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    Lightbulb Origins of our Species

    Ancient artifacts found in Florida sinkhole...

    Early snowbirds? Florida sinkhole yields ancient artifacts
    May 13, 2016 — Scientists say a stone knife and other artifacts found deep underwater in a Florida sinkhole show people lived in that area some 14,500 years ago.
    That makes the ancient sinkhole the earliest well-documented site for human presence in the southeastern U.S., and important for understanding the settling of the Americas, experts said. The findings confirm claims made more than a decade ago about the site, some 30 miles southeast of Tallahassee. At that time, researchers reported evidence that humans were there some 14,400 years ago. But in an era when such an old date was widely considered impossible, other experts disputed the evidence, said Mike Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. The sinkhole was "just politely ignored," he said. Waters was among a new team of scientists who excavated there from 2012 to 2014. They report finding the knife and stone flakes in a paper released Friday by the journal Science Advances. The new work offers "far better" evidence for early humans than the earlier research did, he said.

    The sinkhole is nearly 200 feet wide. In ancient times, it had a shallow pond at the bottom. That offered fresh water and a gathering point for animals, which "probably would have been easy pickings" for hunters who saw them trapped in the deep depression, Waters said. Today, the sinkhole is filled with about 30 feet of water, and it took divers equipped with head-mounted lights to look for artifacts. It was "as dark as the inside of a cow, literally no light at all," said Jessi Halligan, the lead diving scientist and an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University in Tallahassee. They found the knife while digging with a trowel. It's a couple of inches long and about an inch wide, sharpened on both sides. To determine its age, the researchers used nearby mastodon dung, which contained twigs that could be analyzed. The twigs, and therefore the knife, were found to be about 14,550 years old.


    In this 2015 photo provided by Texas A&M's Center for the Study of the First Americans, divers investigate the Page-Ladson archaeological site in Florida. Scientists say artifacts found deep underwater in a Florida sinkhole show people lived in that area some 14,500 years ago. That makes it the earliest well-documented site for human presence in the southeastern U.S., and important for understanding the settling of the Americas, experts said

    Man-made stone flakes were found to be about the same age. The scientists also examined a mastodon tusk recovered in 1993, and confirmed that its long, deep grooves were made by people, probably as they worked to remove the tusk from a skull. The first people in North America are thought to have crossed a now-submerged land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. From there, people spread southward. Waters said the age of the sinkhole artifacts adds to evidence that people may have migrated south from Alaska as early as 16,000 years ago by boat along the coast, because inland Canada was blocked by ice sheets until 2,000 years later. Halligan said the ancient visitors to the sinkhole could have been the Southeast's first snowbirds, moving south for the winter and north for the summer. They could have followed mastodons, whose remains have been found as far north as Kentucky, she said. "They were very smart about local plants and local animals and migration patterns," she said.

    In American archaeology, sites showing signs of human presence more than about 13,000 years are called "pre-Clovis," since they predate the Clovis era of widespread human occupation. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History said that he ranked the sinkhole with two locations in Pennsylvania and Virginia as "the best-dated and oldest pre-Clovis sites yet found in North America." While the other two sites are older, "the Florida site has a major role to play in learning the story of the peopling of the Americas," said Stanford, who didn't participate in the research. Another expert, James Adovasio of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton agreed, saying it promises to shed light on "early Native American lifestyle in an environment where these lifestyles are very poorly defined."

    http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/...ient-artifacts
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    Findings Push Human Timeline in US Back a Millennium
    May 13, 2016 - A new trove of carbon-dated archaeological evidence from a submerged site in Florida has some big implications for the history of human beings in the Americas.
    Researchers from several U.S. universities say their work suggests humans were wandering around Florida about 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. Their study, published in the journal Science Advances, also paints a fascinating picture of what life in the Americas was like over 14,000 years ago. The new evidence comes from an underwater archaeological site called Page-Ladsen that has been giving up human and animal artifacts for over 50 years. Previous carbon dating of the objects brought up from murky waters put them anywhere between 11,000 and 13,000 years old.


    A mastodon tusk (partially reassembled) from the Page-Ladsen site; curvature is typical for an upper tusk from the left side

    But a team that dived back into the site came up with some new artifacts that date to a much earlier time — 14,550 years ago. That makes it one of the oldest sites in the Southeast, and the oldest submerged site in the Americas. And it pushes back current thinking on when humans were in this area by well over 1,000 years. These people were there well before the Clovis hunters, a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that was previously thought to be the most ancient human group living in North America. There has always been tantalizing archaeological and genetic evidence that humans had been in the region earlier than thought, but until now it could not be proven because so few older remains had been uncovered.


    Neil Puckett, a doctoral student from Texas A&M University involved in the excavations, surfaces with the limb bone of a juvenile mastodon.

    In a teleconference, the scientists suggested that changing sea levels might be the reason more evidence of these ancient Americans hadn't been found. Jessi Halligan, one of the researchers from Florida State University, said during the call that sea levels 14,000 years ago were 100 meters lower than they are today because of extensive glaciering. That means much of the earliest record of human habitation of the American Southeast is likely buried and underwater. The researchers' evidence is contained in stone tools and mastodon bones brought up from the 8-meter-deep sinkhole in the Aucilla River in Florida. They said the tools were clearly used to butcher the mastodon alongside a watering hole that, 15,000 years ago, would have been 200 kilometers from the shoreline. Today, it is the coastline.


    Co-principal investigator Michael R. Waters and CSFA student Morgan Smith examine a biface, or bifacial stone tool, in the field after its discovery.

    As further evidence that this population was a separate culture from the Clovis people, the researchers in their teleconference pointed to distinct differences between the stone tools they recovered and the flaked points of Clovis culture tools. In addition to pushing back the frontier of human colonization of the Americas, the evidence also paints a picture of a much different world. Fourteen thousand years ago, camels, mastodons and giant armadillo-like animals called Glyptodons, to name a few, lived in the area in abundance. Another tantalizing discovery are bones the researchers believe are from dogs, which even back then are likely to have been trained companions. But the dogs disappeared about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. The humans, resilient as always, stayed, survived and thrived.

    http://www.voanews.com/content/findi...m/3329678.html

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    That would have been during the last ice age.

    (Luckily it has warmed since then)
    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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    Lightbulb

    Granny says dat was a bit before her time...

    Life 'went large' a billion years ago
    Tue, 17 May 2016 - Life was already organising itself into large communities of cells more than a billion years ago, new evidence from China suggests.
    The centimetre-scale life forms were preserved in mudstones from the Yanshan area in the country's north and are dated to 1.56 billion years ago. Fossils big enough to be seen by the naked eye became common between 635 and 541 million years ago. But the latest specimens are more than twice that age. The findings by a Chinese-American team of researchers appear in the journal Nature Communications. The mysterious organisms from the Gaoyuzhuang rock formation appear to belong to the branch of life known as the eukaryotes, which today includes everything from single-celled amoebae to plants, fungi and animals. The sea-dwelling life forms probably lived on the shelf areas of ancient oceans and bear a superficial resemblance to algae. They also appear to have used photosynthesis, the process by which plants, some bacteria and other simple organisms convert sunlight into chemical energy.


    Macroscopic fossils

    Prof Andrew Knoll, from Harvard University, a co-author of the paper, said the organism represented by the Chinese fossils was "large but I doubt that it was complicated - an important distinction". He told me: "You're a good example of a complex multi-cellular organism because you have 250 cell types, dozens of tissues, different organ systems. "On the other hand if you go to the beach you will find seaweeds that consist of a sheet of cells that are almost all identical. Most of them can either photosynthesise or be used for reproduction." The team, including Prof Knoll and Shixing Zhu from the China Geological Survey in Tianjin, found that life in this ancient period had already developed a variety of forms. Of 53 separate specimens, 26 (49%) were linear in shape, 16 (30%) were wedge-shaped, eight (15%) were tongue-shaped and three (6%) were oblong-shaped. The marine organisms measured up to 30cm in length and up to 8cm wide. Some of the specimens revealed fine structure: a closely-packed arrangement of individual cells measuring about 10 micrometres long - which is the same as the width of cotton fibre.

    Go big or go home

    Examples of multi-cellular life dating back more than a billion-and-a-half years have been described before. They include Horodyskia, which was shaped like a strings of beads, and Grypania, a coiled, ribbon-like organism. But the diversity of forms and the size of the fossils from Yanshan mark them out. The researchers say the fossils are unlikely to be of agglomerations of bacteria known as microbial mats, and instead are probably early examples of eukaryotic organisms. If so, the organisms suggest multi-cellularity was a feature of marine life a billion years before the so-called Cambrian explosion, a rapid evolutionary event that began 542 million years ago and resulted in the divergence of major animal groups. Some scientists partly attribute this evolutionary flowering to a rise in oxygen levels, although the causes are the matter of continuing debate. The findings also suggest that the preceding era, characterised by lower oxygen levels and sometimes referred to as the "boring billion", may have been misjudged.

    Prof Knoll told BBC News: "It looks like the leap from single cells to simple multi-cellularity is easy - in relative terms. It was done many times (over the course of evolution) and this really cements the case that it was done early in the history of eukaryotes. "There are a couple of cases where we know the genomes of both unicellular (single-celled) organisms and their closest multi-cellular relatives. When the jump is from a single cell to simple multi-cellularity, there's very little difference in the gene content of the organism. That's a small leap forward. "The difference when you go from simple multi-cellularity to complex multi-cellularity, however, is large. The tree of life suggests that has happened only rarely." However, the team was not able to link the fossils with any other known group of eukaryotes - living or extinct.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36303051

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    Question

    Light shed on how humans populated Americas...

    Alaskan 'sunrise' girl sheds light on how humans populated Americas
    January 3, 2018 | WASHINGTON - Ancient DNA extracted from the skull of a six-week-old baby girl whose 11,500-year-old remains were unearthed in a burial pit in central Alaska is helping scientists resolve long-standing controversies about how humans first populated the Americas.
    Scientists said on Wednesday a study of her genome indicated there was just a single wave of migration into the Americas across a land bridge, now submerged, that spanned the Bering Strait and connected Siberia to Alaska during the Ice Age. The infant -- named “sunrise girl-child” (Xach‘itee‘aanenh T‘eede Gaay) using the local indigenous language -- belonged to a previously unknown Native American population that descended from those intrepid migrants, the researchers added. “The study provides the first direct genomic evidence that all Native American ancestry can be traced back to the same source population during the last Ice Age,” University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist Ben Potter said.

    The remains of the infant -- part of a hunter-gatherer culture that hunted bison, elk, hare, squirrels and birds and caught salmon -- were unearthed in 2013 at a prehistoric encampment in Alaska’s Tanana River Valley about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Fairbanks. Our species first arose in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, and later spread around the world. The researchers studied the baby’s genome and genetic data covering other populations to unravel how and when the Americas were first populated. A single ancestral Native American group split from East Asians about 36,000 year ago and thousands of years later crossed the land bridge, they said. This founding group diverged into two lineages about 20,000 years ago.

    The first lineage trekked south of the huge ice caps that covered much of North America between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, spreading throughout North and South America and becoming the ancestors of today’s Native Americans. The second was the newly identified population called Ancient Beringians who included the infant. They eventually disappeared, perhaps absorbed into another population that later inhabited Alaska.

    Some scientists previously hypothesized about multiple migratory waves over the land bridge as recent as 14,000 years ago. The girl was found alongside remains of an even-younger female infant, possibly a first cousin, whose genome the researchers could not sequence. Both were covered in red ochre and surrounded by decorated antler tools. “Even the one that got sequenced was a huge challenge due to poor DNA preservation,” said Eske Willerslev, director of the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for GeoGenetics. The research was published in the journal Nature.

    https://in.reuters.com/article/us-sc...-idINKBN1ES1NH

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    Red face

    Kinda looks like Uncle Ferd's g/f...

    This ancient teenager is the first known person with parents of two different species
    Aug 23, 2018 - A new ancient DNA study published in Nature Wednesday reports the first known person to have had parents of two different species. The studied remains belonged to a girl who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
    Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived throughout Europe and Western Asia until around 30,000 years ago. This species lived in several different ecological zones, survived three glacial periods, and were excellent hunters and tool-makers. Denisovans (Homo sapiens denisova), on the other hand, we know very little about. Thus far they have only been found in Denisova Cave in Sibera as tiny bone fragments. We don’t yet know what they looked like – nor exactly what they were capable of. Neanderthal, Denisovans, and modern humans all shared a common ancestor more than 400,000 years ago.



    Is this what Denisova 11’s mother looked like? A museum model of a Neanderthal woman.




    Found in Denisova Cave, this child — known as “Denisova 11” — was at least 13 years of age at the time of her death. Analysis of a piece of her bone found that the girl died more than 50,000 years ago.
    This discovery occurred through ancient DNA analysis, whereby a small piece of the teenager’s bone was pulverised, the DNA extracted, and then sequenced. The sequence was then compared to previously analysed samples from Neanderthals, modern humans, and Denisovans. Her genetic traits could only be explained if her mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan.
    Denisova 11 was a first generation Neanderthal-Denisovan woman – perhaps we could call her a “Neandersovan”?



    Neighbours of modern humans

    Neanderthals and Denisovans inhabited Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago when they were replaced by modern humans (Homo sapiens). But before this replacement occurred, there appears to have been a fair bit of mingling going on whenever the different groups met. Indeed, the ancestors of modern-day Oceanians and Asians contain Denisovan DNA, while present-day non-Africans contain 2-4% Neanderthal DNA.


    More mobile than we thought


    The DNA of this girl — Denisova 11 — also suggests that there was some quite significant movement of Neanderthal groups between Western Europe and the East. Analysis of her DNA found that rather than being more closely related to a Neanderthal who lived in her home cave sometime prior to her birth, she instead showed more connections to those recovered in Western Europe. This finding is interesting because most archaeological evidenceindicates that Neanderthals — unlike modern humans — were not interested in long-distance movement. They don’t seem to have moved much beyond relatively constrained territories which provided everything they needed for day-to-day life.



    MORE
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    Mixed-species DNA casts new light on early humans
    Fri, Aug 24, 2018 - Denny was an inter-species lovechild.
    Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported in Nature on Wednesday. Nicknamed by Oxford University scientists, Denisova 11 — her official name — was at least 13 when she died for reasons unknown. “There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups,” said lead author Vivian Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “But this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring.” Denny’s surprising pedigree was unlocked from a bone fragment unearthed in 2012 by Russian archeologists at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.


    Analysis of the bone’s DNA left no doubt: The chromosomes were a 50-50 mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan, two distinct species of early humans that split apart between 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. “I initially thought that they must have screwed up in the lab,” said senior author and Max Planck Institute professor Svante Paabo, who identified the first Denisovan a decade ago at the same site. Worldwide, fewer than two dozen early human genomes from before 40,000 years ago — Neanderthal, Denisovan and Homo sapiens — have been sequenced, and the chances of stumbling on a half-and-half hybrid seemed vanishingly small. Or not. “The very fact that we found this individual of mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan origins suggests that they interbred much more often than we thought,” said Slon.



    A 40,000-year-old Homo sapiens with a Neanderthal ancestor a few generations back, recently found in Romania, also bolsters this notion, but the most compelling evidence that inter-species hanky-panky in Late Pleistocene Eurasia might not have been that rare lies in the genes of contemporary humans. About 2 percent of DNA in non-Africans across the globe today originates with Neanderthals, earlier studies have shown. Denisovan remnants are also widespread, although less evenly. “We find traces of Denisovan DNA — less than 1 percent — everywhere in Asia and among native Americans,” Paabo said. “Aboriginal Australians and people in Papua New Guinea have about 5 percent.” Taken together, these facts support a novel answer to the hotly debated question of why Neanderthals — who had successfully spread across parts of western and central Europe — disappeared about 40,000 years ago.

    What if our species — arriving in waves from Africa — overwhelmed Neanderthals, and perhaps Denisovans, with affection rather than aggression? “Part of the story of these groups is that they may simply have been absorbed by modern populations,” Paabo said. Recent research showing that Neanderthals were not knuckle-dragging brutes makes this scenario all the more plausible. Far less is known about Denisovans, but they might have suffered a similar fate. Paabo established their existence with an incomplete finger bone and two molars dated to about 80,000 years ago. Among their genetic legacy to some modern humans is a variant of the gene EPAS1, which makes it easier for the body to access oxygen by regulating the production of hemoglobin, a 2014 study said. Nearly 90 percent of Tibetans have this precious variant, compared with only 9 percent of Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.


    http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../24/2003699117

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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter1469 View Post
    That would have been during the last ice age.

    (Luckily it has warmed since then)
    Florida would have been considerably larger then and about 3-4C cooler.
    When Donald Trump said to protest “peacefully”, he meant violence.

    When he told protesters to “go home”, he meant stay for an insurrection.

    And when he told Brad Raffensperger to implement “whatever the correct legal remedy is”, he meant fraud.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

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