|
人類學 – 開欄文
|
瀏覽1,666 ｜回應13｜推薦2 |
|
歐洲人類史新發現 2 -- Ellyn Lapointe
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
下文所報導的研究論文與《歐洲人類史新發現 1》一文相同(本欄02/04/24)；但兩者重點略有差異。現代人類祖先曾與林德索人比鄰而居甚至交媾，數年前已經由基因學領域的研究證實。此研究則從考古人類學領域以實體物件做為證據。
兩文可與《石器文化演進新理論》參看(本欄02/10/24)。
Human bones unearthed from a German cave have altered the timeline of ancient human history
Ellyn Lapointe, 02/13/24
* Human bones in a German cave place Homo Sapiens in Europe 7,500 years earlier than experts thought.
* The findings suggest Homo sapiens lived near Neanderthals for millennia, which is a new revelation.
* Previously, scientists thought Homo sapiens arrived right around the time Neanderthals went extinct.
For years, archaeologists have argued over an ancient culture with the unwieldy title: the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician technocomplex. Even scientists know that’s a mouthful, so they call it the LRJ for short.
The LRJ is characterized by the creation of specific blades and leaf points, which share aspects of both Neanderthal and Homo sapien craftsmanship.
LRJ stone tools newly excavated from Ranis. Josephine Schubert / Museum Burg Ranis (請至原網頁查看圖片)
The debate is over who made them, and the answer could help offer clues as to what happened about 45,000 years ago — when Neanderthals, one of our closest human relatives, mysteriously went extinct across Europe while Homo sapiens, ultimately, thrived.
“The usual wisdom was to consider that they were made most likely by late Neanderthals,” said study co-author Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor of paleoanthropology at the College of France.
But Hublin and his colleagues wanted to settle the debate once and for all.
This led them to Ilsenhöhle cave in Ranis, Germany, one of several sites across Northwestern Europe where LRJ artifacts have been found.
The opening of Ilsenhöhle cave in Ranis, Germany. Tim Schüler / TLDA (請至原網頁查看圖片)
Besides solving the mystery they sought, the researchers wound up discovering so much more.
Mining ancient DNA
When they excavated the cave, the researchers uncovered more than just LRJ artifacts — they came upon tiny bone fragments, too.
Most of the bones were too small to identify what animal they came from based on looks, alone.
But thanks to a revelatory new analysis called zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, or ZooMS, the researchers were able to determine that 13 of the roughly 2,000 bone fragments they analyzed belonged to early humans.
The researchers analyzed animal teeth found at Ranis to gain insight into the climate these animals lived in. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (請至原網頁查看圖片)
The next step was determining which species of ancient human they were from. If the team could figure that out, then it would likely point them to who made the LRJ artifacts in the cave, thus solving the mystery, Hublin said.
To that end, they extracted DNA, which confirmed the bones belong to Homo sapiens, providing strong evidence that they were responsible for the LRJ artifacts. “Voila!” Hublin said triumphantly.
But they weren’t done, yet.
The researchers extracted protein from the bone fragments to analyze their DNA. Dorothea Mylopotamitaki (請至原網頁查看圖片)
The team also used radiocarbon dating to date the bones, and were surprised by what they discovered.
According to their data, Homo sapiens were present in Ranis 47,500 years ago — thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Unlikely neighbors
Until this discovery, archaeologists believed Homo sapiens did not arrive in Western Europe until 42,000 years ago, contributing to the extinction of Neanderthals.
To get to the LRJ layer, archeologists had into an 8-meter-deep shaft below Ranis. Marcel Weiss (請至原網頁查看圖片)
A growing library of evidence has been pushing this timeline back more and more. Hublin and the team's discoveries are the latest series of studies adding to the mounting pile.
The research was published in three papers in the peer-reviewed journals Nature and Nature Ecology and Evolution and paints a very different picture of history.
It suggests there were small “pioneer” groups of Homo sapiens living in Europe with Neanderthals for thousands of years before the species went extinct.
Whether these two groups ever interacted during that time remains unclear.
“It’s not at all the picture we had years ago of this wave of Homo sapiens moving into Europe and replacing the Neanderthals,” said Hublin. “What we see now is that it was not a wave, it was several wavelets,”
Moreover, the research suggests these early Homo sapien “pioneers” were more hardcore than we’ve given them credit for.
Hardcore humans
Previous research asserted that Homo sapiens were only able to enter Europe during warmer time periods because they were adapted to the warm climate of Africa, where they originated from.
But the specimens and artifacts found at Ranis suggest they actually entered directly through the chilly Northwest, and that this region was much colder than previously thought.
Analysis of animal teeth collected at the site revealed the climate was 7 to 15 degrees Celsius colder than it is today, similar to that of northern Scandinavia or parts of Siberia, said Hublin.
Additionally, analysis of animal remains revealed that mammals adapted to extreme cold were present at Ranis, including wooly mammoths, reindeer, and wolverines.
Analysis of over 1,000 animal bones from Ranis showed that early Homo sapiens processed the carcasses of deer but also of carnivores, including wolves. Geoff M. Smith (請至原網頁查看圖片)
Questions remain about how warm-weather-adapted Homo sapiens survived such a dramatic transition. But they likely made warm clothing out of furs from these animals, explains study co-author Geoff Smith, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Kent.
Rewriting prehistory
Together, these findings paint a picture of human prehistory that is very different from the one we had before. But there are still questions to be answered.
The researchers have no plans to excavate Ranis further, and the cave has been closed off for safety reasons. But they will continue to study the specimens and artifacts from this last dig to dive deeper into interactions between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals during this time.
“I think we have more to discover,” Hublin said. “What’s ahead of us is understanding what was going on among the late Neanderthals. To what extent have they been penetrated by these newcomers? What kind of interactions do they have with them? But I think it’s a great step to have resolved the LRJ story.”
本文於 修改第 1 次
|
|
石器文化演進新理論-Mirjam Guesgen
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
索引：
flint：燧石；燧石由于堅硬，破碎後產生鋒利的斷口，所以是最早為石器時代的原始人所青睞。
Neolithic：新石器時代
Epipaleolithic period：中石器時代；refer to the geographic areas of Levant and, often, the rest of the Near East
Mesolithic：中石器時代；refer to the geographic areas of parts of Southeast Europe
Paleolithic Period：舊石器時代
Lower Paleolithic period：舊石器時代早期
Middle Paleolithic period：舊石器時代中期
Upper Paleolithic period：舊石器時代晚期
A Prehistoric Tool Discovery May Have Just Rewritten Human History
New research suggests a sudden "revolution" in human history that allowed our species to thrive and spread was a longer and more complex process.
Mirjam Guesgen, 02/09/24
Somewhere between 50-40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans overtook Neanderthals and other archaic humans, spreading out all over Eurasia.
That shift has mostly been attributed to a dramatic and sudden "revolution" called the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition, where modern humans improved their tool-making, found new and different sources of food, took to the seas, and expressed themselves through ornaments and cave art. Now, a study published Wednesday in Nature Communications has challenged this narrative, instead implying that this “revolution” was more of a gradual and complex process.
Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing how productive ancient humans were when it came to turning rocks into tools during a 50,000-year span between the Late Middle Paleolithic (69,000 years ago), through the Upper Paleolithic, to the Epipaleolithic period (15,000 years ago). The tools came from five sites across the western Hisma Basin in southern Jordan.
Specifically, researchers quantified the ratio between the length of a particular stone tool’s cutting edge with the mass of the stone as a whole. The more cutting-edge length per mass of stone, the more efficiently early humans used the raw stone material. “Stone raw material, like flint, is not everywhere. It needs to be procured from certain sources,” the study’s lead author, Seiji Kadowaki from Nagoya University in Japan, told Motherboard in an email. “So, more economical consumption of stone raw material reduces the cost for the procurement of raw material.”
Kadowaki said they chose this metric because they needed a way to compare very different types of stone tools in a systematic way. “Because stone tool forms and their production technology changed and varied from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, the classification system for stone tools differs between the two periods. Thus, it is difficult to have consistent criteria for comparison of the two periods,” he told Motherboard in an email.
He and his colleagues noticed that modern humans became more productive not before or at the beginning of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition, but after they’d already started to spread out into new geographical areas in the Early Upper Paleolithic. “In terms of the productivity of cutting-edge length, its development does not simply coincide with the timing of the dispersal of modern humans.”
Much of this shift came down to the stones humans used to make tools becoming smaller and lighter. This was probably because around the same time, humans started developing bladelets—small, long, symmetrical stone tools probably used as spear- or arrowheads.
These technological changes came with a shift from humans being more mobile hunter-gatherers to having slightly more stable base camps. Many of the sites researchers looked at were small, with a few hearths—typical for more wandering groups. Some however were “more intensive occupations” where people would stay for longer periods of time. Under this new system, people may have carried around smaller, more portable blades or partially-made ones that they could use to cut up food stored at these base camps.
The latest findings agree with other studies that have been published in recent years, which also argue that the so-called revolution was actually a slower, multi-step process.
Although the latest study is specific to archeological finds in Jordan, the authors say it serves as a working hypothesis for other places worldwide, including Europe and Central-North Asia where archeologists have seen similar patterns in tool evolution.
Kadowaki also says they need more evidence from other sources before they can definitively paint a new picture of how stone tools evolved. “We need to look at other aspects of stone tools as well as other archaeological records to better understand the technological behaviors and their development at the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition.”
本文於 修改第 1 次
|
|
歐洲人類史新發現 1 -- Katie Hunt
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
Bones found in 8-meter-deep pit may ‘fundamentally change’ history of humans in Europe
Katie Hunt, CNN, 02/02/24
Microscopic fragments of protein and DNA recovered from bones discovered in 8-meter-deep cave dirt have revealed Neanderthals and humans likely lived alongside one another in northern Europe as far back as 45,000 years ago.
The genetic analysis of the fossils, which were found in a cave near the town of Ranis in eastern Germany, suggested that modern humans were the makers of distinctive, leaf-shaped stone tools that archaeologists once believed were crafted by Neanderthals, the heavily built hominins who lived in Europe until about 40,000 years ago.
Modern humans, or homo sapiens, weren’t previously known to have lived as far north as the region where the tools were made.
“The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit,” said research author Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a news release.
“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”
The discovery means the two groups, who once interbred and left most humans alive today with traces of Neanderthal DNA, may have overlapped for several thousand years. It also shows that Homo sapiens, our species, crossed the Alps into the cold climes of northern and central Europe earlier than thought.
Three studies detailing the discoveries and lab analysis were published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Earliest Homo sapiens fossils found north of the Alps
The style of stone tool found at Ranis has also been discovered elsewhere across Europe, from Moravia and eastern Poland to the British Isles, according to the studies. Archaeologists call the tool style Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, or LRJ, in reference to the places where it was first identified.
To identify who made the artifacts, the team excavated Ilsenhöhle cave near Ranis from 2016 to 2022. When the cave was first excavated in the 1930s, only the tools were found and analyzed. This time around the team was able to dig deeper and more systematically, ultimately uncovering human fossils there for the first time.
“The challenge was to excavate the full 8-metre sequence from top to bottom, hoping that some deposits were left from the 1930s excavation,” said study coauthor Marcel Weiss, a researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a statement. “We were fortunate to find a 1.7 metre thick rock the previous excavators did not get past. After removing that rock by hand, we finally uncovered the LRJ layers and even found human fossils.”
However, the human remains weren’t immediately identifiable among the hundreds of bone fragments unearthed during the six-year dig. It was only later the team knew definitively that the layers of sediment that contained the LRJ stone tools also included humans remains.
The researchers used proteins extracted from bone fragments to identify animal and human remains they found, a technique known as palaeoproteomics. It allows scientists to identify human and animal bones when their form is unclear or uncertain. Using the same technique, the team also managed to identify human remains among bones excavated during the 1930s.
However, the protein analysis was only able to identify the bones as belonging to hominins — a category that includes Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals. To distinguish between the two, the team was able to extract fragments of ancient DNA from the 13 human fossils they identified.
“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged to Homo sapiens,” said study coauthor Elena Zavala, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in the release.
“Interestingly, several fragments shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequences — even fragments from different excavations,” Zavala added. “This indicates that the fragments belonged to the same individual or were maternal relatives, linking these new finds with the ones from decades ago.”
Unexpected adaptability
Radiocarbon dating of the fossils and other artifacts in the cave suggested that these early humans were living there from around 45,000 years ago, making them the earliest Homo sapiens known to have inhabited northwestern Europe.
The region would have had a dramatically different climate then, with conditions typical of steppe tundra such as that found in present-day Siberia. The dig revealed the presence of reindeer, cave bears, woolly rhinoceroses and horses. The researchers also concluded that hibernating cave bears and denning hyenas primarily used the cave, which had only periodic human presence.
“This shows that even these earlier groups of Homo sapiens dispersing across Eurasia already had some capacity to adapt to such harsh climatic conditions,” said coauthor Sarah Pederzani, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of La Laguna in Spain, who led the paleoclimate study of the site. “Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold-climate conditions did not appear until several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result,” she said, according to the news release.
William E. Banks, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux in France, said the studies showed how new methods are allowing archaeologists to examine sites in unprecedented detail, improving the ability to pinpoint when a site was occupied.
The “discoveries provide another important piece of the puzzle of this culturally and demographically complex period in Europe,” Banks noted in a commentary published alongside the studies. However, Banks, who wasn’t involved in the research, added that archaeologists “must be careful not to generalize findings from one or two sites.”
He noted that recent discoveries suggested Neanderthals were more culturally and cognitively complex than popular stereotypes suggest and that archaeologists should “not necessarily assume” in all cases that modern humans made more complex styles of stone tools from that pivotal period before Neanderthals disappeared.
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
|
本城市首頁
看回應文章
等級：8
