 Neandertal Flute Found in
SloveniaResearchers in Slovenia have discovered a piece of bear thigh
bone at a Neandertal cave site that appears to
have been a flute.
A preliminary date
of the flute-like bone has been set at between
43,000 and 82,000 years BP. Before this find, the
earliest bone flutes found in Europe and Asia
dated from 22,000 to 35,000 years BP.
The bone is
only a few inches long, but it is hollow and has
a series of holes on one side. The holes are
aligned in a straight line, just as they are in
most ancient flutes. The ends of the bone have
been broken or chewed.
The site,
Divje Babe I, is located near Cerkno in central
Slovenia. The find was announced by Bonnie
Blackwell, geologist at City University of New
York's Queen College at Flushing. She and
colleague Ivan Turk of the Slovenia Academy of
Sciences at Ljubljana have a paper on the finds
there upcoming in Geoarchaeology.
Among the discoveries were several living floors with hearths
and associated stone tools and tool fragments.
The flute/bone was found next to one of fire
places. Also discovered were over 65,000 bear
teeth, many in stratigraphic association with the
flute.
The artifact
was dated by subjecting associated teeth to the
electron spin resonance process.
According to Science
News,
archaeologist Randy White of New York University
is making a model of the artifact to
"explore the range of sounds that could have
been produced by blowing into it."
"Neandertals were
apparently quite similar to Homo sapiens
in their behavior and cognitive capacities,"
Blackwell told the magazine.
The flute is
another in a string of Neandertal discoveries in
recent years which underline the
"humanness" of these people. Some
scientists continue to maintain Neandertals were
in a separate line from H. sapiens, but there is
no real evidence to support that theory while H.
sapiens neandertalis' place in our taxonomic
family continues to grow. 1/22/97
10 Million Year Old Ape
Found in Turkey
The nearly complete fossil face of a 10 million year old
hominoid, Ankarophithecus meteai, has
been discovered in Central Turkey.
The fossil has
a mix of anatomical traits that excavation
director Berna Alpaguf of Ankara University says
disqualify it as a direct ancestor of either
modern apes or humans.
Diastema is
present, but some teeth are less massive than
suggested by bits of the species found before
this find. Alpaguf did not specify other traits.
An image of
the fossil appeared in the Aug. 3 edition of Science
News. The primate possessed a massive,
elongated face. 11/23/96
Native Americans Used
Psychedelics 4,000 Years Ago
 Peyote
and jimson weed
which both contain psychoactive compounds may be
pictured in ancient native rock art along the
border between Texas and Mexico.
According to
Carolyn E. Boyd and J. Philip Dering of Texas
A&M University, many scenes on the walls of
rock shelters along the Pecos River depict
shamans surrounded by jimson weed and peyote.
Traces of both
plants have been found in 4,000-year-old rock
shelter strata associated with previous human
occupation, and historical records noted
widespread use of jimson weed in the American
Southwest and Mexico 500 years ago.
Besides the
rock art and residue evidence, the Texas
researchers point out that many of the shaman
images are surrounded by black dots with arrows
in them. Some Southwest groups believed peyote to
be living manifestations of their deer deity and
shot the plant with arrows, thus symbolically
killing the deer-peyote entity before eating it.
Both plants
cause hallucinations if taken in low dosages.
Jimson weed can be fatal in high dosages, and
peyote makes its devotees vomit and can cause
involuntarily excretion and elimination, all at
the same time. The good part comes later. 11/26/96.
Beringia Land Bridge
Lasted Until 11,000 Years Ago
According to an
article in June's Nature,
new data indicates the Bering land bridge that
connected Siberia with Alaska, was still high and
dry 11,000 years ago.
According to
Scott A. Elias of the University of Colorado,
plants living there 11,000 years ago included a
variety of shrubs and hardy tundra plants that
could not have supported large grazing animals.
Instead, large animals crossing the land bridge
probably hastened right across it.
Elias' data
comes from cores taken from the now-submerged
bridge. Radiometric dates for plants in those
cores came in at about 11,000 years, pulling the
date for land bridge existence about 3,000 years
closer to the present. 11/26/96
Siberian Find Links to
American Artifacts
The discovery of a fluted point at the Siberian site
called Uptar, located about 1,200 miles from the
Bering Strait, casts doubt on previous
archaeological claims that the distinctive fluted
points were made only in America.
Dating of ash
and charcoal associated with the point has dated
to 8,300 years BP (radiometric date). The point
itself has not been dated, but if it turns out to
be over 11,000 years old, it may be a precursor
of similar American points. If it is younger as
the associated strata indicate, the Siberian
point's existence means knowledge of how to make
it existed at the same time on both sides of the
Bering Strait. 11/25/96
Hominid diffusion from
Africa
 Homo erectus hand axes have been found at two sites
in Israel. The two sites are only about six miles
apart at the north edge of the Red Sea.
Stone tools
found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, dated about
600,000 B.P. They are said to be very similar to
tools of about the same age from Olduvai Gorge
and Olorgesaille in East Africa.
Tools from
Ubeidiya date to about 1,000,000 BP are very
similar stone tools of the same age coming from
several African locations. These older tools were
described as "simpler" than the 600,000
BP artifacts, according to archaeologists Naama
Goren-Inbar and Idit Saragusti.
They examined
105 typical oval-shaped hand axes and 40
retangular "cleavers" from the Ya'aqov
site and discovered that 40 percent were
"flaked" tools. Flake tools are
abundant at African sites of similar antiquity,
but the Israeli tools are the only ones found in
the Middle East. Flake technology is a major
technological advance over "shaped"
stones, because they are sharper and lighter than
a single, shaped rock.
The 1
million-year-old tools from Ubeidiya are single
stones chipped into triangular shapes and similar
to African tools dating over 1mya.
Goren-Inbar
and Saragusti say this is evidence of cultural
diffusion from Africa, as tool-making technology
went with hominid migration. Furthermore, they
note that the two distinct types of tools,
separated by .5 million years, probably indicate
multiple hominid diffusions from Africa.
However, the
artifacts could also be evidence of independent
invention by indigenous hominids in what is now
Israel.
There are so
many artifacts in such good condition that
further, detailed analysis is expected to reveal
mountains of data about how the tools were made.
Excavations took place in the 1960s, then again
beginning in 1989. 9/17/96.
Earliest human-made cord
The earliest known examples of cord made by humans has
also turned up in Israel. Three pieces of twisted
plant fiber were found during excavations of an
ancient village, Ohalo II, submerged for at least
100 years on the edge of the Sea of Galilee.
The pieces of
cord dated to 19,300BP and may have been used to
bind food stuffs. If so, they represent the
oldest known example of above-ground food
storage. The food storage hypothesis is based on
discovery of piles of fish bones found with the
cord.
The oldest
previous evidence of human-made cord came from
Lascaux Cave, France and dated 17,000BP. 9/17/96
First Europeans Were Late
Comers
A pair of Dutch archaeologists say that the first
hominids able to call themselves Europeans
probably didn't get there until 500,000BP. Their
finding counters recent claims that humans
reached Europe between 1 to 2 millionBP.
Wils Roebroeks
and Thijs van Kolfschoten of Leiden University
reached their conclusion by examing the
archaeological evidence used in claiming the
older arrival dates.
According to a
report in Science News , all of the artifacts
over 500,000 years old come from distrubed
contexts with no associated human remains. The
Dutchmen contend the older artifacts are simply
stone chips and flakes produced by natural
forces. However, they also found that beginning
about 500,000BP, European sites contain large
numbers of uncontested stone tools.
The antiquity
of European settlement debate bears close
watching, because of past association between
European anthropological claims of all sorts and
nationalism. The Germans claim they've been in
Europe longer than the French, and the French
think their ancesters were the
"advanced" Cro Magnon cave
painters while the Germans descended from the
more "primitive" H. neandertalis.
The beat goes on....9/18/96
Taung child attacked by
eagle?
The artwork associated with the Taung skull (Australopithecus
africanus, 2.5 million BP) in my college
textbooks pictured a sabre-toothed leopard
dragging the child by the head South African
cavern/pit. Earlier versions theorized other
hominids killed and ate the child.
Best
explanation yet comes from Lee Berger and Ron
Clarke at Univ. of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
They say puncture marks in the Tuang skull are
identical to puncture marks found in contemporary
baboon skulls found beneath eagle nests.
The small size
of young gracile australopithicenes lends
credence to their theory, and also to the prey
side of the predator vs. prey evolutionary
hypothesis. Australopithicenes not only faced
death from other homindis and terrestial
predators, but also had to keep an eye peeled in
the skies where hungry eagles hunted for them.
Curiously,
contemporary H. sapiens is known to have
a weak spot in this area. Most humans do not
commonly look above for danger. Police agencies
capitalize on this by observing subjects from
elevated sites. The Viet Cong placed booby traps
in trees where soldiers wouldn't notice them.
This blind spot may be a mammalian trait. Hunters
know that deer and most other animals don't look
upward for threats. That's why hunters use tree
stands. 9/18/96
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