Cave formations along the coast of an island in the Mediterranean Sea hold evidence that sea level can rise and fall abruptly during an Ice Age, a finding that casts some doubt on current notions about how those lengthy cold spells develop and progress.
     At the height of an ice age, immense volumes of water are locked up in land-based ice sheets, and ocean levels can be as much as 130 meters below where they are today. By contrast, when that ice melts during warm periods, sea level can be a few meters higher than the modern-day standard, says Jeffrey Dorale, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City (USA). Now, Dorale and his colleagues report that during a brief interval well within the most recent Ice Age, sea level suddenly and inexplicably rose to a height more than one meter above today's.
     Evidence supporting that conclusion comes from cave formations on the Spanish island of Majorca, the researchers say. As sea levels rose and fell, waters sloshing into coastal caves left crusts of minerals on their walls and floors as well as on existing cave formations, Dorale says. Radioisotope dating of mineral crusts in one cave along Majorca's southern coast indicates that sea level sat about 1.5 meters higher than today between 110,000 until 10,000 years ago. Similar analyses of samples from nearby caves show that between 80,000 and 82,000 years ago, sea level ranged between 1.25 and 1.6 meters above today's standard.
     "The [team's] results are strong but not absolutely watertight," comments R. Lawrence Edwards, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. One possible confounding factor, for instance, could be the rebound of Earth's crust in the region since the end of the most recent ice age. After the ice mass smothering Northern Europe melted and ran to the sea, pressure from viscous material at the top of Earth's mantle would have lifted the area, thereby influencing apparent sea level. But Dorale and his colleagues contend that tectonic uplift hasn't affected their data.
     Studies at a handful of sites worldwide have noted that sea level reached an exceedingly brief and similarly enigmatic high point around 81,000 years ago, says Dorale. Those results have been controversial and, for the most part, have been "politely ignored because they don't fit the presumed pattern" of how ice ages develop and progress, he says. The new findings are somewhat disturbing because they suggest that at some points during an Ice Age, sea level can rise as much as 2 meters over the course of a century. "It's tough to explain how to melt that much ice that fast," he admits.

Source: ScienceNews (11 February 2010)

A new early bull species shows that cattle and humans evolved side-by-side. The fossil skull is a missing link between modern cattle and their African ancestors. Although there is no evidence that early humans were actually herding early cattle 2.5 million years ago, the early humans and early cattle certainly shared the same landscape and beef was definitely on the menu all along, say researchers.
     The telltale fossil is a skull with enormous horns that belongs to the cattle genus Bos. It has been reassembled from over a hundred shards found at a dig that also contains early human remains, said paleontologist Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. "This means that the humans have been eating Bos since the beginnings of the genus Homo," said Martinez, referring to the genus to which humans belong.
     The million-year-old skull of the new Bos species, dubbed Bos buiaensis, has features of both earlier and later forms of Bos, which make it essentially a missing link between more modern cow-like species found in Eurasia and the earlier African cattle ancestors found alongside hominids and dating back 2.5 million years. "The most important point is that this Bos connects the African Bos with Eurasian bulls," and so confirms the long, uninterrupted coexistence of humans and cattle from the earliest times, he said.
     There are some researchers who might take issue with some of the details of the cattle family tree as Martinez and his colleagues have described it, but the overall conclusion seems sound, commented Sandra Olsen, curator of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "One way or the other, hominids are associated with these creatures," Olsen said.
     The distinctive horns of the new Bos also broach some other interesting matters, said Olsen. There is a tantalizing resemblance between the newfound Bos and depictions of bulls in ancient petroglyphs found in western Saudi Arabia - along the route once taken by humans out of Africa. The rock art shows exceptionally long-horned cattle being hunted by humans with bows, arrows and dogs, Olsen said. The petroglyphs are at least 5,000 years old, she said, but very hard to date exactly. "(The new Bos species) look so much like the pictures in Saudi Arabia," said Olsen, "which people have thought were exaggerations."

Source: Discovery News (9 February 2010)

A new paper, by Professor João Zilhão and colleagues, builds on his earlier research which proposed that, south of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountain chain (Spain), Neanderthals survived for several millennia after being replaced or assimilated by anatomically modern humans everywhere else in Europe.
     Although the reality of this 'Ebro Frontier' pattern has gained wide acceptance since it was first proposed by Professor Zilhão some twenty years ago, two important aspects of the model have remained the object of unresolved controversy: the exact duration of the frontier; and the causes underlying the eventual disappearance of those refugial Neanderthal populations.
     Professor Zilhão and colleagues now report new dating evidence for the Late Aurignacian of Portugal, an archaeological culture unquestionably associated with modern humans, that firmly constrains the age of the last Neanderthals of southern and western Iberia to no younger than some 37,000 years ago. This new evidence therefore puts at five millennia the duration of the Iberian Neanderthal refugium, and counters speculations that Neanderthal populations could have remained in the Gibraltar area until 28,000 years ago.
     These findings have important implications for the understanding of the archaic features found in the anatomy of a 30,000 year old child unearthed at Lagar Velho, Portugal. With the last of the Iberian Neanderthals dating to many millennia before the child was born, 'freak' crossbreeding between immediate ancestors drawn from distinct 'modern' and 'Neanderthal' gene pools cannot be a viable explanation. The skeleton's archaic features must therefore represent evolutionarily significant admixture at the time of contact, as suggested by the team who excavated and studied the fossil.
     Professor Zilhão said: "I believe the 'Ebro frontier' pattern was generated by both climatic and demographic factors, as it coincides with a period of globally milder climate during which oak and pine woodlands expanded significantly along the west façade of Iberia. Population decrease and a break-up of interaction networks probably occurred as a result of the expansion of such tree-covered landscapes, favouring the creation and persistence of population refugia. Then, as environments opened up again for large herbivore herds and their hunters as a result of the return to colder conditions, interaction and movement across the previous boundary must have ensued, and the last of the Neanderthals underwent the same processes of assimilation or replacement that underpin their demise elsewhere in Europe five millennia earlier."
     The dating was undertaken by experts at the University of Vienna led by Professor Eva Maria Wild, and at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. Professor Wild, head of the 14C program at VERA (Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator) said: "Accurate 14C dating was crucial for this study. For layer 2 of the cave sediment we achieved this by selecting teeth for 14C dating and by comparing the 14C results of the same sample after different, elaborate sample pre-treatments. Agreement between the results obtained with different methods provides a proof for accurate dating."

Source: ScienceDaily (27 January 2010)

A team of researchers from Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Study (CSIC) are examining a marshy area of Andalusian parkland to find evidence of a 3,000-year-old settlement. They believe that Tartessos, a wealthy civilization in southern Iberia that predates the Phoenicians, may have had its capital in the heart of what is now the Donana national park.
     Until now historians had dismissed the region as a possible site believing that it had been submerged since the Ice Age. But it is claimed new evidence suggests the waters may have receded in time for the Tartessians to build an urban centre, which was later destroyed in a tsunami. The Hinojos marshes, an area close to the mouth of the Guadalquiver river where it meets the Atlantic, have now been pinpointed as the site most likely to provide evidence of a lost city.
     Archaeological findings have already proved the existence of Tartessian culture at sites on the opposite bank of the river. "If they existed on the other side, they must also have been here (in Donana)," Sebastian Celestino, the archaeologist leading the project said. "There were earthquakes and one of them caused a tsunami that razed everything and which coincided with the era in which Tartessian power was at its height."
     Aerial photos show the existence of large circular and rectangular forms that could not have been produced by nature. The images, together with literary accounts by ancient Greek geographers have given weight to the theory that a great Tartessian city once existed within the park.
     The Tartessian civilization, which developed in southern Spain between the 11th and 7th centuries BCE and became rich trading gold and silver from local mines, has long been linked by mythologists to the Atlantis legend.

Sources: Telegraph.co.uk, The Olive Press (19 January 2010)

Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity's closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all.
     Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens). The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that they lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why modern humans eventually replaced them.
     Although hints of Neandertal art and jewelry have cropped up in recent years, such as pierced and grooved animal-tooth pendants or a decorated limestone slab on the grave of a child, these have often been shrugged off as artifacts mixed in from modern humans, imitation without understanding, or ambiguous in nature. Now archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe.
     At the Cueva (Cave) Antón, the scientists unearthed a pierced king scallop shell (Pecten maximus) painted with orange pigment made of yellow goethite and red hematite collected some five kilometers from that site. In material collected from the Cueva de los Aviones, alongside quartz and flint artifacts were bones from horses, deer, ibex, rabbits and tortoises as well as seashells from edible cockles (Glycymeris insubrica), mussels, limpets and snails; the researchers also discovered two pierced dog-cockleshells painted with traces of red hematite pigment. No dyes were found on the food shells or stone tools, suggesting the jewelry was not just painted at random. In addition, Zilhão and his colleagues saw an orange pigment–coated horse bone at Aviones that might have served as a pin to prepare or apply mineral dyes or to pierce painted hides as well as three thorny oyster (Spondylus gaederopus) shells that might have served as paint cups, holding as they did residues of hematite, charcoal, dolomite and pyrite. The researchers also came across lumps of red and yellow pigments there that had to have come from afield. Black sticks of the pigment manganese, which may have been used as body paint by Neanderthals, have previously been discovered in Africa. "[But] this is the first secure evidence for their use of cosmetics," Zilhão said. "The use of these complex recipes is new. It's more than body painting."
     These discoveries, in combination with earlier findings hinting at Neandertal ornaments and funerary practices, suggest "Neandertals had the same capabilities for symbolism, imagination and creativity as modern humans," Zilhão says. Instead of Neandertals and modern humans developing jewelry independently, two intriguing possibilities this discovery raises are that Neandertals taught our ancestors art-or vice versa. "I have argued that the archaeological culture associated with Europe's earliest modern humans, the Proto-Aurignacian, features a mix of ornaments of different traditions: small, basket-shaped beads similar to those known from South Africa since about 75,000 years ago, likely to have been used as parts of composite beadworks, and pierced animal teeth, likely to have been used as isolated pendants," Zilhão says. Although tooth pendants are entirely unknown in the modern humans of Africa and the Near East prior to their dispersal into Europe, Zilhão adds they are precisely the kinds of ornaments linked with the Châtelperronian industry in France during the upper Paleolithic period of the Stone Age, which is linked with the Neandertals. "This mix indicates a significant level of cultural exchange at the time of contact, and the persistence in early modern human cultures of Europe of items and traditions of Neandertal origin," he says.
     Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, said: "I agree that these findings help to disprove the view that Neanderthals were dim-witted. But, he added that evidence to that effect had been growing for at least the last decade. "It's very difficult to dislodge the brutish image from popular thinking." Professor Stringer said.

Sources: Scientific American, Discovery News (8 January 2010), BBC News (9 January 2010)

An archaeological dig in the Sierra Helada (Spain) has unearthed evidence of what local heritage councillor, Jaime Llinares, has described as Benidorm's first ever hotel. It's in the area known as 'L'Abric de la Pedrera', and archaeologists working at the site have so far discovered remains of ancient stone tools and evidence of flora and fauna which are believed to date back as much 10,000 years. Should carbon dating confirm their age, the site could prove to be the earliest known stable human settlement of the Marina Baixa. The oldest known to date in the Benidorm area is El Tossal de la Cala, from the Iberian period, which dates from less than 3,000 years ago.

Source: Typically Spanish (21 December 2009)

Early modern humans and their predecessors in Europe were mostly big game hunters, but a pile of well-nibbled bird bones suggests that at least some prehistoric European cavemen enjoyed small prey too, according to a new study. The 202 bones, belonging to the Aythya genus of diving ducks, were found at Bolomor Cave near the town of Tavernes in Valencia, Spain. The ducks date to around 150,000 years ago, and were not eaten daintily.
     "The birds were de-fleshed using both stone tools and teeth," co-author Ruth Blasco said, noting that some of the ducks may have even been consumed raw. "The modifications observed on small remains from Bolomor Cave are the strongest evidence for bird consumption in the European Middle Pleistocene," she added.
     Blasco, a researcher at the Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, and colleague Josep Fernandez Peris analyzed the duck bones under high magnification. They determined three characteristics allow the bird remains to be considered duck dinner leftovers. First, they found 'cutmarks on bones of both the front and hind limb.' Second, they identified the 'presence of burning patterns on the extremities of the bones, areas of the skeleton with less meat.' Finally, the researchers discovered 'human tooth marks on limb bones.'
     Although both Neanderthal and modern human remains have been found at the Bolomor Cave complex, the geological level of the roasted duck finds suggests that Homo heidelbergensis is the human species that ate the duck meals. The remains of at least seven hearths additionally prove that big-brained, tool-wielding H. heidelbergensis was a master at creating and controlling fire.
     The findings, which are published in the October issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, indicate early Europeans enjoyed a much broader diet than first suspected. "The acquiring of fast-running and quick-flying small prey requires a sophisticated technology and involves obtaining and processing ways different from those used for large and medium-sized animals," according to the scientists, who think Heidelberg Man might have used traps, bird calls and other techniques to obtain ducks.
     Gerrit Dusseldorp, a University of Leiden expert on Neanderthals and early humans, suggests dining on birds and other small prey might have been much more common in prehistoric Europe. He also proving small prey consumption is inherently more difficult due to the size of bones and the way the animals were probably eaten.

Source: Discovery News (25 November 2009)

A group of archaeologists working in the Astigarraga cave in Deba (Basque Country, Spain) have uncovered the oldest cave paintings discovered in the region to date. Dating back between 20,000 and 22,000 years, the markings represent a group of 16 'paired fragments' in red. Doctor of History and expert in cave paintings, Marcos García Díez, speaking during a conference with press, stressed that this was one of the most important discoveries made in the Basque Country since the discovery of the Altxerri cave in Aia and Ekain in Deba, and highlighted the archeological 'potential' of the site.
     The Astigarraga cave, which was first discovered in 1967, contains other paintings such as one of a mass of black paint covered with concretions of lime, possibly intended to represent an equine animal; or another, of several engraved lines going in various directions which seemingly stand for an anthropomorph. García Díez insisted that, although the images, discovered in August, do not have 'much visual impact', their importance lies in the fact that the 'paired fragments' - 'very rare in cave art' - are binding proof that they were painted in the Upper Paleolithic age and, more specifically, during the Solutrean era, of which they are typical. In his judgement, these 'paired fragments' can be explained by means of Ethnography, or the study of human societies, which would reveal that many primitive groups of the age still used their fingers to paint with during rituals in which they attempted to contact supernatural and transcendent forces. The director of the dig, José Antonio Mujika, who began studying Astigarraga in 2005, also indicated that inside the cave they had found bones placed in crevices and a small throwing dart hidden among stones.

Source: EIRB.com (8 October 2009)

Cave art seems always to have been thought of, for no especially good reason, as the work of men. Perhaps it is because much of the art lies in deep, dark caverns, or because many of the paintings and engravings are of large food animals such as mammoth and bison, which men might be supposed to have hunted. An American archaeologist has now proposed that at least some of the art is, in fact, the work of women. He has measured outlined handprints found on cave walls in France and Spain, some dating to 28,000 years ago, and he has shown that the relative lengths of fingers fit the proportions of female hands better than those of males.
     "I had access to lots of people of European descent who were willing to let me scan their hands as reference data," said Dean Snow, of Pennsylvania State University. By matching their hand profiles against photographs of paint-outlined hands from the caves of El Castillo and Gargas, in northern Spain, and Pech-Merle in the Dordogne region of France, "even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there".
     The handprints were created by placing the palm, or possibly the back, of the hand against the cave wall, taking a mouthful of powdered pigment - usually red ochre - and blowing it. Sometimes a finger appears to be missing. Such absences have been attributed to mutilation, but bending the finger back while spraying the hand with the pigment powder would give the same effect.
     Professor Snow believes that many of these hand prints are those of women. In two examples from Castillo, about 28,000 years old, "The very long ring finger on one example is a dead giveaway for male hands," he said. "The other has a long index finger and a short little finger - thus very feminine." At Pech-Merle, pigment-outlined hands encircle the famous 'spotted horses', the spots on which were created by the same blowing technique. By measuring and analysing the Pech-Merle hand stencils, Snow found that many were, indeed, female in proportion, raising the possibility, to say the least, that the horses were also created by women.
     Handprints are not found in all, or indeed most, caves, however, and since many are those of men, it is so far impossible to say firmly which if any of the great animal friezes in caves such as Lascaux or Chauvet might be women's work. There is also the possibility that children contributed to the painting endeavours. The late Alexander Marshack noted that a zone near the floor in some caves had chaotic 'spaghetti'-like lines traced in the soft surface, and suggested that young cave-persons had been obtaining experience of drawing by torchlight in the gloom.

Source: Ties Online (11 September 2009)

Archaeologists have long been puzzled by a 1-million-year pause between when early humans started making sophisticated hand axes with two-faced blades in Africa 1.5 million years ago and when the technology finally got to Europe. But new research is showing that advanced Stone Age tools got to Europe close to the time they reached other sites outside of Africa.
     In a letter published in Nature, two archaeologists have shown that axes from southeastern Spain are from 900,000 years ago, much older than had been believed. That would mean it took about 600,000 years for the new ax-making technique to get to Europe. What was surprising was that older axes hadn't been found before in Europe, says archaeologist Luis Gibert, a co-author on the letter.
     The work is credible, says Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "If you asked me yesterday when were the earliest hand axes in Europe, I would say we have an excellent site in England called Boxgrove and that's about 500,000," he says. The new research has almost doubled that time period, from 500,000 to 900,000 years ago, Potts says.
     Gibert and fellow author Gary Scott are at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, a research institute in Berkeley, Calif., that studies the history of the Earth and dating methods. They used analysis of changes in the Earth's magnetic fields to date the axes. Very fine-grained magnetic materials in the rock will orient themselves with the current magnetic field, making it possible to measure which era a given area came from by dating the polarity of the Earth's magnetic fields at the time. In addition to the palaeomagnetic technique, Gibert notes that a record in rock layers of the remains of micro-mammals such as rodents, developed by Walker's team at Estrecho del Quípar, was crucial in confirming the dates. The Solana del Zamborino cave hadn't been studied in more than 30 years.
     Stone axes, called Acheulian by archaeologists, were "the Swiss Army Knife of the Stone Age," Potts says. Hand axes date to roughly 1.7 million years ago in eastern Africa. And age estimates of 1.2 million years and 800,000 years for hand axes from two Israeli sites indicate that this tool-making style spread out of Africa long before the origin of Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago. Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis are all species known to be associated with Acheulian axes, which have two-sided cutting faces that were made of many types of stone for still-unconfirmed uses. They began to be replaced by a smaller, more mobile kit of specialized stone tools about 400,000 years ago, Potts says.
     Perhaps even more interesting than the previous gap in the arrival of the hand-ax technology is why the axes weren't more popular outside Africa, says Ian Tattersall, curator in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Common at sites in Africa, the hand axes are much rarer in Europe and Asia. "That's the question: If this was such a revolutionarily wonderful new technology, why weren't they more widely used?" Tattersall says.
     The older dates for the Spanish axes are now expected to generate new studies at other European rock shelters bearing Acheulian artefacts. But those studies may be hampered by the lack of appropriate sediments with which to identify palaeomagnetic polarity reversals, says Walker.

Sources: Nature (2 September 2009), Discovery News, USA Today (3 September 2009)