# Origin of our species



## waltky (Mar 10, 2013)

DNA Evidence Suggests Man 340,000-Years-Old...

*The family tree that rewrote human history: Researchers stunned to find DNA submitted to online project dates back 338,000 years*
_7 March 2013 | Discovery made after American submitted his DNA to a family tree service; DNA traced to Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon; Proves last common Y chromosome ancestor lived 338,000 years ago, even though oldest fossil of modern man is only 200,000 years old_


> A DNA test on an American hoping to trace his family tree has come up with a stunning result - the roots of the human tree date back much further than previously thought.  Researchers were shocked when they analysed the DNA of Albert Perry, a recently deceased African-American from South Carolina.  'This lineage diverged from previously known Y chromosomes about 338,000 years ago, a time when anatomically modern humans had not yet evolved,' said Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona. "This pushes back the time the last common Y chromosome ancestor lived by almost 70 percent.'
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> This time predates the age of the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils.  The fossil record dates back about 200,000 years, said Hammer.  Either interbreeding with Neanderthals or other populations led to the unusual genetic makeup, he said, or humans evolved far earlier than the extant fossil record suggests.  The new divergent lineage - which was found when Mr Perry contacted Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots - branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the fossil record.
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## PUCrussel (Mar 19, 2013)

interesting article!


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## TheOldSchool (Mar 19, 2013)

That's some amazing stuff.  I can't believe we've gotten to that level of understanding in the field of genetics.  It seems like serious genetic research just started a few years ago but I guess it's been around for a long time now.


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## waltky (Mar 21, 2013)

Granny says dat looks like Uncle Ferd an' one o' his fishin' buddies...

*Neanderthal Genome Data Sheds Light on Human Ancestors*
_ March 21, 2013 - Scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute have released a final version of a high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome, which could shed light on why humans survived and earlier hominid species did not._


> "The genome of a Neanderthal is now there in a form as accurate as that of any person walking the streets today," Svante Paabo, a geneticist, told the Associated Press. Paabo led the research project as part of the Institutes Evolutionary Anthropology department.  Neanderthals are the closest relative to humans and existed as recently as 30,000 years ago. It is believed by many scientists that modern humans, Homo sapiens, drove them to extinction. Humans and Neanderthals became divergent branches on the evolutionary tree more than 300,000 years ago.
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## Oldguy (Mar 22, 2013)

The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.


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## waltky (May 7, 2013)

Granny says, "Dat's right - we all come down from the 12 tribes o' Israel...

*Europeans had common ancestors 1,000 years ago*
_May 7,`13  -- Europeans appear to be more closely related than previously thought._


> Scientists who compared DNA samples from people in different parts of the continent found that most had common ancestors living just 1,000 years ago.   The results confirm decade-old mathematical models, but will nevertheless come as a surprise to Europeans accustomed to thinking of ancient nations composed of distinct ethnic groups like "Germans," "Irish" or "Serbs."  "What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other," said Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, who co-wrote the study published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Biology.
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> Coop and his fellow author Peter Ralph of the University of Southern California used a database containing more than 2,250 genetic samples to look for shared DNA segments that would point to distant shared relatives.  While the number of common genetic ancestors is greater the closer people are to each other, even individuals living 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) apart had identical sections of DNA that can be traced back roughly to the Middle Ages.  The findings indicate that there was a steady flow of genetic material between countries as far apart as Turkey and Britain, or Poland and Portugal, even after the great population movements of the first millennium A.D. such as the Saxon and Viking invasions of Britain, and the westward drive of the Huns and Slavic peoples.
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## waltky (Jun 14, 2013)

At the other end of the spectrum - "Why Gramma, what big eyes ya got...

*Humans in 100,000 years: What will we look like?*
_June 12, 2013 > Homo sapiens have slowly evolved over thousands of millennia, but what happens when modern technology comes into play?_


> Visual artist, Nickolay Lamm of Pittsburgh, Pa., tried to answer that question. Interested in illustrating how humans would look like in 100,000 years, he asked science for the answers.  Because I'm not expert in evolution, _ got in touch with Dr. [Alan] Kwan who gave me his educated guess at what we may look like, Lamm told FoxNews.com in an email.  Working with Dr. Kwan, who has a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University, they established one possible timeline to future human evolution of sorts. It's not science -- just a "thought experiment," Kwan has clarified -- but it's fascinating to think about.
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> Published on MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, these changes to modern-day humans were based on the assumption that by the 210th century, scientists will be able to modify human appearances before birth through zygotic genome engineering technology.  Kwan based his theories on the accepted idea that between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, the Earth underwent a period of fluctuation in its climate, which resulted in a tripling of the human brain, as well as skull size. Scientists agree that the rapid changes in climate may have created a favorable environment for those with the ability to adapt to new challenges and situations.
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## numan (Jun 14, 2013)

'
Pure clap-trap. Natural evolution is dead.

From now on, human evolution will be artificially engineered.

We will have travelled far down the road to becoming cyborgs in decades, not in millennia !!
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## whitehall (Jun 15, 2013)

Not too flattering to have the same DNA as "humans who have not evolved". I've been called a neanderthal. Maybe that's a compliment.


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## waltky (Oct 18, 2013)

possum thinks dat's a scarey lookin' skull fer Halloween...

*Unique Skull Find Rebuts Theories On Species Diversity in Early Humans*
_Oct. 17, 2013  This is the best-preserved fossil find yet from the early era of our genus. The particularly interesting aspect is that it displays a combination of features that were unknown to us before the find. The skull, found in Dmanisi by anthropologists from the University of Zurich as part of a collaboration with colleagues in Georgia funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, has the largest face, the most massively built jaw and teeth and the smallest brain within the Dmanisi group._
=snip=


> It is the fifth skull to be discovered in Dmanisi. Previously, four equally well-preserved hominid skulls as well as some skeletal parts had been found there. Taken as a whole, the finds show that the first representatives of the genus Homo began to expand from Africa through Eurasia as far back as 1.85 million years ago.
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> Diversity within a species instead of species diversity
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## waltky (Jan 30, 2014)

Granny says mebbe dat explains Uncle Ferd...

*Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest*
_29 Jan.`14  - It's getting harder and harder to take umbrage if someone calls you a Neanderthal._


> According to two studies published on Wednesday, DNA from these pre-modern humans may play a role in the appearance of hair and skin as well as the risk of certain diseases.  Although Neanderthals became extinct 28,000 years ago in Europe, as much as one-fifth of their DNA has survived in human genomes due to interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, one of the studies found, although any one individual has only about 2 percent of caveman DNA.
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> "The 2 percent of your Neanderthal DNA might be different than my 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA, and it's found at different places in the genome," said geneticist Joshua Akey, who led one of the studies. Put it all together in a study of hundreds of people, and "you can recover a substantial proportion of the Neanderthal genome."  Both studies confirmed earlier findings that the genomes of east Asians harbor more Neanderthal DNA than those of Europeans. This could be 21 percent more, according to an analysis by Akey and Benjamin Vernot, published online in the journal Science.  Still, "more" is a relative term.
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## oldfart (Feb 3, 2014)

waltky said:


> *Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest*
> _29 Jan.`14  - It's getting harder and harder to take umbrage if someone calls you a Neanderthal._
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## jwoodie (Feb 6, 2014)

Oldguy said:


> The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.



Why don't you drop the straw man argument and contribute something useful?


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## waltky (Feb 15, 2014)

DNA Shows Native Americans Emigrated From Asia...

*Ancient DNA Ties Native Americans From Two Continents To Clovis*
_February 13, 2014 ~ The mysterious Clovis culture, which appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, appears to be the forerunner of Native Americans throughout the Americas, according to a study in Nature. Scientists have read the genetic sequence of a baby from a Clovis burial site in Montana to help fill out the story of the earliest Americans._


> Until now, archaeologists have had to rely mainly on tools made of stone and bone, and other artifacts to tell the story of human migration about 15,000 years ago to the New World.  Now that story is bolstered with some dramatic, ancient DNA, extracted from the remains of a 1-year-old boy who died in what is now Montana more than 12,000 years ago.  That's the only human skeleton known from a brief but prolific culture in the Americas called Clovis.  "Clovis is what we like to refer to as an 'archaeological complex,' " says Michael Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University. That complex is defined by characteristic tools, he says.
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> The Clovis artifacts were common for about 400 years, starting about 13,000 years ago. But at this point, there is only one set of human remains associated with those sorts of tools: that of the baby from Montana.  "So this genetic study actually provides us with a look at who these people were," Waters says.  The most obvious conclusion from the study is that the Clovis people who lived on the Anzick site in Montana were genetically very much like Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere.  "The Anzick family is directly ancestral to so many peoples in the Americas," says Eske Willerslev, from the University of Copenhagen. "That's astonishing!"
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## Gracie (Feb 15, 2014)

I always figured NA's and Asians were related.


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## Agit8r (Feb 15, 2014)

My guess is that the aesthetics of cultures that are prone to theorize about "racial purity" have been shaped by ancient shame felt regarding the tundra fever that went on, and are in fact the result of attempts to hide its evidence.


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## editec (Feb 15, 2014)

At this stage of human development I am much more interested in humanity's final destination than its original starting point.


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## waltky (Jun 10, 2014)

Mebbe is why some got flat noses...

*Fistfights Drove Human Face Evolution, Utah Researchers Suggest*
_June 09, 2014 WASHINGTON  The human face evolved so that it could take a punch, researchers suggest in a new study._


> It's a much more violent explanation than the leading alternative, that our skulls changed to accommodate a diet of hard-to-chew foods. And the authors said it suggests a pugilistic past where violence was key to our evolution.  When people fight, they go for the face, said study co-author Mike Morgan.  Morgan knows a little something about fights. He is a black belt in two martial arts and is training as an emergency medicine physician at the University of Utah.  "It gives me first-hand experience with a lot of the end results of human violence and aggression," he said.
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## S.J. (Jun 10, 2014)

Wow, 340,000 years old!  We're lucky if we make it to 80 these days.


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## waltky (Sep 17, 2014)

Uncle Ferd wants to find him a fine Scottish lass...

*Genetic history of modern Europeans a tangled tale, research finds*
_17 Sept.`14: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The genetic origins of modern Europeans may be more complicated than previously thought._


> Ancient people from Siberia who were related to the first humans to enter the Americas during the Ice Age also mingled with prehistoric populations in Europe and left their mark on the DNA of today's Europeans, scientists said on Wednesday.  Their study, published in the journal Nature, is the latest to use sophisticated genetic research to clarify the ancestry of modern populations.  Experts had thought today's Europeans descended from two other groups of people.  The first were primitive hunter-gatherers from western Europe who had lived on the continent since it was first colonized by our species more than 40,000 years ago. The second were farmers who migrated into Europe from a region spanning parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq around 7,000 years ago.
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> The new study revealed the role of hunter-gatherers from the Siberian region who the scientists called "ancient north Eurasians."  The scientists sequenced the genomes of a farmer who had lived in Germany about 7,000 years ago and eight hunter-gatherers who had lived in Luxembourg and Sweden about 8,000 years ago. They then compared those findings with the genomes of 2,345 people living today to decipher European ancestry.  "Our study does indeed show that European origins were more complex than previously imagined," said Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School.  "It seems that Europeans - who are often considered one group today - actually have a complex history with at least three groups admixing in different proportions in their history," Lazaridis added.
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## jwoodie (Sep 24, 2014)

Like the human race, this thread is devolving...


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## waltky (Nov 17, 2015)

Granny says, "Dat's right - first white man found...

*Researchers reveal Europeans' fourth ancestral 'tribe'*
_Nov. 16, 2015 - The Caucasus population was well-positioned to influence the peoples of both Europe and Asia, and studying them further is likely to bring further revelations._


> The origins of modern Europeans' genetic makeup is becoming clearer. Scientists have found the "fourth strand" of European ancestry.  A small but significant portion of Europe's genome is derived from a unique population of hunter-gatherers who for several thousand years sat out the frigid intolerance of the Ice Age in the shelter of the Caucasus mountains.  Shortly after the Out of Africa movement, a group of hunter-gatherers split off from western populations and settled the lands along the present day Russian-Georgian border. There, hemmed in by ice and snow, they remained isolated for several thousand years, their genetic makeup growing more distinct.
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## Delta4Embassy (Nov 17, 2015)

waltky said:


> DNA Evidence Suggests Man 340,000-Years-Old...
> 
> *The family tree that rewrote human history: Researchers stunned to find DNA submitted to online project dates back 338,000 years*
> _7 March 2013 | Discovery made after American submitted his DNA to a family tree service; DNA traced to Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon; Proves last common Y chromosome ancestor lived 338,000 years ago, even though oldest fossil of modern man is only 200,000 years old_
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Was this before or after Adam and Eve then?


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## Picaro (Nov 17, 2015)

DNA can't in any way be used to chronologically date anything.

Punctuated equilibrium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In fact, the more complex the organism, the more uncertain any timeline will be.


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## waltky (Jan 14, 2016)

Mysterious tool makers inhabited Sulawesi 118,000 years ago...

*Ancient tools show mysterious humans occupied Indonesian island*
_13 Jan.`16  WASHINGTON - The diminutive prehistoric human species dubbed the "Hobbit" that inhabited the isle of Flores apparently had company on other Indonesian islands long before our species, Homo sapiens, arrived on the scene._


> Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of stone tools at least 118,000 years old at a site called Talepu on the island of Sulawesi, indicating a human presence. The scientists said no fossils of these individuals were found in conjunction with the tools, leaving the toolmakers' identity a mystery.  "We now have direct evidence that when modern humans arrived on Sulawesi, supposedly between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago and aided by watercraft, they must have encountered an archaic group of humans that was already present on the island long before," said archaeologist Gerrit van den Bergh of University of Wollongong in Australia.
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## waltky (Jan 15, 2016)

Diggin' up an ol' woolly mammoth carcass in Russia...

*Ancient people conquered the Arctic at least 45,000 years ago*
_14 Jan.`16 | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The frozen carcass of a woolly mammoth found in Siberia with unmistakable signs of spear wounds is providing evidence that people inhabited Arctic regions thousands of years earlier than previously known._


> Russian scientists on Thursday said the male mammoth excavated from a bluff on Yenisei Bay on the Arctic Ocean was killed by hunters 45,000 years ago, providing the earliest indication of the presence of humans in the Arctic.  Until now, the oldest evidence of humans in Arctic regions dated to "more or less 30,000 years ago," according to Vladimir Pitulko, senior research scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg.
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## Old Rocks (Jan 17, 2016)

Just had my DNA done by 23andme. Turns out I am at least 4% neanderthal. Wife said she thought it would be far higher than that.


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## waltky (Feb 8, 2016)

Transitional species of humans found...

*Early human ancestor didn't have a nutcracker jaw*
_Feb. 8, 2016 - "Humans also have this limitation on biting forcefully," explained researcher Justin Ledogar._


> In 2012, a team of scientists published a paper suggesting Australopithecus sediba, an early human ancestor, subsisted on mostly on hard foods including tree bark, nuts, fruits and leaves.  But even if early hominids had the stomach for such a diet, they didn't have the jaw. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications suggests biting on hard foods like bark or shelled nuts would have risked dislocating the jaw of A. sediba.
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> Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis say the hominid didn't have the nutcracker jaw that its predecessors possessed. The new evidence supports the assertion that A. sediba was a transitional species between A. africanus and either Homo habilis or the later H. erectus.  "Most australopiths had amazing adaptations in their jaws, teeth and faces that allowed them to process foods that were difficult to chew or crack open," lead researcher David Strait, a professor of anthropology at WUSTL, said in a news release. "Among other things, they were able to efficiently bite down on foods with very high forces."
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## Steven_R (Feb 10, 2016)

numan said:


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> Pure clap-trap. Natural evolution is dead.
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> From now on, human evolution will be artificially engineered.
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I, for one, can't wait to become more machine now than man, twisted and evil...


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## Steven_R (Feb 10, 2016)

editec said:


> At this stage of human development I am much more interested in humanity's final destination than its original starting point.



Eloi and morlocks?


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## waltky (Mar 19, 2016)

Understanding the Denisovans...

*How extinct humans left their mark on us*
_Fri, 18 Mar 2016 - Most of us share 2-4% of DNA with Neanderthals; some have genes from Denisovans; but their genetic mark has vanished in some stretches of genetic code._


> Most people in the world share 2-4% of DNA with Neanderthals while a few inherited genes from Denisovans, a study confirms.  Denisovan DNA lives on only in Pacific island dwellers, while Neanderthal genes are more widespread, researchers report in the journal Science.  Meanwhile, some parts of our genetic code show little trace of our extinct cousins.  They include hundreds of genes involved in brain development and language.  "These are big, truly interesting regions," said co-researcher Dr Joshua Akey, an expert on human evolutionary genetics from the University of Washington Medicine, US.  "It will be a long, hard slog to fully understand the genetic differences between humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals in these regions and the traits they influence."
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> Siberia cave  Studies of nuclear DNA (the instructions to build a human) are particularly useful in the case of Denisovans, which are largely missing from the fossil record.  The prehistoric species was discovered less than a decade ago through genetic analysis of a finger bone unearthed in a cave in northern Siberia.  Substantial amounts of Denisovan DNA have been detected in the genomes of only a handful of modern-day human populations so far.  "The genes that we found of Denisovans are only in this one part of the world [Oceania] that's very far away from that Siberian cave," Dr Akey told BBC News.
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See also:

*DNA of girl from Denisova cave gives up genetic secrets*
_31 August 2012 - The DNA of a cave girl who lived about 80,000 years ago has been analysed in remarkable detail._


> The picture of her genome is as accurate as that of modern day human genomes, and shows she had brown eyes, hair and skin.  The research in Science also sheds new light on the genetic differences between modern humans and their closest extinct relatives.  The cave dweller, a Denisovan, was a cousin of the Neanderthals.  Both groups of ancient humans died out about 30,000 years ago, but have left their mark in the gene pool of modern people.
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> Shadowy past
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## waltky (May 15, 2016)

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.
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> 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.
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See also:

*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.
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## numan (May 15, 2016)

Steven_R said:


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For all we know, Artificial Intelligence and cyborgs may be more decent and spiritual than we are.
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## waltky (May 18, 2016)

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.
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## waltky (Jun 7, 2017)

How long has our species been around?...




*Discovery in Morocco alters history of Homo sapiens*
_Jun 7, 2017,  How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years._


> The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species' evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.  "They are not just like us," said Jean-Jacques Hublin, one of the scientists reporting the find. But they had "basically the face you could meet on the train in New York."  Coupled with other evidence, the Moroccan fossils suggest that Homo sapiens may have reached its modern-day form in more than one place within Africa, said Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the College of France in Paris.
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> Previously, the oldest known fossils clearly from Homo sapiens were from Ethiopia, at about 195,000 years old.  It's not clear just when or where Homo sapiens came on the scene in Africa. Hublin said he thinks an earlier stage of development preceded the one revealed by his team's discovery.   We evolved from predecessors who had differently shaped skulls and often heavier builds, but were otherwise much more like us than, say, the ape-men that came before them. Our species lived at the same time as some related ones, like Neanderthals, but only we survive.  Hublin and others described the new findings in two papers released Wednesday by the journal Nature . The discovery could help illuminate how our species evolved, Chris Stringer and Julia Galway-Witham of the Natural History Museum in London wrote in a Nature commentary.
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## yiostheoy (Jun 7, 2017)

2 million years ago humanoids began to develop.

But this 300,000 year old fossil looks Neanderthal NOT modern human.


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## waltky (Dec 10, 2017)

The most complete skeleton of a human ancestor older than 1.5 million years ever found...

*3.6-million-year-old human skeleton found, shocking scientists*
_8 Dec.`17 — Researchers in South Africa have unveiled what they call “by far the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor older than 1.5 million years ever found.”_


> The University of the Witwatersrand displayed the virtually complete Australopithecus fossil on Wednesday.  The skeleton dates back 3.6 million years. Its discovery is expected to help researchers better understand the human ancestor’s appearance and movement. The researchers say it has taken 20 years to excavate, clean, reconstruct and analyse the fragile skeleton.
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> The skeleton, dubbed Little Foot, was discovered in the Sterkfontein caves, about 40 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg when small foot bones were found in rock blasted by miners.  Professor Ron Clarke and his assistants found the fossils and spent years to excavate, clean, analyse and reconstruct the skeleton.
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## waltky (Jan 3, 2018)

Light shed on how humans populated Americas...
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*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.
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> 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.
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## waltky (Aug 23, 2018)

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





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> *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.*
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> *More mobile than we thought*
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*See also:*

*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. *
> 
> ...


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## Picaro (Aug 24, 2018)

DNA testing has a lot of problems, and shouldn't be blindly trusted. And, old bones shouldn't be referred to as 'human ancestors', since they aren't, they're extinct species of apes or some other life form, not humans. Calling them 'human ancestors' is speculation, not science.

Outside of that, these are cool articles, especially the latest dated ones.


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## Muhammed (Aug 24, 2018)

Oldguy said:


> The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.


A mere 6000 years? That notion is just as stupid as claiming that our ancestors just magically appeared on Earth a mere 400,000 years ago.


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## Picaro (Aug 24, 2018)

Old Rocks said:


> Just had my DNA done by 23andme. Turns out I am at least 4% neanderthal. Wife said she thought it would be far higher than that.



Probably not accurate. They like selling the kits and charging for the tests, though, and it seems to make people happy, like their grandma telling them they're handsome and smart.

DNA Ancestry Tests Are 'Meaningless' for Your Historical Genealogy Search

https://gizmodo.com/another-reminder-that-consumer-dna-tests-are-not-100-a-1824149551


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## Picaro (Aug 24, 2018)

Oldguy said:


> The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.




Well, that's because it is; DNA testing isn't accurate, and gets even less accurate when the DNA is over 5,000 years old. Not that some old fossils of extinct species of apes constitutes proof of human evolution. The entire collection will fit on an average sized dining room table, and there is no chain of evidence whatsoever over those 'millions of years'.


The idea that all humans came from the same place and same ancestors is ludicrous anyway; not enough time for all the different variations to have evolved into such distinct races and sub-races.


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