///////////////Human ancestors more primitive than once thought By Neil Schoenherr
Sept. 20, 2007 -- A team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has determined through analysis of the earliest known hominid fossils outside of Africa, recently discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, the former Soviet republic, that the first human ancestors to inhabit Eurasia were more primitive than previously thought.
Herman Pontzer
The fossils, dated to 1.8 million years old, show some modern aspects of lower limb morphology, such as long legs and an arched foot, but retain some primitive aspects of morphology in the shoulder and foot. The species had a small stature and brain size more similar to earlier species found in Africa.
"Thus, the earliest known hominins to have lived outside Africa in temperate zones of Eurasia did not yet display the full set of derived skeletal features," the researchers conclude.
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The people of the Hunza Valley do not look Pakistani at all. They are decendents of Alexander The Great's Army which marched through in 330 BC. Aima and Shamila smile happily for the camera. Karimabad, Pakistan (9/99).
/////////////////Quest for the Lost Land Renée Hetherington, J. Vaughn Barrie, Roger MacLeod and Michael Wilson
Editor's note: For more background about the studies on the early Americans and dating terminology, read the previous feature.
Until recently, researchers believed our North American roots stretched back only about 11,200 radiocarbon years before present (YBP). These earliest settlers, from a culture now called Clovis, traveled from northeast Asia across the "Beringia landbridge," hunting large mammals with stone tools and colonizing the Americas via an "ice-free corridor" east of the Canadian Rocky Mountains (see story, this issue). However, in 1989, archaeologist Tom Dillehay at the University of Kentucky published a two-volume work entitled Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, which describe a human settlement dated to 12,500 YBP, approximately 1,300 years before Clovis. This site contained non-Clovis stone tools, a child's footprints and a community of dwellings constructed in part from animal skins. Archaeological sites like this and others found south of areas glaciated during the last ice age, and dated to between 12,500 and 11,500 YBP, imply that people had reached the southern tip of South America prior to the recession of the giant ice sheets, leading archaeologists to postulate alternative migration routes. Now geologists are also working on these alternative routes, exploring the region's glacial past to reconstruct a potential path for early peoples along the northwestern coast of North America.
////////////////////////Watching the English
The hidden rules of English behaviour — Kate Fox
"I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep."
In Watching the English, Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and Byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue – and moan about it all – exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.
The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex-apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class-anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.
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