I'm going to dig in Spain! (Plus questions on hominins)

As you can see from the title, I'm been confirmed a place at a dig in Montlleó open-air site in the summer.  The site is about 2 hours from Barcelona.  It's Magdalenian - about 15,000 years old - and I'll be excavating and digging at the site and analysing lithic remains in the lab for three weeks, all with SERP (http://www.ub.edu/SERP/index.htm). All in all I'm very excited, and even better I'll only be paying for the flight and hopefully the sun will come out! A dig and a tan. What could be better for an Arch and Anth student?

I finished my first piece of work of this term yesterday (excluding my collections and their anxiously-anticipated results) on African Plio-Pleistocene hominins and their characteristics.  We complied a fact-file of hominins from Ardipithecus ramidus (Late Miocene/Early Pliocene - about 5.7 mya (million years ago) to Homo ergaster (African erectus) which is thought to have lived 1.9 million mya.  We also had to draw a lineage of these species and multiple genus, so I got to use my colouring pencils...at last!  I used this phylogeny as my basis, which I first saw from Mike Petraglia's lectures on human evolution.

So I was reassured by my tutor today he uses the same one too (I think it's from the Smithsonian Institute).  So many changes have occurred morphologically in such a 'small' amount of time.  At first I questioned the amount of catergories paleoarchaeologists had 'split' the fossils into; however, this approach is opposed to 'lumping', where you bung a lot of similar-featured fossils together in one group.  There's a lot of debate as to which group some fossils belong to, as you can imagine.  I'm really enjoying learning about my very, very old roots, and still have a lot of questions to ask; what behavioural changes have happened apart from physical ones? Which species did we descend from? Why do I feel so old right now? But questions are good. A recent article in Nature argues against the assumption that Homo habilis was the first to use tools; instead, it might have been Australopithecus afarensis, a gracile Australopithecus found in sites in East Africa.  You can read it here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7308/full/nature09248.html

It just shows there are many questions about out evolutionary past that are still unanswered. I'd like to answer some of these one day.

Red Deer Cave People

As you may have heard in the news, it is thought that a new species prehistoric human has been identified from fossilised skeletal remains in south-west Asia.  A skull dug up in 1979 in Longlin Cave, Guangxi Province has only now been fully analysed, and its anatomy appears to be unique in its form against other skeletal evidence of other human ancestors.

This comes from Darren Curnoe at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.  The skull appears to show a hash of some very 'primitive' features, but also some very modern ones.  Quoting Curnoe,

"They have rounded braincases with prominent brow ridges, thick skull bones, short and flat faces, tucked under the front part of the brain, a broad nose, jutting jaws that lack a human-like chin, brains moderate in size with a modern looking frontal lobe, but primitively short parietal lobes, and they have large molar teeth."
(Source: FAQs on the Red Deer Cave People: http://www.darrencurnoe.net/documents/QA_RedDeerCavePeople.pdf )

Photo by Curnoe

This is extremely exciting, not in the least because evidence of this hominin has apparently appeared also at Mula Cave in Yunnan Province, according to Curnoe and Ji Xueping of Yunnan University.  Curnoe explains that they are hesitant to put this species in with Homo sapiens, mainly because the species H. sapiens is still under question as to what classifies as an example of one! As such, Curnoe says these people could present a 'new evolutionary line' or a 'previously unknown prehistoric population'. (See FAQs page above).

It's also exciting because as Curnoe says:
"...dated to between about 14,500 and 11,500 years ago, the Red Deer Cave people are the youngest population to be found anywhere in the world whose anatomy doesnʼt comfortably fit within the range of modern humans: whether they be modern humans from 150 or 150,000 years ago." (See FAQs page again).

That's very special indeed.  This furthers the view of a very diverse 'human' population at the end of the Ice Age, through which the Red Deer Cave people must have survived.  Christ Stringer, a British anthropologist, suggests that these Red Deer Cave people may have been related to the Denisovian people, whilst one of my lecturers last term Mike Petraglia agrees that a diverse population of 'humans' might have existed at the end of the Ice Age, more broad than we thought.

All in all, this is a very cool discovery, and I can't wait to see if the DNA of the bones from Red Deer Cave can be properly analysed.

For more information and as one of my sources, you can read the simple but meaty article from New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21586-chinese-human-fossils-unlike-any-known-species.html.  Curnoe's FAQ page is also great as a quick summary of his report.  You can read the original PLoS article here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031918.