Category: Breaking News
top 10 list of structures made using human bones, in which the top spot is occupied by a tower made from human skulls. The tower, made from the skulls of Serbian rebels against the Ottoman empire, was the brainchild of one general Hurshid Pasha, who built the 15-foot tower from 952 skulls, near the city of Nis. Commenting on the Mexico City find, one of the researchers working on the dig, Raul Barrera, told the AP that there are a lot more skulls in deeper layers in the ground, so the initial number of 35 is expected to swell considerably as excavations continue. This will take time, however, because the house above the site is considered to be historically valuable, so the archaeologists often have to work in narrow wells some six feet under the floor of the house, suspended on a wooden platform, lying face down. It seems that these efforts have paid off, since there is not much doubt that this is indeed the main tzompantli of the Templo Mayor Aztec. A year ago, scientists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History uncovered another partial tzompantli in Mexico City, under a stretch of a new underground extension currently under construction. Four skulls were discovered there, Gizmodo reports, one of them, interestingly, a dog skull. Animal skulls were put on skulls racks extremely rarely, with the Aztecs obviously believing that human heads were more awe inspiring. ]]>
A. sediba remains, has confirmed previous research that the species it belongs to, known as Papio angusticeps, has a close relationship to modern baboon species living today. In fact, P. angusticeps might actually be one of the very first members of Papio hamadryas, the modern monkey species known as the hamadryas baboon. Modern baboon populations are routinely divided into several different groups, most commonly referred to as separate species or subspecies, throughout large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa. These modern baboons have also spread into the Arabian Peninsula, easily making them one of the biggest evolutionary success stories of the primate world. However, there are plenty of questions about the origins of modern baboon species when it comes to examples in the fossil record. Dr. Gilbert says that modern baboons had been thought to have diverged from their closest evolutionary relatives between 1.8 million and 2.2 million years in the past, but evidence in the form of fossil specimens had been rare to nonexistent until this latest find. The scientist added that the Malapa specimen, in conjunction with the analysis conducted by the research team, lends credence to the possibility that early P. hamadrayas fossils might have been incorrectly categorized by earlier researchers as P. angusticeps – especially in light of how modern baboon anatomy seems to be consistent with that of P. angusticeps – to the point where experts would be hard-pressed to differentiate ancient specimens from the bones of modern baboons hailing from South and East Africa. For more information: www.journals.plos.org Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: RADION Imaginery / Kamil Wence]]>
www.nature.com Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: Flicka]]>
Antiquity. The composition, they write, is typical of Fremont art, which often depicts human shapes with elongated bodies and round heads that are surrounded by “attendants”, smaller images of animals such as cats, dogs, badgers, bears, and birds. Commenting on the news, one biologist who had seen the painting himself, Phil Senter from Fayetteville State University, told Live Science that what Bahn and Le Quellec had found was in line with his own view of the image, that it was clearly a collection of several images rather than one “pterodactyl”. Another scientist, world rock art professor Benjamin Smith, noted that dinosaurs only rose to fame in the nineteenth century, when palaeontology gained traction. It is difficult to imagine that a culture as ancient as the Fremont would have known about pterodactyls, regardless of the fact that the region around Black Rock Canyon is rich in pterosaur fossils. For more information: “The death of a pterodactyl” Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: Franko Fonseca]]>
www.pnas.org ]]>
Homo habilis and Paranthropus boisei, the researchers say, but was more modern human-like than them. In fact, this species could be a “missing link” between Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. The bone was discovered in Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania, at a rich palaeontological site called Philip Tobias Korongo, or PTK, and, according to UPI, moves forward the point at which hominins climbed down the trees and evolved hands suitable for holding tools by as many as 400,000 years. In their paper, the researchers who discovered the bone note that there has been ongoing debate about the cause and effect relationship between the evolution of a hand capable of manipulating tools and the invention of these tools, a debate in which the discovery represents a valuable input. For one thing, it brings the evolution of the modern human-like hand closer to the oldest stone tools, discovered earlier this year in Kenya. Still, the tools predate the finger fossil by more than a million years, suggesting there could be even older fossils of modern human-like hands. The lead author of the study, Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo from the Institute of Evolution in Africa, told New Scientist that the bone “belongs to somebody who’s not spending any time in the trees at all”. It is straighter than the phalangeal bones of tree-dwelling hominins who used their hands as modern-day primates do, to move in trees by hanging from branches and swinging between them. Speaking to the Christian Science Monitor, Dominguez-Rodrigo also said that this species was already capable of using tools and it was larger than its contemporaries. Based on the size of the fossil, the hominin it belonged to must have stood about five foot nine, which is quite a bit more than Homo habilis, (the first hominin who left Africa), who has been estimated to have stood at around three feet tall. The authors of the study note that the evolution of the hand has been a major driver for the evolution of humans, because the more capable of manipulating objects it became, the more capable hominins got at using increasingly sophisticated tools. However, recent discoveries, including this one, are revealing a much more complex hand evolution picture. For instance, the researchers write, the hand bones of some Pliocene australopiths have proven to be much more modern human-like than the bones of hominins from a more recent era, the Pleistocene. This suggests that hands capable of manipulating tools evolved before the tools were invented, feeding more evidence into the debate about the causal link between hand evolution and tool invention. For more information: “Earliest modern human-like hand bone from a new >1.84-million-year-old site at Olduvai in Tanzania” ]]>
