wupatki national monument

walnut canyon national monument, az

thats the visitors center on top and ruins below

South African Cave Yields Strange Bones Of Early Human-Like Species

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of an unusual human-like creature that lived long ago. Exactly how long ago is still a mystery — and that's not the only mystery surrounding this newfound species.

The bones have a strange mix of primitive and modern features, and were found in an even stranger place — an almost inaccessible chamber deep inside a South African cave called Rising Star.

"It is perhaps one of the best known caves in all of South Africa," says Lee Berger, who studies human evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

In 2013, some local cavers found some fossils inside Rising Star cave. Berger had asked them to be on the lookout, so they brought him photos.

"And there I saw something I perhaps thought I'd never see in my life," recalls Berger. "That is, clearly primitive hominin remains lying on the floor of a cave."

A jaw and a skull were just sitting there in the dirt — usually such bones are encased in rock.

Berger was excited, but he knew he personally could never reach this fossil site. To get into the cave chamber, you have to climb a steep, jagged rockfall called Dragon's Back, then wiggle through a small opening that leads to a long, narrow crack.

The crack is only about 7 ½ inches wide, and goes down more than 30 feet. Squeezing through it is the only way to reach the chamber of bones at the bottom.

Since he couldn't go, Berger sent in his tall, skinny 16-year-old son. "When he came out after 45 minutes, he stuck his head out. And to tell you how bad I am, I didn't say: 'Are you OK?' I said: 'And?' And he says, 'Daddy, it's wonderful.' "

Berger got funding from the National Geographic Society to excavate the site. And he advertised for research assistants on Facebook — for skinny scientists who weren't claustrophobic. Six women took the job.

They worked in the chamber almost like spacewalkers, communicating with researchers outside, via cameras and about 2 miles of fiber optic cable. The team in the chamber used paintbrushes and toothpicks to gently unearth fossil bones — there were more than 1,550 of them, an incredible treasure trove. The researchers describe their find Thursday in a journal called eLife.

"Often I was wondering, 'How on Earth are we going to get that fossil out?' because the density of bones in that chamber was so great, it was like a puzzle to get each fossil out," says Becca Peixotto, one of the scientist-cavers and a doctoral student in anthropology at American University.

The bones come from at least 15 individuals, says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was on the team that studied the bones.

"We have every age group represented" among the fossils, he says. "We have newborns; we have children of almost every age; we have adults and old adults."

He says these creatures were short — less than 5 feet tall — and thin. They have a particular combination of features that has never been seen before. "It's a new species to science," says Hawks. Researchers have named it Homo naledi, because "naledi" means "star" in a local South African language.

"They have a very small brain. They are not human-like at all in their brain," Hawks says. "It's around a third the size of a human brain today."

But the creatures had feet like us, and walked in a very human-like way. Their hands were also like ours, but their fingers were more curved.

The researchers also tackled this question: How did these human-like creatures get into such a crazy spot? It looks as though the cave chamber has always been hard to reach.

There are no animal bones there, except for a handful of bits from birds and mice. There's no evidence that a carnivore dragged the human-like creatures in, or that they somehow got washed in. And there's no evidence of a mass death, such as a cave accident.
Berger believes someone had to have put the bodies there.

"Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead in a repeated, ritualized fashion in this deep underground chamber," he says.

That's quite a claim — that kind of ritual has been thought to be unique to modern humans or our very close relatives.

And really, the whole discovery — from the bones to their bizarre location — has perplexed experts on human evolution.

"To be honest, I would really distrust anyone who thinks they understand what the significance of these finds is," says Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University.

Usually scientists can tell how old fossilized bones are, but in this case the geology of the cave gives no clues. The bones could be less than 100,000 years old or several million years old.

"These folks do not have an age, yet they have some remarkable fossils, and the context of them is also remarkable," says Wood. "It's not only remarkable, it's also rather weird. But nonetheless, the fossils are important. So the community is, I think, struggling to work out what it all means."

He notes that only a small section of the cave chamber has been excavated, and it looks like many more bones are down there.

"There is the potential for thousands of specimens in that cave," says Wood. "Intellectually, it's a real puzzle. And I think it's going to take scientists quite a time to get their heads around what the real significance of these discoveries is." npr

Stonehenge Has A New (Old) Neighbor: Row Of Huge Stones Found Nearby

In the biggest find yet in a project to map the landscape near Stonehenge, researchers have found a row of up to 90 standing stones — some of them nearly 15 feet tall. The huge stone assembly is less than 2 miles from Stonehenge; scientists say it could be as old or older than the famous monument.

The newly found Neolithic monument dates from around 4,500 years ago, researchers say, and it adds a new wrinkle to the Durrington Walls super-henge.

"We don't think there's anything quite like this anywhere else in the world," said lead researcher Vince Gaffney as his team unveiled their findings Monday at the British Science Festival. "This is completely new and the scale is extraordinary."

Using advanced scanning technology, the researchers found that Durrington Walls, the largest henge in Britain, has been hiding a large stone component beneath its well-known earthwork enclosure. Like Stonehenge, the much larger Durrington Walls was built to align with the solstice.

"Not only does this new evidence demonstrate a completely unexpected phase of monumental architecture at one of the greatest ceremonial sites in prehistoric Europe, says Gaffney, "the new stone row could well be contemporary with the famous Stonehenge sarsen circle or even earlier."

Comparing the two sites, Stonehenge's iconic circle is made of sarsen stones that are around 13 feet tall. Researchers say that while they haven't dug out any of the newly found stones, they expect to find that they are also sarsen — a type of sandstone block that's been found elsewhere in the region.

Gaffney adds that the discovery "has significant implications for our understanding of Stonehenge and its landscape setting."

The survey that found the slightly curved row of large rocks hidden beneath the banks of Durrington Walls used ground penetrating radar and other technologies to find evidence of an earlier phase of building at the site.

Researchers believe the newly discovered stones were pushed over and covered by a large bank as part of the super-henge – an incident that might have helped preserve some of the stones.

"In the east up to 30 stones, measuring up to size of 4.5 m x 1.5 x 1 m, have survived below the bank whereas elsewhere the stones are fragmentary or represented by massive foundation pits," says Professor Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology.

The new find is the most shocking of several revelations made by Gaffney and his colleagues in the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project. In 2010, they uncovered a "shadow Stonehenge" less than 3,000 feet from the famous monument. And last year, Gaffney described finding 17 ritual monuments in the same area.

What's Better For Afghanistan's Future: Buddha Tours Or A Copper Mine?

About an hour's drive south of Kabul, there's a vast Buddhist archaeological site dating back at least 1,500 years. It happens to be sitting on top of one of the biggest untapped copper deposits in the world, potentially worth billions of dollars.

 Nearly a hundred ancient Buddhist shrines like this one have been uncovered by archaeologists at Mes Aynak, south of Kabul.

 The ground at Mes Aynak is so rich in copper that rock and bones — like this skeleton found lying near a Buddhist shrine — are stained greenish-blue.

By the time archaeologists uncovered this statue of the Buddha at Mes Aynak, its head was gone — likely broken off by looters.

Eight years ago, the Afghan government made a deal with a Chinese conglomerate to mine the copper, but mining hasn't begun and likely won't for several more years. The area in which the copper is located, Logar Province, presents challenges in both security and infrastructure: no reliable water or power supply, no railway for transporting copper and increasing threats from the Taliban.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that Afghanistan holds $1 trillion in mineral wealth but none of it has ever been developed. This could represent a huge and much-needed source of revenue for a country long dependent on foreign aid. But given other countries' experience with the so-called "resource curse," concerns have been raised over whether Afghanistan's natural resources can or will be exploited responsibly. Part of the concern has centered on whether extracting copper at Mes Aynak must result inevitably in the destruction of a spectacular archaeological site that has been compared to Machu Picchu and Pompeii. Historical riches like this, advocates argue, represent a different kind of wealth and could hold the key to a thriving tourism industry in the future.

Villagers have been hired to help archaeologists with the excavation.

npr

A Culture Clash Over Guns Infiltrates the Backcountry

SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah — As a lover of ancient rock art, Steve Acerson usually roams Utah’s backcountry searching for images of hunters and rams carved on boulders and canyon walls. But one morning, on a hillside speckled with those prehistoric petroglyphs, he was also finding signs of a younger civilization: Shotgun shells. Bullets. Shredded juniper trees. Exploded cans of spray paint.

“It’s all been shot,” he said. “It’s just destroying everything.”

America’s cultural divide over guns has gone into the woods. As growing numbers of hikers and backpackers flood national forests and backcountry trails searching for solitude, they are increasingly clashing with recreational target shooters, out for the weekend to plug rounds into trees, targets and mountainsides.

Hiking groups and conservationists say that policies that broadly allow shooting and a scarcity of enforcement officers have turned many national forests and millions of Western acres run by the Bureau of Land Management into free-fire zones. People complain about finding shot-up couches and cars deep in forests, or of being pinned down by gunfire where a hiking or biking trail crosses a makeshift target range.

Over the Fourth of July weekend in Pike National Forest in Colorado, a 60-year-old camper preparing to make s’mores with his grandchildren was killed when a stray bullet arced into his campsite. The camper, Glenn Martin, said “ow,” his daughter said, and when his family ran to help him, there was a hole in his shirt and blood pouring from his mouth.

“A war zone,” said Paul Magnuson, who owns a cycle shop in Woodland Park, Colo., and rides mountain bikes in the same forest where Mr. Martin died. His customers have complained about bullets whistling overhead, and Mr. Magnuson said he has gotten used to yelling out to alert target shooters that he was coming.

“Every time in the woods, you feared for your life,” he said. “It was absolutely, completely out of hand.”

It is a fight playing out from the pine forests of North Carolina to the Pacific Northwest to the Lake Mountains here in central Utah, where hillsides with thousands of images of prehistoric rock art have become a popular shooting spot. Officials in the Croatan National Forest in North Carolina issued an emergency halt to target shooting after receiving hundreds of complaints. In New Mexico, homeowners upset by the crackle of gunfire are fighting a proposal to renew the permit for a gun range that has long operated on national forest land.

The federal agencies that manage national forests and open lands have tallied a growing number of shooting violations in the backcountry in recent years. The Forest Service recorded 1,712 shooting incidents across the country last year, up about 10 percent from a decade ago. More than a thousand of those reports ended with a warning or citation, but in some, Forest Service officers did not find the shooters or evidence of a violation after investigating a complaint.

The violation logs from the bureau are a tally of risky behavior: Shooting from vehicle. Weapon discharge in campground. Shooting at television. Using exploding targets. Shooting in “no shooting area.”

Gun groups say they have been shooting safely on public lands for decades, and that accidents are rare. They say they have the same rights to use America’s collective backyards as four-wheelers, mountain bikers or backpackers.

When federal agencies have proposed closing areas to shooting, the National Rifle Association and other shooting groups have objected, urging members to write letters and attend meetings to keep the land open to guns. The N.R.A. has also supported a bill backed by several congressional Republicans that would tell federal land managers to make sure public lands are open to hunters and recreational shooters.

“Just the same as there should be areas on public lands for people to go mountain biking or mountain climbing, there should be areas for shooters,” said Lars Dalseide, an N.R.A. spokesman.

But in Colorado, Sean Mooty, 26, said he has taken to draping a bright orange windbreaker over his backpack when he sets out in the Arapaho National Forest, which reported 103 shooting violations last year. He put a whistle on his pack, and when he hears gunshots, he said, he starts to blow it so people will know he is coming.

“All you can do is hear it,” he said. “Like a mixture of thunder and gunfire, just rolling through the mountains.”

Karie Rubertus, 46, an office manager, said she has been jolted awake by gunfire while camping a few years ago at Rainbow Falls in Colorado, near the spot where Mr. Martin was killed. When she went to explore, she said, she spoke to a group of motorcyclists who had been firing guns most of the night and asked them to take a break. She said they walked with her, unasked, back to her camper. She woke her husband and they left immediately.

“One of the most scary experiences ever,” she said.

Here in the Lake Mountains of Utah, Bureau of Land Management officials want to permanently ban shooting because they say it is jeopardizing hundreds of petroglyphs that Native Americans pecked onto sandstone outcroppings and boulders as long as 10,000 years ago. Advocates say the mountainside is an open-air museum, one where bullets have struck the petroglyphs, chipping and cracking the runic swirls and wiry images of people and animals.

“We’ve had serious damage,” said Kevin Oliver, district manager for the bureau’s West Desert district. “The shooting was so dense we had to do something.”

There have also been about 130 wildfires here over the past decade, some caused by bullet ricochets or exploding targets igniting dry cheatgrass. One bullet flew across the range and hit a bedpost in a nearby home, and land officials said that high school students on a bus had to take cover to avoid careless gunfire. Cleanup crews have hauled away 20 tons of trash a year — refrigerators and car parts, clay pigeons and sofas, even bowling pins.

“Anything you don’t want in your garage, you take out there and shoot,” said Mr. Acerson, a retired state transportation worker.

Bill Pedersen, a director at the Utah Shooting Sports Council, acknowledged that some people dump what he called “trigger trash,” but he added that thousands of responsible gun owners have been hunting and shooting in the area for decades. He shot pheasants and doves there as a teenager. In the years since, as Utah’s population has surged, new subdivisions have popped up on the private lands adjoining these federal outdoor parcels, putting more pressure on the land.

The Bureau of Land Management has proposed creating a shooting range, but gun advocates say it would be too small to accommodate them safely. They said previous shooting restrictions had already limited their activity, and they were angry at the prospect of another closing.

“Shooters are getting frustrated and upset,” Mr. Pedersen said. “What gives the B.L.M. the right to go down and shut it down on a whim?”

Officials have limited shooting access for years in the Pike National Forest, including the site where Mr. Martin was killed; it was the first fatal shooting officials could remember.

Since Mr. Martin’s death, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office has asked people who were in the area that day to allow their weapons to be tested, to see if they unknowingly fired the fatal shot. So far, investigators have tested five rifles, with none of them found to be the weapon in question. Mr. Martin’s daughter Carlie said they had complained about hearing gunshots when they arrived at the campsite, but they said forest officials reassured them the shooters were firing in the other direction.

“You keep on asking why,” she said. “One hundred ninety million acres of forest, and it has to hit Daddy?" msn

Kennewick Man

New genetic evidence suggests that Kennewick Man, an 8,500-year-old skeleton found in Washington state, is related to members of a nearby Native American tribe.

"We can see very clearly that Kennewick Man is more closely related to present day Native Americans than he is to anybody else," says Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen. He specializes in the study of ancient DNA and led the research.

Willerslev's team extracted DNA from one of the skeleton's hand bones. They compared it to DNA from various groups around the world, including Native Americans from North and South America.

They found that Kennewick Man is not related to the Ainu of Japan or Polynesians. But he does share a close genetic affinity with members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. These tribes stem from the Pacific Northwest, and are among several Native American groups that demanded custody of the skeleton.

These results were published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature.

But if that sounds like "case closed," it isn't.

Willerslev acknowledges that there is very little genetic information about modern Native Americans to make comparisons. There might be other tribes more closely related to Kennewick Man. And it also could be that Native Americans are descendants of some relative of Kennewick Man who lived 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

"We probably will never be able to say who is, in fact, the closest living relative of Kennewick Man," Willerslev says.

And there's at least one scientist who isn't convinced by the genetic evidence. Physical anthropologist Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution has edited a 700-page study of the skeleton.

Owsley can read the bones like we might read a book. He looks for ridge lines that indicate which muscles Kennewick Man used the most, and what he was doing with them. First off? He had muscular legs like a soccer player — likely from running, trudging and hunting.

"In his leg structure, he's certainly accustomed to very rapid movement, quick movement, and you can read that in those muscle ridges," says Owsley.

He also likely had killer arms from throwing a tricky kind of spear. Owsley says Kennewick Man was so strong in his right arm, he was like a pro baseball pitcher, and the bones show he got today's equivalent of a career-ending sports injury.

"If it happened to a contemporary baseball pitcher, they'd need surgery," says Owsley. The injury, he says, "took off a piece of bone off the back side of the shoulder joint."

Owsley says Kennewick Man stood about 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed about 170 pounds. And he wasn't any stranger to pain. K-Man, as he's known in eastern Washington, got hit on the head a few times and was stabbed with a basalt rock point that got stuck in his hip.

Owsley's research includes these big revelations about the Paleoamerican's origins. For one, Kennewick Man lived on the coast, not inland along the Columbia River where his bones were found. The scientists can tell from tiny bits of his bones and the enamel on his teeth that he ate mostly marine animals, like seals.

At his laboratory, he displays a cast of Kennewick Man's skull — alongside skulls of three Native Americans. Clearly, Kennewick Man does look different.

"It is a much narrower and longer — relatively longer — cranium, and the way the base of the cranium is configured," he says. "It is different from what we see in Native Americans."

Owsley doesn't dispute that Kennewick Man, or his people, passed on genes that now show up in Native American populations. But he doesn't think the evidence is sufficient to satisfy the repatriation law that requires Native American remains to be turned over to tribal authorities. npr 2

Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene

Evidence of interpersonal violence has been documented previously in Pleistocene members of the genus Homo, but only very rarely has this been posited as the possible manner of death. Here we report the earliest evidence of lethal interpersonal violence in the hominin fossil record. Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma. The type of injuries, their location, the strong similarity of the fractures in shape and size, and the different orientations and implied trajectories of the two fractures suggest they were produced with the same object in face-to-face interpersonal conflict. Given that either of the two traumatic events was likely lethal, the presence of multiple blows implies an intention to kill. This finding shows that the lethal interpersonal violence is an ancient human behavior and has important implications for the accumulation of bodies at the site, supporting an anthropic origin. PLOS

Fig 1. Stratigraphy of the Sima de los Huesos site (modified from Arsuaga et al. [21]).

The hominin bones were recovered in Lithostratigraphic Unit 6 (LU-6) dated to c. 430ka [21]. This unit is composed of pure red clays, filtering into the conduit system from overlying soils with little or no lateral transport, and very low velocity of sedimentation (decantation by dripping water) [23]. The figure also shows a detailed image of Cr-17 during its excavation at the site. Note the pure red clay that covers the cranial bones (partially cleaned in situ to enhance visualization) and the typical in situ postmortem (fossil diagenetic) fractures of the cranial vault. Photo credit: Javier Trueba (Madrid Scientific Films).

The skull in question was found at a site in Spain called Sima de los Huesos, or the Pit of the Bones, and it contained remains of 28 individuals. Quam said their presence there was intentional. "The only explanation that we have that can not be rejected is the idea that the human bodies arrived at this place by other humans," Quam told NPR. npr

Fossil Provides Evidence Of Early Human Migration To Europe

Some 55,000 years ago, a person — whether female or male, we don't know — lived in Manot Cave in the western Galilee area of what is now Israel. Judging from the partial skull recovered from the cave, and described in Nature last week by Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University and his co-authors, the person was anatomically modern and closely related to the first modern humans who went on to colonize Europe.

Greedy for any solid evidence that sheds light on the migration of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa and into Europe, paleoanthropologists welcome detailed analysis like this one about the Manot Cave person (known as "Manot 1").

AMH — people like us — evolved in Africa right around 200,000 years ago from earlier human-like ancestors. For many millennia, Africa remained the center of our evolution — and not just anatomically: The fascinating paint factory found at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to 100,000 years ago is just one illustration of the behavioral and cognitive sophistication that developed in Africa.

By about 45,000 years ago, AMH had reached Europe in a migration out of Africa. Europe had, of course, been inhabited before that time by other human-like species including Homo heidelbergensis, but we ourselves only arrived at this relatively late period. Within about 15,000 years, at places like Chauvet Cave in France, our AMH ancestors were painting cave walls with gloriously colorful, highly accurate representations of animals.

But how can we understand something about that initial migration and the people who made it? Here's where Manot 1 comes in. Israel was part of a key evolutionary landscape for our species, in part because of the travel corridor in the Levant region through which migrants passed out of Africa. Lead author Hershkovitz told The New York Times last week that the Manot cranium "is the missing connection between African and European populations."

In other words, as the Times also emphasized, in this new discovery we have the very first fossil evidence of the "out of Africa" migration at this critical time period. That's big news.

Certain details of the skull anatomy, as reported in Nature, are particularly significant. The skull has what's called an occipital bun, a particular shape at the skull base that is, Hershkovitz and his co-authors write, "a feature very frequently found both in European Neanderthals and in the majority of Upper Paleolithic modern humans." This feature sets the skull apart from those of other AMH living in the Levant at the same time, and links the Manot person to Europe.

But it also links Manot 1, at least potentially, to Neanderthals, who also lived in the same region. And here, the Nature team's conclusion is circumspect: "The Manot 1 specimen could potentially represent a hybrid between AMH's and Neanderthals." npr

X-Rays Open Secrets Of Ancient Scrolls

Researchers in Europe have managed to read from an ancient scroll buried when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The feat is all the more remarkable because the scroll was never opened.

The Vesuvius eruption famously destroyed Pompeii. But it also devastated the nearby town of Herculaneum. A villa there contained a library stacked with papyrus scrolls, and the hot gas and ash preserved them.

Sort of.

"To be honest, being from Kentucky, they look like pieces of coal," says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has held some of the scrolls. "You look at the end and you can see the circular markings of how it's been rolled, but it looks more like the growth marks of a tree."

Researchers want to unroll these scrolls, but opening them is more like peeling the flaky skin of an onion.

"When you try to pull one layer off it just breaks away from the rest, and so you have ten million fragments after you've peeled it away in that manner," Seales says.

Roughly 1800 scrolls were unearthed back in the 1750s. Seales says only about 300 have survived efforts to read them.

And that's why this latest finding is such a breakthrough. The researchers used a particle accelerator in France to bombard a rolled-up scroll with x-rays. These x-rays were so sensitive, they detected changes in thickness where ink had been used to write letters. The team could make out the entire Greek alphabet inside the tightly wound scroll.

"Capturing those letters you know that's pretty amazing in itself," says Seales, who has worked with the team but was not directly involved in this latest effort. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

From just the letters, the researchers believe the scroll is in the handwriting of the philosopher Philodemus. He was of the school of Epicureanism, which stressed enjoyment of the pleasures of life, according to Seales. Several other scrolls in the collection have been identified as works by Philodemus over the years.

The researchers can't read whole words yet. And that's where Seale's computer-scientist chops will come in handy. He thinks he can make a program that can distinguish which letters belong to which layers, so the scrolls can finally be deciphered. npr

machu picchu, peru

the town below machu picchu

benchmark!

inca bridge

classic.

alpaca

alpaca party

why early humans reshaped their children's skulls

It doesn't take a degree in human anatomy to realise that there is something unusual about the Cohuna skull. With its flat, sloping forehead and prominent brow ridge, it looks distinctly primitive.

For decades, the prehistoric Cohuna skull and others like it have occupied a central and contentious role in answering one of the most important questions in human evolutionary studies: where did our species, Homo sapiens, come from?

Most anthropologists now agree that the skulls don't demand a rewrite of the human evolution text books, but this, paradoxically, has made them all the more intriguing. It confirms that they owe their strange appearance not to the blind hand of evolution but to the guiding hand of humanity. Australia's ancient inhabitants were among the first in the world to deliberately transform the shape of their own skulls - and their motives for doing were probably not as strange as they might at first appear.

The skull was a source of controversy from almost the moment it was ploughed up in a field near the town of Cohuna in Victoria, Australia, in 1925. Some researchers enthusiastically proclaimed its strange shape and the generous coating of minerals encrusted around it showed that it predated all then known human skulls, and must therefore have belonged to one of our earliest ancestors. 

Sceptics, who pointed out it was found in geologically recent soil not far below the surface, were just as certain it did not. They soon won the argument. Genuinely primitive and ancient human skulls were discovered in Africa around this time, and over time anthropologists came to accept that it was there, rather than in Australia, that humanity had evolved long ago. The Cohuna skull was clearly unusual and its anomalous shape was difficult to explain, but it was quietly forgotten….

By now it was possible to estimate the age of fossils using carbon dating: the Kow Swamp specimens were about 9,000 to 13,000 years old, while the Nacurrie skull was about 11,000 years old. The Coobol Creek remains were about 14,000 years old. This makes the fossils prehistoric, just as the enthusiasts in the 1920s had suspected. But the sceptics had been correct too as human fossils found in Africa were dated at between 3 and 4 million years old. Even our species, Homo sapiens, comfortably predates the strange Australians, as skulls with all the features of modern humans are found in rocks as old as 160,000 years.

The age of the Australian skulls did raise a question, though. Their distinctive sloping foreheads and prominent brow ridges are very like those of an ancient human species called Homo erectus, that lived between 2 million and 140,000 years ago. Why did the Australian skulls look so eerily like this long-dead species? bbc

Indonesian Cave Paintings As Old As Europe's Ancient Art

Prehistoric cave paintings of animals and human hands in Indonesia are as ancient as similar paintings found in Western Europe, according to a new study that suggests humans may have carried this art tradition with them when they migrated out of Africa.

"Until now, we've always believed that cave painting was part of a suite of complex symbolic behavior that humans invented in Europe," says archaeologist Alistair Pike of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. "This is actually showing that it's highly unlikely that the origin of painting caves was in Europe."

For decades, Indonesian researchers have known about rock art in limestone caves and rock shelters on an island called Sulawesi. The hand stencils and images of local animals, such as the "pig-deer," or babirusa, were assumed to be less than 10,000 years old, because scientists thought that the humid tropical environment would have destroyed anything older.

"The truth of it was, no one had really tried to date it," says Matt Tocheri of the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. "It's not easy to date rock art."

Now, though, in the journal Nature, a group of researchers from Indonesia and Australia, led by Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, have analyzed mineral deposits that formed on top of these paintings in seven caves.

Their analysis shows that one hand stencil is at least 39,900 years old and a painting of a babirusa is at least 35,400 years old.

Those ages are comparable to the age of a painted rhinoceros from the famous Chauvet Cave in France, which has been dated to 35,300 to 38,827 years ago. The oldest known cave painting is a red disk found on the wall of a Spanish cave that's at least 40,800 years old. npr