that belonged to one of them,” he added.
According to Haaretz, the IAA has not yet confirmed the finding, but Shukron trusts his findings.
“I have no doubt that it belongs to the time the Wall was built,” he said.
“We found it at the base of the Western Wall, about six meters (19.68 feet) below the main street of Jerusalem in the era of the Second Temple,” he added.
Ancient Rural Town Uncovered in Israel
Commonly believed to have been part of King Herod’s massive expansion project on the Temple Mount, which included the Second Temple itself, the Western Wall may have not been built by the Bible’s bloodiest tyrant after all.
According to Shukron, the excavation revealed a number of coins beneath the wall which date decades after Herod’s death.
This would suggest that construction of the Western Wall had not even begun at the time of Herod’s death and was likely completed only generations later by one of his descendants.
The IAA said it would not comment on the discovery until analysis on the chisel and other findings were completed.
http://www.livescience.com/45118-ancient-chisel-used-to-build-western-wall-found.html

Humans May Have Dispersed Out of Africa Earlier Than Thought

By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor

 

Modern humans may have dispersed in more than one wave of migration out of Africa, and they may have done so earlier than scientists had long thought, researchers now say.

Modern humans first arose between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in Africa. But when and how the modern human lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long been controversial.

Scientists have suggested the exodus from Africa started between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. However, stone artifacts dating to at least 100,000 years ago that were recently uncovered in the Arabian Desert suggested that modern humans might have begun their march across the globe earlier than once suspected.

 

 Out of Africa models

To help solve this mystery, Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues tested four competing out-of-Africa models. Two models involved a single dispersal — one involved a route northward, up the Nile River valley and then eastward across the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula into Asia; the other involved a "beachcomber" route along the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula into Asia. Two other models involved multiple dispersals, with both models involving routes along the northern and southern ends of the Arabian Peninsula — one involved connections and gene flow between these routes, and the other did not. [See Photos of Our Closest Human Ancestor]
The investigators used these models to predict how much the genes and skull measurements of different groups in Africa, Asia and Australia might have diverged from one another given how separated they were by space and time. Then, the researchers compared these predictions with actual gene and skull data from 10 African, Asian and Australian human populations.
The researchers found that both the genetic and skull data supported a multiple-dispersal model involving several migrations.
"It is really exciting that our results point to the possibility of a multiple-dispersals model of modern humans out of Africa," Harvati said. "A multiple-dispersals scenario, with earlier modern humans leaving Africa as early as 130,000 before present, can perhaps account for part of the morphological and genetic patterns that we see among modern human populations."
 The first wave of migrations probably followed the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula as early as 130,000 years ago to Australia and the west Pacific region, while the second wave traveled along the northern route about 50,000 years ago, the researchers said. These waves of migration appear relatively isolated from each other.
"Australian Aborigines, Papuans and Melanesians were relatively isolated after the early dispersal along the southern route," study lead author Hugo Reyes-Centeno, of the University of Tübingen, said in a statement. Other Asian populations apparently descended from members of the later northern wave of migration, the researchers said.
The delay between these waves of migration could be due to ancient environmental factors, "specifically climatic conditions that might have impeded the crossing of the Arabian Peninsula, such as desert conditions," Harvati said.
Ancient environmental factors might not only have prevented migrations, but also spurred them, Havarti said.
"For example, the documentation of severe droughts throughout eastern Africa between about 75,000 to 135,000 years ago could have encouraged a dispersal into other parts of Africa as well as outside of the continent," Harvati said. "More favorable conditions within Africa could have limited migrations out of the continent between 75,000 to 50,000 years ago."

Effects of interbreeding
The researchers cautioned that interbreeding between modern humans and other lineages of humans might influence the results of this new study. For example, instances of interbreeding with the now-extinct Denisovan lineage might have introduced ancient genes into certain modern human groups, perhaps making them look as if they left Africa earlier than they actually did. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors]
"Our study did not specifically test for hybridization with archaic humans, and, of course, it is possible that such admixture could contribute to our results," Harvati said. "We feel, however, that the very low levels of admixture that have been proposed are not sufficient to drive our findings."
The researchers said continued fieldwork and genetic advancements might help confirm this model of multiple, relatively isolated waves of migration.
"The story of human evolution tends to be simplified," Harvati said. "However, more complex models, such as multiple dispersals versus a single dispersal out of Africa, gain strength as more data and new methods become available."
"Further fieldwork in the region of the southern route — for example, the Arabian Peninsula, southeast Asia, Melanesia — is essential in order to further understand the timing and route of early modern human dispersals," Harvati said. "Of course, this is a vast geographical space that has been largely understudied, but it is crucial in developing our knowledge of the first Eurasians."
http://www.livescience.com/44988-humans-dispersed-earlier-than-thought.html

Blood in Gourd Didn't Belong to Louis XVI, New DNA Study Finds

  By Megan Gannon, News Editor

A gourd emblazoned with heroes of the French Revolution said to contain the blood of Louis XVI. Credit: Davide Pettener View full size image

New genetic evidence casts further doubt on the authenticity of a grisly French relic: a gourd long believed to be stained with the blood of Louis XVI.
Scientists sequenced the genome from dried blood inside the 200-year-old gourd and found that it didn't match with the DNA signatures of the king's ancestry, nor did it seem to carry the code for Louis XVI's celebrated traits, like his imposing height and blue eyes.
Deposed during the French Revolution, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January 1793, months before his wife, Marie Antoinette, fell victim to the Reign of Terror, too. According to legend, witnesses soaked up the king's blood with handkerchiefs after his beheading. An inscription on the elaborately decorated gourd claims the vessel held one of those bloody cloths. [See Photos of Louis XVI's Embalmed Head & Gourd]


Last year, a group of scientists compared the DNA signatures from blood found in the gourd with the DNA of three modern male relatives of Louis XVI from different branches of the Bourbon line. The Y chromosomes from the three men matched one another, but not the blood. This revelation, published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, sparked a new investigation.
"When the Y chromosome of three living Bourbons was decoded, and we saw that it did not match with the DNA recovered from the pumpkin in 2010, we decided to sequence the complete genome and to make a functional interpretation in order to see if the blood could actually belong to Louis XVI," Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), said in a statement.
Based on their newly sequenced genome, Lalueza-Fox and colleagues think whomever the blood in the gourd belonged to didn't look like Louis XVI in terms of physical appearance or genealogical heritage.
Louis XVI was known for his towering stature; he may have stood over 6 feet (185 centimeters) tall. Though scientists do not entirely understand the genetic basis for height, Lalueza-Fox and colleagues wrote that the genome pieced together from the gourd blood was not consistent with that of a very tall person, but rather better matched someone with only slightly above-average height for the day. The king also had blue eyes, while the person who left their blood on the gourd more likely had brown eyes, the researchers say.
What's more, the genome had some markers of northern Italian heritage. This finding "cannot be easily reconciled with the known Louis XVI family history, given that just one in 16 great-great-grandparents — Victor Amadeus II, Duque of Savoy (1666–1732) — has some possible northern Italian ancestry," the researchers wrote.
http://www.livescience.com/45103-blood-louis-xvi-gourd-genome.html