DHARMIC SNIPPETS OF PHILOSOPHY
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/////////////////Early Humans Settled India Before Europe, Study Suggests
Brian Vastag
for National Geographic News
November 14, 2005
Modern humans migrated out of Africa and into India much earlier than once believed, driving older hominids in present-day India to extinction and creating some of the earliest art and architecture, a new study suggests.
The research places modern humans in India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe.
University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James developed the new theory after analyzing decades' worth of existing fieldwork in India. They outline their research in the journal Current Anthropology.
"He's putting all the pieces together, which no one has done before," Sheela Athreya, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, said of Petraglia.
Modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, leaving behind cave paintings, jewelry, and evidence that they drove the Neandertals to extinction.
Petraglia and James argue that similar events took place in India when modern humans arrived there about 70,000 years ago.
The Indian subcontinent was once home to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominid species that left Africa about 800,000 years ago, Petraglia explained.
"I realized that, my god, modern humans might have wiped out Homo heidelbergensis in India," he said. "Modern humans may have been responsible for wiping out all sorts of ancestors around the world."
"Our model of India is talking about that entire wave of dispersal," he added. "[T]hat's a huge implication for paleoanthropology and human evolution."
A New Model
Petraglia and James reached their conclusions by pulling together fossils, artifacts, and genetic data.
The evidence points to an early human migration through the Middle East and into India, arriving in Australia by 45,000 to 60,000 years ago, they say.
Their model begins about 250,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis arrived in India toting crude stone tools. Digs in central India in the 1980s turned up skeletal remains of the species, and other sites revealed almond-shaped hand axes chipped from stone.
Meanwhile in Africa modern humans arose about 190,000 years ago, most archaeologists believe. These humans too developed stone tools.
Scattered evidence, such as red ochre—perhaps used as body paint—suggests early African humans also dabbled in the creative arts.
The new theory posits that as much as 70,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans migrated east, arriving in India with technology comparable to that developed by Homo heidelbergensis.
"The tools were not so different," Petraglia says. "The technology that the moderns had wasn't of a great advantage over what [Homo heidelbergensis] were using."
But modern humans outcompeted the natives, slowly but inexorably driving them to extinction, Petraglia says. "It's just like the story in Western Europe, where [modern humans] drove Neandertals to extinction," he says.
The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of the so-called Hobbits, whose fossilized bones were discovered recently on the Indonesian island of Flores.
But Athreya of Texas A&M argues that the evidence for such a "replacement event" in India remains weak.
"You have to explain the reasons for the replacement, [such as] technical superiority," she said.
"The genetic evidence shows there were multiple migrations out of Africa, so there would have been multiple migrations into [India]. But I think these migrating populations didn't completely replace the indigenous group."
Early Art
Petraglia and James's report presents evidence of creativity and culture in India starting about 45,000 years ago. Sophisticated stone blades arrive first, along with rudimentary stone architecture.
Beads, red ochre paint, ostrich shell jewelry, and perhaps even shrines to long-lost gods—the hallmarks of an early symbolic culture—appear by 28,500 years ago.
This slow change is in contrast to what many scientists believe played out in Europe. Modern humans blew through the continent like a storm about 40,000 years ago, and Neandertals quickly disappeared.
The switch happened so rapidly—as evidenced by the sudden arrival of advanced stone tools and an explosion of cave painting and other art—that anthropologists call it the "human revolution."
"What we have is a much patchier, very slow and gradual accumulation of what we call modern human behavior in South Asia," Petraglia says.
"And that just simply means that culture developed in a slightly different way in South Asia than it did in Western Europe."
A dearth of fossils and artifacts in India makes Petraglia and James's research even more valuable, writes Robin Dennell, professor of archeology at the University of Sheffield, in a comment accompanying the study.
The subcontinent has produced just one set of early Homo sapiens fossils, found in a cave in Sri Lanka and dated to about 36,000 years ago.
Despite this, Petraglia hopes his analysis throws new light onto early human history in India.
"We're trying to give a wake up call to anthropologists … saying that we have to be looking at all parts of the world," he says.
"If we really want to tell the story of human evolution we've got to bring all parts of the world into the story."
//////////////////WIKI=Homo heidelbergensis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Homo heidelbergensis
Fossil range: Pleistocene
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. heidelbergensis
Binomial name
Homo heidelbergensis
Schoetensack, 1908
Homo heidelbergensis ("Heidelberg Man") is an extinct species of the genus Homo which may be the direct ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis in Europe. The best evidence found for these hominins date between 600,000 and 400,000 years ago. H. heidelbergensis stone tool technology was considerably close to that of the Acheulean tools used by Homo erectus.
Contents [hide]
1 Morphology and interpretations
1.1 RAO hypothesis
1.2 Social behavior
1.3 Language
1.4 Evidence of hunting
2 Discovery
2.1 Boxgrove Man
2.2 Sima de los Huesos
3 Extinction or evolution
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
[edit]Morphology and interpretations
Reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis
Both H. antecessor and H. heidelbergensis are likely descended from the morphologically very similar Homo ergaster from Africa. But because H. heidelbergensis had a larger brain-case with a typical cranial average of modern humans and had more advanced tools and had more behavior, it has been given a separate species classification. The species was 1.8 meters tall on average, and more muscular than modern humans.
[edit]RAO hypothesis
According to the "Recent Out of Africa" theory, similar "Archaic Homo sapiens" found in Africa (ie. Homo sapiens idaltu only 160,000 years old), existing in Africa as a part of the operation of the Saharan pump, and not the European forms of Homo heidelbergensis, are thought to be direct ancestors of modern Homo sapiens.
[edit]Social behavior
In theory recent findings in Atapuerca also suggest that H. heidelbergensis may have been the first species of the Homo genus to bury their dead, but that is contested at this time. Some experts believe that H. heidelbergensis, like its descendant H. neanderthalensis acquired a primitive form of language. No forms of art or sophisticated artifacts other than stone tools have been uncovered, although red ochre, a mineral that can be used to create a red pigment which is useful as a paint, has been found at Terra Amata excavations in the south of France.
[edit]Language
Homo heidelbergensis skull replica
The morphology of the outer and middle ear suggests they had an auditory sensitivity similar to modern humans and very different from chimpanzees. They were probably able to differentiate between many different sounds.[1]
[edit]Evidence of hunting
Cut marks found on wild deer, elephants, rhinos and horses demonstrate that they were butchered, some of the animals weighed as much as 700 kg (1,500 lb) or possibly larger. During this era, now-extinct wild animals such as mammoths, European lions and Irish elk roamed the European continent.
Moreover, a number of 400,000 year old wooden projectile spears were found at Schöningen in northern Germany. These are thought to have been made by Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis. Generally, projectile weapons are more commonly associated with H. sapiens. The lack of projectile weaponry is an indication of different sustenance methods, rather than inferior technology or abilities. The situation is identical to that of native New Zealand Maori - modern Homo sapiens, who also rarely threw objects, but used spears and clubs instead.[2]
[edit]Discovery
Replica of the type specimen from Mauer
The first fossil discovery of this species was made on October 21, 1907 and came from Mauer where the workman Daniel Hartmann spotted a jaw in a sandpit. The jaw (Mauer 1) was in good condition except for the missing premolar teeth, which were eventually found near the jaw. The workman gave it to professor Otto Schoetensack from the University of Heidelberg, who identified and named the fossil.
The next Homo heidelbergensis remains were found in Steinheim an der Murr, Germany (the Steinheim Skull, 350kya), Arago, France (Arago 21), Petralona, Greece and Ciampate del Diavolo, Italy.
[edit]Boxgrove Man
In 1994 British scientists had unearthed a lower hominin tibia bone just a few kilometres away from the English Channel including hundreds of ancient hand axes at the Boxgrove Quarry site. A partial leg bone is dated to 478,000 and 524,000 years old. Homo heidelbergensis was the early proto-human species that occupied both France and Great Britain at that time; both locales were connected by a landmass during that epoch. Prior to Gran Dolina, Boxgrove offered the earliest hominid occupants in Europe.
The tibia had been gnawed by a large carnivore, suggesting that he had been killed by a lion or wolf or that his unburied corpse had been scavenged after death [3].
[edit]Sima de los Huesos
Beginning in 1997, a Spanish team has located more than 5,500 human bones dated to an age of at least 350,000 years old in the Sima de los Huesos site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. The pit contains fossils of perhaps 28 individuals together with remains of Ursus deningeri and other carnivores and a biface called Excalibur. It is hypothesized that this Acheulean axe made of red quartzite was some kind of ritual offering for a funeral. Ninety percent of the known Homo heidelbergensis remains has been obtained from this site. The fossil pit bones include:
A complete cranium (Skull 5), nicknamed Miguelón, and fragments of other craniums, as Skull 4, nicknamed Agamenón and skull 6, nicknamed Rui (from El Cid, a local hero).
A complete pelvis (Pelvis 1), nicknamed Elvis, in remembrance of Elvis Presley.
Mandibles, teeth, a lot of postcranial bones (femurs, hand and foot bones, vertebrae, ribs, etc.)
Indeed, nearby sites contain the only known and controversial Homo antecessor fossils.
[edit]Extinction or evolution
Some believe that H. heidelbergensis is an extinct species, some that is a cladistic ancestor to other Homo forms sometimes improperly linked to distinct species in terms of populational genetics.
Some scenarios of survival include
H heidelbergensis > H. neanderthalensis > H sapiens sapiens
H. heidelbergensis > H. rhodesiensis > H. idaltu > H sapiens sapiens
Those supporting multiregional origin of modern humans envise fertile reproduction between many evolutionary stages; Homo walking[4], or gene transfer between adjacent populations due to gene passage and spreading in successive generations.
[edit]See also
List of fossil sites (with link directory)
List of hominina (hominid) fossils (with images)
Saldanha man
Altamura man
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