Iraq is the home of the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization. But the country’s importance in human history goes back even further, to the time of the Neanderthals. In 1951, American archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered Neanderthal remains in Shanidar Cave. The cave sits in the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, about 250 miles north of Baghdad. From 1951 to 1960, Solecki and colleagues excavated the cave and recovered fossils belonging to 10 individuals dating to between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago. Politics prevented further archaeological work, but the Shanidar fossils still provide important insights on the Neanderthals of West Asia. Here are a few of the most intriguing finds:
Shanidar 1: Nicknamed Nandy, Shanidar 1 lived sometime between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. He had a hard life. A blow to the head in his youth probably blinded him in his left eye. A withered right arm and leg suggest the head injury probably also caused brain damage that paralyzed the right side of Nandy’s body. He also fractured his foot at some point. Yet his bones all show signs of healing, and Nandy lived to be a senior citizen by Neanderthal standards, dying sometime between the ages of 35 and 45. The find revealed that Neanderthals must have taken care of their sick and wounded.
Shanidar 3: Also an adult male, Shanidar 3 had plenty of problems of his own. In addition to suffering from arthritis, the Neanderthal seems to have been violently attacked. A tiny groove on one of his ribs indicates he was probably struck in the chest. A 2009 analysis (PDF) points to a modern human, Homo sapiens, as the assailant. Based on experimental stabbings of pig carcasses, a team led by Steven Churchill of Duke University determined that the most likely weapon was some kind of dart, shot from long range. Because modern humans are the only hominids known to have made projectile weapons, the researchers blamed our species for the wound. The wound may have harmed Shandiar 3′s lungs, but it’s possible he survived the attack. A callous that formed over the groove shows that he must have lived at least a few week after the incident. And modern people with similar injuries can survive even with little medical care.
Today, you can examine Shanidar 3 for yourself at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where the fossil is on display.
Shanidar 4: Yet another adult male, Shanidar 4 was found on his side curled up in the fetal position. An analysis of the ancient pollen found in association with the fossilized skeleton revealed bright flowers had been brought into the cave. Solecki interpreted the pollen studies as evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead and adorned the graves with flowers, suggesting Neanderthals had rituals. Skeptical anthropologists say natural forces—perhaps burrowing rodents—introduced the pretty flora into the cave. Although Neanderthals might not have decorated the graves, they were responsible for burying at least some of the individuals in Shanidar.
Greece should be filled with hominid bones and stone tools. Its location makes it the perfect gateway to Europe for the earliest hominids leaving Africa, and even during dry and cold spells that made many other parts of the world uninhabitable, Greece remained pleasant. Yet the country’s archaeological record is bare from 1.8 million to 125,000 years ago, a period known as the Early to Middle Pleistocene.
And here’s why: Only 2 to 5 percent of Greece’s paleoanthropological record from this period has survived. That’s the conclusion of the authors of a new study in Quaternary Science Reviews that looks at the geological processes that preserve or destroy bones and artifacts.
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Evolution Skeptics Will Soon be Silenced by Science: Richard Leakey
Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.
Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.
Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it,” the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist said.
“If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”
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Human Evolution Isn’t What It Used to Be
Recent analyses of the human genome reveal a huge number of rare—and therefore probably fairly new—mutations.
You write about genetics and evolution, one of the commonest questions you are likely to be asked at public events is whether human evolution has stopped. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer.
I’m tempted to give a flippant response, borrowed from the biologist Richard Dawkins: Since any human trait that increases the number of babies is likely to gain ground through natural selection, we can say with some confidence that incompetence in the use of contraceptives is probably on the rise (though only if those unintended babies themselves thrive enough to breed in turn).
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Dogs may have helped Humans beat the Neanderthals
One of the most compelling — and enduring — mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.
They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.
What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals — and what went so right for us humans?
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How Humans Became Moral Beings
In a new book, anthropologist Christopher Boehm traces the steps our species went through to attain a conscience.
Why do people show kindness to others, even those outside their families, when they do not stand to benefit from it? Being generous without that generosity being reciprocated does not advance the basic evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce.
Christopher Boehm, an evolutionary anthropologist, is the director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. For 40 years, he has observed primates and studied different human cultures to understand social and moral behavior. In his new book, Moral Origins, Boehm speculates that human morality emerged along with big game hunting. When hunter-gatherers formed groups, he explains, survival essentially boiled down to one key tenet—cooperate, or die.
First of all, how do you define altruism?
Basically, altruism involves generosity outside of the family, meaning generosity toward non-kinsmen.
Why is altruism so difficult to explain in evolutionary terms?
A typical hunter-gatherer band of the type that was universal in the world 15,000 years ago has a few brothers or sisters, but almost everyone else is unrelated. The fact that they do so much sharing is a paradox genetically. Here are all these unrelated people who are sharing without being bean counters. You would expect those who are best at cheating, and taking but not giving, to be coming out ahead. Their genes should be on the rise while altruistic genes would be going away. But, in fact, we are evolved to share quite widely in bands.
What did Charles Darwin say about this “altruism paradox?”
Charles Darwin was profoundly perplexed by the fact that young men voluntarily go off to war and die for their groups. This obviously didn’t fit with his general idea of natural selection as being individuals pursuing their self-interests.
He came up with group selection as an answer to this paradox. The way it worked, if one group has more altruists than another, it is going to outcompete the other group and outreproduce it. The groups with fewer altruists would have fewer survivors. Therefore, altruism would spread at the expense of selfishness.
The problem with group selection has been that it is very hard to see how it could become strong enough to trump selection between individuals. You need an awful lot of warfare and genocide to really make group selection work.
And what did Darwin have to say about the origins of the human conscience?
What he did really was to take the conscience, set it aside as something very special and then basically say, “I throw up my hands. I can’t tell you how this could have evolved. What I can tell you is that any creature that became as intelligent and as sympathetic as humans would naturally have a conscience.”
Fast-forward a century and half—where are we now in understanding the origins of human morality and conscience?
Well, there are quite a few books on the subject. But they are almost all arguments out of evolutionary design; that is, they simply look at morality and see how it functions and how it could have been genetically useful to individuals. My book is the first to actually try to look at the natural history of moral evolution. At what time and how did developments take place which led us to become moral? In a way, this is a new field of study.
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Anthropologist finds explanation for hominin brain evolution in famous fossil
(Phys.org) — One of the world’s most important fossils has a story to tell about the brain evolution of modern humans and their ancestors, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.
The Taung fossil — the first australopithecine ever discovered — has two significant features that were analyzed by Falk and a group of anthropological researchers. Their findings, which suggest brain evolution was a result of a complex set of interrelated dynamics in childbirth among new bipeds, were published May 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“These findings are significant because they provide a highly plausible explanation as to why the hominin brain might grow larger and more complex,” Falk said.
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One gene helped human brains become complex
When it comes to brain development, slow and steady wins the race. A single ancestral human gene that made two copies of itself may have helped the evolution of our large brains 2.5 million years ago, as our ancestors were diverging from australopithecines.
Paradoxically, it seems the effect of the extra copies was to slow down individual brain development. This allowed time for neurons to develop more and better connections with one another.
Gene duplications are rare in human history: only about 30 genes have copied themselves since we split from chimps 6 million years ago. Few have been studied, but those that have encode genes that are very exciting, says human geneticist Evan Eichler of the University of Washington in Seattle. Many are involved in brain development.
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…At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Schaaffhause has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
- The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Volume 1 – by Charles Darwin
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Poor Neanderthals. Every time anthropologists acknowledge that these “brutes” were more sophisticated than previously thought, researchers come up a new reason why our closest cousins were inferior. This time it’s their lesser navigation skills. A recent study suggests that modern humans’ greater spatial reasoning may have given them an edge over Neanderthals.
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