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 Researchers used a dating technique that relies on when the tools were buried  The tools from Jebel Faya (pictured) were made by modern humans, the researchers argue |
Humans 'left Africa much earlier' (Africa) 27 January 2011 (www.bbc.co.uk) Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests. Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago. The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science. The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago. Simon Armitage, from Royal Holloway, University of London, Hans-Peter Uerpmann, from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and colleagues, uncovered 125,000-year-old stone tools at Jebel Faya which resemble those found in East Africa at roughly the same time period. The authors of the study say the people who made the tools were newcomers in the area with origins on the other side of the Red Sea. The researchers were able to date the tools using a light-based technique, which tells scientists when the stone artefacts were buried. Genetics questioned So-called anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged somewhere in Africa some 200,000 years ago. They later spread out, migrating to other continents where they displaced the indigenous human groups such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia. DNA from the cell's powerhouses - or mitochondria - can be used as a "clock" for reconstructing the timing of human migrations. This is because mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates mutations, or changes, at a known rate. Tools from Jebel Faya Researchers used a dating technique that relies on when the tools were buried Studies of mtDNA had suggested a timing for the "Out of Africa" exodus of 60-70,000 years ago. But scientists behind the latest study argue that the people who made tools at Jebel Faya 125,000 years ago are ancestral to humans living outside Africa today. Professor Uerpmann said the estimates of time using genetic data were "very rough". "The domestic dog was said to be 120,000 years old, and now it is 20,000. You can imagine how variable the genetic dating is," he explained. Commenting on the findings, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, said: "This archaeological work by Armitage and colleagues provides important clues that early modern humans might have dispersed from Africa across Arabia, as far as the Straits of Hormuz, by 120,000 years ago. "This research augments the controversial idea that such populations could have migrated even further across southern Asia, despite conflicting genetic data that such movements only occurred after 60,000 years." Multiple migrations? The researchers say the toolmakers at Jebel Faya may have reached the Arabian Peninsula at a time when changes in the climate were transforming it from arid desert into a grassland habitat with lakes and rivers. These human groups could later have moved on towards the Persian Gulf, trekking around the Iranian coast and on to South Asia. Indeed, Dr Mike Petraglia at the University of Oxford has uncovered tools in India that he says could have been made by modern humans before 60,000 years ago. Some tools were sandwiched in ash from the eruption of the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that geologists can date very accurately to 74,000 years ago. However, other researchers suggest that the people living in India at this time could have died out and been replaced by a later wave of humans. Anthropologists already knew of an early foray out of Africa by modern humans. Remains found at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel date to between 119,000 and 81,000 years ago. But the Skhul and Qafzeh people are generally thought to have died out or retreated south, perhaps because of climatic fluctuations. They subsequently disappear, and their sites are re-occupied by Neanderthals. Professor Stringer said the fact that the tools found at Jebel Faya did not resemble those associated with modern humans at Qafzeh and Skhul hinted at "yet more complexity in the exodus of modern humans from Africa". He posed the question: "Could there have been separate dispersals, one from East Africa into Arabia, and another from North Africa into the Levant?" Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12300228 - By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News
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Success of Poznan archaeologists in Sudan (Sudan) 24 January 2011 (en.naukawpolsce.pl) Concentration of carvings with thousands of images, ancient burial grounds and several dozen terracotta figurines were found by archaeological team from the Department of Archaeology of Africa of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology PAS Poznan Branch during a survey in the mountains on the Red Sea, north of Port Sudan. North-east Sudan, where the archaeological mission conducts its activities, has never been surveyed for prehistoric settlement. In 1999, Krzysztof Pluskota accidentally discovered the first concentration of stone art and informed the archaeologists, which led him to sending an expedition. The head of the expedition is Dr. Przemyslaw Bobrowski. "During December's expedition we discovered another, very rich concentrations of stone art - mainly images of cattle, but also humans and some animals of wild African fauna" - said Prof. Michal Kobusiewicz, one of the expedition members. "These images are concentrated near a characteristic of a lonely, conical mountain with phallic shape, suggesting that the concentration of the images of cattle, the main sustenance of the then population, is associated with the cult of fertility" - he added. According to archaeologists, the mountain was a symbol of fertility cult, the proof of which are its miniatures are made of sandstone found near the carvings, remains of cemeteries and settlements, and its image carved in stone. Cult nature of this place is also evidenced by the discovery of a deposit consisting of several terracotta figurines depicting humans, cattle and phallic symbols. In the immediate vicinity of cave engravings, the researchers found many traced of prehistoric settlements in different periods. According to the researchers, more close determination of the age of carvings looks promising with radiocarbon analysis, geomorphological and environmental studies. In 2011, archaeologists plan to continue research with regard to these important discoveries. Previous activities were possible with grants allocated by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Source : http://en.naukawpolsce.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_naukapl.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=szablon.depesza&dz=archeology&dep=379400&data=&lang=EN&_CheckSum=-791131093
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Sailing into antiquity : BU archeologist unearths clues about ancient Egypt’s sea trade (Egypt) 11 January 2011 (www.boston.com)  The archeological digs at Egypt’s Wadi Gawasis have yielded neither mummies nor grand monuments.
But Boston University archeologist Kathryn Bard and her colleagues are uncovering the oldest remnants of seagoing ships and other relics linked to exotic trade with a mysterious Red Sea realm called Punt. “They were the space launches of their time,’’ Bard said of the epic missions to procure wondrous wares. Although Nile River craft are well-known, the ability of ancient Egyptian mariners to ply hundreds of miles of open seas in cargo craft was not so fully documented. Then the team led by Bard and an Italian archeologist, Rodolfo Fattovich, started uncovering maritime storerooms in 2004, putting hard timber and rugged rigging to the notion of pharaonic deepwater prowess. In the most recent discovery, on Dec. 29, they located the eighth in a series of lost chambers at Wadi Gawasis after shoveling through cubic meters of rock rubble and wind-blown sand. Only a few days earlier, Bard had been grading term papers in chilly Boston; now, with flashlight and trowel, she was probing a musty manmade cavern, one that might date back more than 4,000 years. “When the last layer of sand was removed, stale, fetid air rushed from a crack,’’ Bard said by mobile phone from the dig site, a dried-out water course beside the Red Sea. The reconnaissance of the room and its relics will take time and caution. The chamber’s most likely contents include ship parts, jugs, trenchers, and workaday linens, as well as hieroglyphic records. “It’s a storeroom, not a royal tomb,’’ Bard stressed. However prosaic they seem, the finds at Wadi Gawasis - including the ancestor of the modern package label - really speak of the glitter, gold, and glory of a long-ago civilization that bewitches us still. The remote desert site at the sea’s edge was established solely to satisfy the cravings of Egypt’s rulers for the luxury goods of faraway Punt: ebony, ivory, obsidian, frankincense, precious metals, slaves, and strange beasts, such as dog-faced baboons and giraffes. Starting in the middle of the last decade, the Bard-Fattovich team grabbed the attention of nautical archeologists with the unearthing of ship timbers, limestone anchors, steering oars, and hanks of marine rope. The precisely beveled deck beams, hull planks, and copper fittings belong to the oldest deep sea vessels ever found, dating back at least 3,800 years. The craft appear to have been up to 70 feet long, powered by rowers and sail and capable of navigating deep seas. “This is exciting stuff, important,’’ said Shelley Wachsmann, a top authority on Bronze Age ships at Texas A&M University’s Institute of Nautical Archaeology. He is not directly involved with Bard’s research. “She’s found the first fragments of an ancient Egyptian seagoing vessel - a ship that actually sailed in pharaonic times,’’ Wachsmann said. Now the privately funded work at Wadi Gawasis - and at the nearby port ruins, known as Mersa - is winning wider attention. This month, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum will open a special exhibition, “Mersa/Wadi Gawasis: A Pharaonic Harbor on the Red Sea,’’ featuring, among other things, cargo seals, voyage accounts, and a shipping crate marked in hieroglyphic text: “Wonderful Things of Punt.’’ Said Rosanna Pirelli, curator of the exhibition: “This is an important scientific event, since the [discoveries] show a more advanced maritime technology’’ in ancient Egypt. Meanwhile, the PBS science series NOVA tomorrow will broadcast “Building Pharaoh’s Ship,’’ a documentary detailing the reconstruction of a Wadi Gawasis vessel by archeologist Cheryl Ward of Coastal Carolina University. The film airs in Boston on WGBH (Channel 2) at 8 p.m. The journeys upon the “Great Green’’ - as one hieroglyph-inscribed tablet found at Wadi Gawasis refers to the sea - involved fantastical feats of organization, navigational skill, and daring. Overland trade between Egypt and Punt dates to the third millennium BC. But by 1950 BC, the rival Kingdom of Kush had cut off traditional desert routes, forcing Egypt to find a new passage. Egypt’s eastern coast - then as now - was too parched to sustain a full-time port and shipbuilding center. So, using timber hewn from the mountains of Lebanon, Egyptian shipwrights built big vessels on the banks of the Nile, near modern Qift, according to archaeology-based theory. “These were then disassembled and transported, with all other supplies, over the desert by donkey, a journey of 10 days’’ to reach Wadi Gawasis, Bard said. The site adjoined a lagoon, in which a port was built. The ship parts were marked and rebuilt by number or color code. The lagoon has long since been swallowed by sand, but satellite images hint at the remains of a slipway or dock. Sea voyages to Punt would have been so costly and required such a massive logistical effort - probably involving thousands of workers, scribes, quartermasters, sailors, and pack animals - that they probably were launched only a few times per century. Punt’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Scholars can’t even pin the realm to a continent. Bard places it on the Horn of Africa, in the region of present-day Eritrea and parts of Sudan and Somalia. Other researchers put it on the Red Sea’s Asian shore, in today’s Yemen. Voyages from the port appear to have been suspended for two or three centuries because of political instability. There is evidence that Queen Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, dispatched a last sea mission to Punt around 1480 BC, partly to obtain “mortuary incense.’’ Wadi Gawasis held its secrets for millennia. Then, on Christmas Day 2004 - Bard’s second season of exploring the site - she thrust her hand into an odd hole in a cliff’s wall. She was thrilled to feel nothing: the indication of a larger space beyond. Removal of rock rubble revealed a room containing a mud brick, some beads, and a grinding stone. Antiquities, sure, but Egypt’s sands are littered with such millennia-old shards and scraps. Instinct, however, told the professor from Boston that the sun-scorched slopes concealed more than broken pots and earthenware adornments. “It just felt like we were on to something,’’ Bard said. Within days, the team had uncovered another human-hewn cavern - this one connecting to a series of underground storage rooms. Here were ships’ timbers. Here were sea anchors. Here were bundles of intact nautical rope. Here was a tantalizing tale of ancient seafaring. “The rope was neatly stored, coiled, and knotted, exactly as some sailor left it,’’ Bard said. “It was a moment perfectly frozen in time for 3,800 years.’’ Source : http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/01/11/boston_university_archeologists_digs_uncover_clues_to_egyptian_mariners/?page=full - By Colin Nickerson, Globe Correspondent
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Study Of Lice DNA Shows Humans First Wore Clothes 170,000 Years Ago (Africa) 7 January 2011 (medicalnewstoday) A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa. Principal investigator David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to better understand human evolution and migration patterns. His latest five-year study used DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first began to diverge genetically from human head lice. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and appears in this month's print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution. "We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing," Reed said. "Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn't exist until clothing came about in humans." The data shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating into colder climates and higher latitudes, which began about 100,000 years ago. This date would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites. The study also shows humans started wearing clothes well after they lost body hair, which genetic skin-coloration research pinpoints at about 1 million years ago, meaning humans spent a considerable amount of time without body hair and without clothing, Reed said. "It's interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn't until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world," Reed said. Lice are studied because unlike most other parasites, they are stranded on lineages of hosts over long periods of evolutionary time. The relationship allows scientists to learn about evolutionary changes in the host based on changes in the parasite. Applying unique data sets from lice to human evolution has only developed within the last 20 years, and provides information that could be used in medicine, evolutionary biology, ecology or any number of fields, Reed said. "It gives the opportunity to study host-switching and invading new hosts - behaviors seen in emerging infectious diseases that affect humans," Reed said. A study of clothing lice in 2003 led by Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated humans first began wearing clothes about 107,000 years ago. But the UF research includes new data and calculation methods better suited for the question. "The new result from this lice study is an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much older than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense," said Ian Gilligan, lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions." The last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, but the study's date suggests humans started wearing clothes in the preceding Ice Age 180,000 years ago, according to temperature estimates from ice core studies, Gilligan said. Modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago. Because archaic hominins did not leave descendants of clothing lice for sampling, the study does not explore the possibility archaic hominins outside of Africa were clothed in some fashion 800,000 years ago. But while archaic humans were able to survive for many generations outside Africa, only modern humans persisted there until the present. "The things that may have made us much more successful in that endeavor hundreds of thousands of years later were technologies like the controlled use of fire, the ability to use clothing, new hunting strategies and new stone tools," Reed said. Study co-authors were Melissa Toups of Indiana University and Andrew Kitchen of The Pennsylvania State University, both previously with UF. Co-author Jessica Light of Texas A&M University was formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Florida Museum. The researchers completed the project with the help of Reed's NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is granted to researchers who exemplify the teacher-researcher role. Source : http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213069.php
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