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A Missing Link from Kent's Cavern in Devonshire

A prehistoric maxilla (upper jawbone) fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, and named Kents Cavern 4. The specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum.

Although previous radiocarbon dating suggested the bone was about 35,000 years old, a new study in Nature redates it securely to 44.2-41.5 kyr. The article by Tom Higham et al., "The Earliest Evidence for Anatomically Modern Humans in Northwestern Europe," also claims that on the basis of dental comparisons it is "human" rather than "Neanderthal."

The Kent's Cavern fragment "therefore represents the oldest known anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe, fills a key gap between the earliest dated Aurignacian remains and the earliest human skeletal remains, and demonstrates the wide and rapid dispersal of early modern humans across Europe more than 40 kyr ago."

A related article in the same issue of Nature is "Early Dispersal of Modern Humans in Europe and Implications for Neanderthal Behavior," by Stefano Benazzi et al. It attempts to place the so-called Cavallo fossil from southern Italy in a timeframe of about 44,000 years ago, thus suggesting a "rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals."

Neither study considers that the evidence they are examining may be the result of hybridization between "humans" and "Neanderthals." Like most geneticists the authors have rigid categories and do not consider that our definitions of species and sub-species and transitions in technocomplexes and traits are in flux as new discoveries are made.

One man's Mede may be another man's Persian, and we note that the "fossil race" is not devoid of scientific jingoism pitting one country's news-making finds against another's. So far England seems to be winning.

However, the British still have to live down Piltdown Man, a fraud of biblical proportions that fooled the world for almost half a century until the 1950s. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery combining the lower jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The editors sum up the two new studies by writing, "The reanalysis of findings from two archaeological sites calls for a reassessment of when modern humans settled in Europe, and of Neanderthal cultural achievements." We wish that the paleontological community would think more out of the box and reassess how, when and where "humans" and "Neanderthals" interbred. 


Location of Kent's Caverns in Devon.

A mental foramen is a small hole in the mandible whose purpose is to allow passage of nerves and vessels to the brain and probably also to relieve tension during chewing and gnawing. It has been identified as a sign of archaic humans, including Neanderthals. Do you have one?

I asked my dentist to look at my X rays on file and he confirmed I have a mental foramen. He has often told me I have "powerful" jaws. It is unclear whether there are normally two of them and what their typical positions are.

In a previous blog post, "Neanderthals in America," we discussed mental foramina (the plural of foramen), occipital bulges or bumps and other archaic skeletal traits. Melungeons seem to have many of these ancestral marks.

Do you? You might want to check with your dentist.

Studies show that Europeans have, on average, between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal genes from an early out-of-Africa interbreeding period in the Middle East. Science has not decided to consider Neanderthals a separate species or sub-species in relation to H. sapiens sapiens (humans).

DNA Consultants offers an estimate of Neanderthal ancestry based on matches with other archaic humans called Neanderthal Index.

Line drawing of Neanderthal male ©DNA Consultants.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Neanderthal fossil record in America. And apparently a Neanderthal hybrid fossil record.

No genetics publication has put all the evidence together: the genetics establishment is still in denial about most things Neanderthal. The evidence is scattered and mostly unrecognized, but, in our opinion, conclusive and compulsive. Consider the following article:

Frank L'Engle Williams and Gail E. Krovitz, "Ontogenetic Migration of the Mental Foramen in Neanderthals and Modern Humans," Journal of Human Evolution 47/4 (Oct. 2004) 190-219. 

The mental foramen (literally "mind's little hole") is an anatomical trait very pronounced in Neanderthals, a small dimple in the lower jaw of the skull beneath the teeth, or mandible. It is found sporadically in humans, where it is classified as archaic. Among the places where it has been identified are the Oleniy Islands and Baltic region, Northwestern Russia in Cro-Magnon like Europoid and Mongoloid types, along with "large and massive" torus occipitalis or Anatolian bumps (Alexander Mongait, 1959; Marija Gimbutas, 1956); Bakhehisarai in the Crimea (Alexander Mongait, 1959); the Joman or Ainu of Japan (Carleton Stevens Coon, 1962); and the "race of giants" continually being unearthed in West Coast, Ohio Valley and New England archeological sites, caves and mounds.

Archaic giant skeletons with mental foramina, occipital bumps, double rows of teeth and other Neanderthal features are reported, in fact, all over the Americas. Fritz Zimmerman has gathered a lot of the evidence in a new book titled Nephilim Chronicles, of which a small excerpt was published in Ancient American magazine, issue 91, pp. 24-27. Here is one of the newspaper reports he cites:

Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), November 8, 1912. PRIMITIVE MEN OF GIGANTIC STATURE.

Eleven skeletons of primitive men, with foreheads sloping directly back from the eyes and two rows of teeth in the front of the upper jaw, have been uncovered at Craigshill at Ellensburg, Washington. They were found about twenty feet below the surface, twenty feet back from the face of the slope, in a cement rock formation over which was a layer of shale. The rock was perfectly dry. The jawbones, which easily break, are so large that they will go around the face of a man today. The other bones are also much larger than those of the ordinary man. The femur is twenty inches long, indicating a man of eighty inches tall [6' 8"]. The teeth in front are worn almost down to the jawbones, due, it is believed, to eating uncooked foods and crushing substances with the teeth. The sloping skull shows an extreme low order of intelligence.

We note that the female mummy clutching a child known as The Thing on display at a roadside attraction on Interstate 10 north of Tombstone, Arizona, has a double row of teeth. It supposedly was one of three skeletons sold to the operator of the original site for $50 by a Chinese gentleman passing through. The Thing is discussed in several works by David Hatcher Childress. (My son and I paid our two bucks and saw it last Christmas on a road trip.)

Photo above:  Archaic skull from Oleniy Island studied by Marija Gimbutas among other archeologists, showing the position of the mental foramen, the result probably of Neanderthal interbreeding.

Photo below:  The Thing.

Did you know that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, does not contain a single mention of the word "evolution"? I am reading it for the first time and was struck not only by the absence of that term in Darwin's first edition (it does begin to creep in after 20 years in later editions) but many other discrepancies between the historical Darwin and modern Darwinism.

For those inclined to believe conspiracy theories--for instance, that it was not Darwin, but Darwinists or even anti-Darwinists who invented the theory of evolution--here are some items to consider:

•  Darwin was a mediocre student at Cambridge, where he learned little science or mathematics and preferred theology. "He passed the final examination in January 1831 at an undistinguished position, tenth in the list of candidates who did not seek honours" (Richard Keynes, in the introduction to the first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published by the Folio Society, 2006).
• Darwin's disordered notebooks and papers, in which he supposedly developed the theory of evolution, only to keep it "secret" for 20 years, were not transcribed and published until 2000.
• The modern reconstruction of Darwin's theory of evolution evolved itself. It began to take iconic form only after the 1960s, when historians of science began to "read between the lines" of Darwin's work. His career was divided into an initial period of 10 years when he was a biologist on the Beagle, then a "secret period" of 20 years until he and Alfred Russel Wallace "simultaneously" broke the theory in 1858, and finally another 20 year period until "evolution" began to appear in his writings by name shortly before his death. 
• Darwin's interests were erratic, not to say eccentric. He spent eight years studying the sex life of a Peruvian barnacle. He published four extensive monographs on the subject between 1851 and 1854. During this period he wrote nothing on "transmutation of species," the early term for "evolution." His young son asked a playmate, "Where does your father do his barnacles?" (Keynes, xxi.)
• After barnacles, Darwin turned his attention to fancy show pigeons. He joined the Philoperisteronic Society and added an aviary to his house.
• The scientific establishment at the time did not exactly acclaim Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The geologist Adam Sedgwick wrote Darwin a scalding letter. "Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved," Sedgwick said, accusing Darwin of "deserting the true method of induction." (xxiv). The astronomer Sir John Herschel called Darwin's work "the law of hiddeldy-pigglety."

Finally, no matter what you might decide about the "evolution of evolution," both Darwin and Darwinists reject the idea that Neanderthals might have been, in the words of the subtitle of On the Origin of Species, anything like a "Favoured Race." They died out, right?  This being so, it is interesting to me that a portrait of Charles Darwin (above) exhibits most if not all the characteristics of a Neanderthal:  sloping forehead, powerful jaws, craggy brow, occipital protuberance and large nose. We don't know quite what to make of it but wish Darwin had willed his skull as well as his thoughts to science.

In a review of Chris Stringer's book The Origin of Our Species (Lane, 2011), Jean-Jacques Hublin sides with one of the first promoters of the 30-year old Recent African Origin hypothesis and supports the notion that modern humans out of Africa entirely replaced Neanderthals because they were, well, fitter and superior.

See "Palaeoanthropology:  African Origins" in Nature 476, 395 (August 25, 2011).

But could the true scenario have been that "we" were already hybridized with Neanderthals, and that's why "we" won out? Recent work has brought evidence that Neanderthals gave "us" our immunities to a wide range of disease and thus allowed "us" to survive. The question doesn't have to be an either/or dilemma.

Above:  Krapina Neanderthal Museum. N. Solic.

According to a professor of immunology and microbiology at Stanford University, humans were able to survive, spread and expand their populations once they left Africa because of immunities to disease they acquired from Neanderthals and Denisovans, who had lived in Europe and Asia already for hundreds of thousands of years.

A review of the new research appears in the online science magazine Discover under the date of June 20, 2011. The professor's name is Peter Parham.

Crux of the matter, according to Royal Society report

• Parham began by taking a close look at a family of genes called  human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which play a central role in our body’s immune responses. We are able to react to a wide array of diseases because our HLA genes are highly variable, each containing dozens of  alleles (forms of genes).
• Our ancestors in Africa, however, would have had a small number of HLA alleles because they likely traveled in small bands and had little contact with other groups. Moreover, their HLAs would have only protected them against African diseases.
• When Parham compared the HLAs of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans, he noticed some overlaps. In particular, he found that HLA-C*0702, an allele common in Europeans and Asians but nonexistent in Africans, was also present in the Neanderthal genome. Similarly, HLA-A*11, which is found in modern Asians but not in Africans, popped up in Denisovan DNA.
• Overall, about 50 percent of HLA Class I alleles in Europeans seemed to come from Neanderthals, 70 to 80 percent in East Asians from Denisovans, and 90 to 95 percent in Papuans from Denisovans, Parham said at a recent Royal Society meeting.

The latest revelation about the true nature of Neanderthals shows how fast current scientific and popular thinking is moving on the subject. Two years ago it was still debated whether "humans" could interbreed with Neanderthals, or whether Neanderthals were even a human species. Denisovans were only discovered in the last year.

DNA Consultants introduced its Neanderthal Index, a measure of affinity with archaic populations of Europe and the Middle East, one year ago this month.

Dr. Donald Yates says he is planning a visit to Vindija cave near Varazdin in Croatia this month to see firsthand the world's most important site for the discovery of Neanderthal bones and lifeways, dating to about 30,000 years ago.

Human history changed drastically with the 1974 Neanderthal discoveries at Vindija Cave. Photo Tomislav Kranjcic.

Did Neandertals Linger in Russia's Far North?

By Michael Balter

Science 13 May 2011:
Vol. 332 no. 6031 p. 778
DOI: 10.1126/science.332.6031.778

For more than 150,000 years, Neandertals had Europe's lush river valleys to themselves. Then, beginning about 40,000 years ago, modern humans swept in from Africa and the Near East, spreading rapidly from east to west. Soon, the archaeological evidence suggests, the Neandertals retreated to “refugia” in southern Europe, such as Spain and Portugal—their last holdouts before going extinct.

Or were they? On page 841, a research team claims that some of the last Neandertals may have taken refuge in the dark Arctic north rather than the sunny south. At the 32,000-year-old site of Byzovaya in Russia's Polar Ural Mountains, which at 65 degrees latitude is as far north as Iceland, archaeologists found stone tools they argue are typical of those long associated with Neandertals in Europe...

Read abstract.

Note: This may explain why Finno-Uralic is one of the strong contributors to a high score on our Neanderthal Index.

Byzovaya Cave in Russia's Polar Ural Mountains with Neanderthal artifacts.

The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia

Science 28 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6016 pp. 453-456 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199113

By Simon J. Armitage, Sabah A. Jasim, Anthony E. Marks, Adrian G. Parker, Vitaly I. Usik, and Hans-Peter Uerpmann

Abstract

The timing of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa is a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies. Existing data suggest a rapid coastal exodus via the Indian Ocean rim around 60,000 years ago. We present evidence from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, demonstrating human presence in eastern Arabia during the last interglacial. The tool kit found at Jebel Faya has affinities to the late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa, indicating that technological innovation was not necessary to facilitate migration into Arabia. Instead, we propose that low eustatic sea level and increased rainfall during the transition between marine isotope stages 6 and 5 allowed humans to populate Arabia. This evidence implies that AMH may have been present in South Asia before the Toba eruption (1).

First paragraph.
The deserts of the Arabian Peninsula have been thought to represent a major obstacle for human dispersal out of Africa. AMH were present in East Africa by about 200 thousand years ago (ka) (2). It is likely that the first migration of AMH out of Africa occurred immediately before or during the last interglacial [marine isotope stage (MIS) 5e] (3). During MIS 6, the Afro-Asiatic arid belt was hyperarid, restricting movements of human populations out of Africa. Finds from Qafzeh and Skhul in the Near East, dated between 119 ± 18 and 81 ± 13 thousand years ago (ka) (4, 5), suggest that AMH first migrated along the “Nile Corridor” and into the Levant. 

Human origins: Shadows of early migrations

By Carlos D. Bustamante & Brenna M. Henn


Nature Volume: 468, Pages:1044–1045
Date published:(23 December 2010) DOI:doi:10.1038/4681044a
Published online22 December 2010

Analysis of ancient nuclear DNA, recovered from 40,000-year-old remains in the Denisova Cave, Siberia, hints at the multifaceted interaction of human populations following their migration out of Africa.

The new discipline of palaeogenetics is delivering increasing dividends, the latest news coming from Reich, Pääbo and colleagues on page 1053 of this issue. The authors' analysis of nuclear DNA of a human-like finger bone, found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, points towards a complex model of migration and colonization after anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa some 50,000–60,000 years ago.

Ever since 1925, when Raymond Dart's report of the first Australopithecus skull in southern Africa upended Victorian views of human origins, there has been debate over whether our species arose only once and spread throughout the world, replacing all extant species of Homo, or whether our ancestors interbred with the other populations and subspecies. The most extreme version of the 'candelabra' model of human origins — according to which human species arose multiple times independently of our Homo ergaster ancestors — has been largely discounted.

But it has been difficult to assess more nuanced models, such as the possibility of genetic exchange with some archaic populations, including Neanderthals, and now perhaps ancient Siberians. Until recently, genetic data and interpretation of the fossil record seemed to favour a complete-replacement model, in which all human species trace all of their genetic ancestry to a single origin in one or more African populations of moderate size some 200,000 years ago2, 3, 4, 5. However, the Denisovan nuclear genome sequence, along with that of Homo neanderthalensis published by some of the same authors6, suggest that the out-of-Africa population history of Homo sapiens is probably much more intertwined than previously thought, with more intertwining in some parts of the world than others.

Read more and follow discussion at Nature.

Triangles and circles respectively represent sampling locations of Neanderthal remains and of present-day human genomes. The blue arrows indicate generally accepted major migrations of anatomically modern humans, following their departure from Africa 50,000–60,000 years ago. At this time, there were two primary archaic species in Eurasia, Neanderthals and Homo erectus; Reich, Pääbo and co-workerssuggest that a third group was also present, represented by the ancient Denisovan genome. From ancient DNA, they identify additional putative events involving two episodes of limited gene flow: first, genetic admixture from Neanderthals to modern humans, shortly after the exit from Africa; second, subsequent admixture with the archaic population exemplified by the nuclear DNA extracted from the Denisova finger bone. This second event seems to affect only the ancestors of present-day Melanesians, who are thought to have colonized Papua New Guinea some 45,000 years ago. African populations, both past and present, are genetically highly diverse, as indicated by the multiple labels.

See also "New Hominin Probably Explains Distinctiveness of Melanesians"

Neanderthal Brain Growth Shows A Head Start for Moderns

Ann Gibbons

With brains as big as ours, Neanderthals were no dumb brutes. But they may not have used their brains the same way we do. In the crucial first year of life, their brains developed dramatically differently from the way ours do, according to a report in this week's issue of Current Biology.

Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/330/6006/900-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/12-November-2010/10.1126/science.330.6006.900-a