In Britain, Ireland and southern Scandinavia, the Early Neolithic is characterised by monumental constructions (e.g. causewayed enclosures, dolmens) and by specific traditions of depositional practice. Some aspects of these practices are similar in both regions, for example the forms and use of monuments, their general sequences of development and the traditions of deposition (types of objects and their treatment, chosen sites and so on).
Despite these similarities, however, there has been little explicit comparative work, largely also because of research paradigms that have tended to emphasise local and regional peculiarities to the detriment of generalised similarities.
Na GrĂŁ-Bretanha, Irlanda e EscandinĂĄvia Meridional, o NeolĂtico Inicial ĂŠ caracterizado por construçþes monumentais (por exemplo, cercados com calçadas, dĂłlmens) e por tradiçþes especĂficas de prĂĄtica deposicional. Alguns aspectos dessas prĂĄticas sĂŁo semelhantes em ambas as regiĂľes, por exemplo, as formas e o uso de monumentos, suas sequĂŞncias gerais de desenvolvimento e as tradiçþes de deposição (tipos de objetos e seu tratamento, locais escolhidos e assim por diante).
Apesar dessas semelhanças, no entanto, houve pouco trabalho comparativo explĂcito, em grande parte tambĂŠm por causa de paradigmas de pesquisa que tendiam a enfatizar peculiaridades locais e regionais em detrimento de semelhanças generalizadas.
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Scientists have discovered that waves of migration from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains to the Levant helped develop the Chalcolithic culture that existed in Israel's Upper Galilee region some 6,500 years ago. "Certain characteristics, such as genetic mutations contributing to blue eye color, were not seen in the DNA test results of earlier Levantine human remains," according to one of the researchers.
So blue eyes come from Turkey and the Zagros? Theyâre a recessive gene, so itâs no wonder they didnât take hold in the Levant. Very interesting article.
Scientists in Greenland announced Wednesday they had found DNA dating back two million years -- the oldest ever extracted -- in sediment from the Ice Age, opening a new chapter in paleogenetics.
"We are breaking the barrier of what we thought we could reach in terms of genetic studies," said Mikkel Winther Pedersen, co-author of a new study published in science journal Nature.
"It was long thought that one million years was the boundary of DNA survival, but now we are twice as old" as that, told AFP.
They found the DNA fragments in sediment from the northernmost part of Greenland known as Kap Copenhagen, said the University of Copenhagen lecturer.
The fragments "come from an environment that we do not see anywhere on Earth today," he added. Frozen in a remote unpopulated area, the DNA had been very well preserved.
New technology enabled the scientists to determine that the 41 fragments were more than a million years older than the oldest known DNA, from a Siberian mammoth.
Teeth from mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost for more than a million years have yielded the world's oldest DNA ever sequenced, according to a new study.
Teeth from mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost for more than a million years have yielded the world's oldest DNA ever sequenced, according to a new study.
Researchers said the three specimens, one roughly 800,000 years old and two over a million years old, provide important insights into the giant Ice Age mammals, including the ancient heritage of the woolly mammoth.
The genomes far exceed the oldest previously sequenced DNA - a horse dating between 780,000 to 560,000 years ago.
Iâve seen this popping up on various pages. Enough that I have to stop and point out that there is so much wrong with this series of âfactsâ from the did-you-know blog. It also stands as an example of the complexity of the fossil record and how scientific interpretations change with new data.
Because I donât want their reblogs to encourage such, in my opinion, terrible fact checking the credit and validity of the screenshots can be found at the permalink here (http://didyouknowblog.com/post/153935113937/about-150000-years-ago-a-neanderthal-fell-into).
 The sources that the did-you-know blog used to generate this synopsis are from a 2016 article on seeker.com (associated with Discovery) and a 2015 article on ancient-origins.net (which, in my opinion, operates as an arm-chair archaeologistâs click-bait page).Â
Most of the actual claims within the sources come from the JHE Lari et al. 2015 paper, âThe Neanderthal in the karst: first dating, morphometric, and paleogenetic data on the fossil skeleton from Altamura (Italy),â which is available through researchgate/academia.edu.
 1. That is a neanderthal toe bone pictured, but it has nothing to do with the Altamura skeleton:
 The quote ââŚand the high-quality genome sequence was taken from this small toe bone.â, appears to be uncritically lifted from a secondary image within the 2016 seeker article. The quote attachment, in itself, appears to be an error on seekers part because you will get 10 articles using the same photo with repeated tag-line. The earliest of these dates to the online announcement of a high-quality nuclear genome recovered from the pictured toe bone obtained from a site in the Altai mountains of Siberia (PrĂźfer et al. 2014, open-access through Pubmed). Â
 2.  Although it is likely, this may not be from the really cool pictured skeleton:
The actual genetic sequencing was done on a portion of the right shoulder (mentioned in Seeker, source for ancient-origins, and the Lari et al. 2015 abstract)
They original authors think this portion of the shoulder fell from the Altamura man but it was actually sourced from a small chamber behind the calcified skeleton (Lari et al. 2015 supplementary material). This is problematic because they have found other animal remains deposited by water-flow and movement within cave sites are notoriously complex.Â
The above could simply be checked with a couple quick searches, which is initially what poked me.Â
The rest is associated with the original post but gets into deeper issues intended for students, people in the field, and boredom masochists....
3.    Neanderthals were probably dark skinned, but we really arenât sure (this goes for all previous hominins as well):
This did-you-know snip appears to have been spurred by the 2016 seeker article that is primarily reporting on an artistic rendition of the âhyper-realistic model of his face and bodyâŚâ. The artistic reconstruction is done by the Kennis brothers, who do amazing work that I am a big fan of, but the seeker article points out that data from DNA analysis was used for the reconstruction.
Because most people knowâfrom various sourcesâthat DNA gives us hints at hair/eye/skin color, this statement may lead one to conclude that some of the artistic decisions were informed by what we know about the fleshy bits of extinct human groups. Given our modern fixation on skin pigment one might even think that the genetics behind variation in color may be well understood, but, in reality, we only understand that separate (read totally different) networks of genes are associated with light skin pigment in Europe and East Asia (Tiosano et al. 2016). More to the point, they appear to have only recently become common in Europe ( after ~5,000 years ago [Wilde et al. 2016]) and East Asia (after 30,000-25,000 years ago [Yang et al. 2016]), which is well after modeled neanderthal breeding events. Â
Some savvy people may now point to the Lalueza-Fox et al. (2007) that indicated a mutated version of the MC1R gene associated with red hair and light skin in two neanderthals. Herein the authors clearly state that 1) this variant isnât found in and of the modern humans the sequenced and 2) that the two copies hypothesized to be needed to produce red hair/light skin existed in an estimated 1 out of 100 neanderthals. Still, this caught media attention and may be the DNA evidence used thereafter in artistic reconstructions (although no article I read indicated where the DNA information comes from).
Critically, one of the two neanderthals used in the 2007 study has since been reassessed with updated methods by Talamo et al. (2016), who showed that most of the skeletal remains were not Neanderthal. Actually, direct dating, isotope analysis, protein analysis, and library (as opposed to PCR) based aDNA analysis showed that 4 fragments were human, 1 was a pig, 1 came from a hoofed animal, and 2 large carnivores but no neanderthal. Unfortunately, the 2007Â paper describing the MC1R variation sampled from a fragment of the skull that was not returned to the museum by subsequent researchers, so thereâs no way to directly reconcile the discrepancy.
Still, the fragments all came from layer I, while the claim of them issuing from a neanderthal were based on the âmixedâ features of the mandible ( but DNA = human) and the indirectly dated tools found in the much lower layer III. Talamo et al. point out that the initial DNA sequence was derived from short PCR sequences that could be modern DNA contaminated by neanderthal aDNA (presumably from within a lab that already contained neanderthal sequences). If this happened for one of the two neanderthals that produced strange MC1R variants analyzed in the same lab, then the second is called into question (in my opinion). This might go to explain why additional analyses looking at similar questions have failed to find this variant in other neanderthal or denisovan aDNA (Cerqueira et al. 2012; Ding et al. 2014) or why other gene networks associated with light skin in Europeans are absent in both archaic groups (Tiosano et al. 2016).
Even if these genes were present in neanderthals, we have a very poor grasp on how isolated genes are reflected in outward appearance. This is because they are incredibly complex systems that can be silenced or promoted by other active gene networks. Of course, in looking at the different networks that result in lighter skin color between people of European and East Asian decent, it is entirely possible that, over time, other archaic human groups evolved genotypes promoting lighter skin color in ways that we canât currently identify. Point being, I think that the DNA suggests that we currently have more reasons to suspect that most people prior to ~20,000 were darker skinned individuals and not the very modern European tone depicted in most artistic reconstructions (which suggests it is the scientists job to convey the most up to date information to the artist).Â
 4.    This may not be a neanderthal at all
The researchers were only able to obtain 82 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA in the hyper-variable-I, which contains ~359 base pairs. For reference, the 1997 Krings et al. paper looking at the first identified neanderthal was able to sequence this complete region (this is more a comment on preservation and not a criticism on the hard work of the original authors). Of course, the four base-pairs that differ from the human reference sequence do match up with neanderthals, but DNA degrades, amplification makes mistakes (I do know the probabilities but those assume weâve thought of everything -> yes the old mtDNA from the reassessed Talamo et al. 2016 individual was used for reference to Altamura), and mystery hominins are something to be taken into account.
Furthermore, although mitochondrial DNA is extremely informative, we incorrectly assumed (with complete reconstructed mitochondrial sequences) that there was no interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals. This wasnât corrected until ancient nuclear genomes became available. Similarly, mitochondrial DNA sequenced from a cache of bones in Spain that are thought to be very similar to the ancestors of neanderthals initially appeared more closely related to the denisovian populations in Siberia. It wasnât until this year that nuclear DNA reaffirmed their assumed relationship (Meyer et al. 2016).
Another reason to think this is a neanderthal is based on the shape of where the shoulder attaches to your upper arm. Mostly this is an outline that looks a 2D jelly-bean, with humans looking more narrow at the top (like a pear), neanderthals being more even at the top and bottom, and older hominins being more narrow (Lari et al. 2015). Even though Altamara sits between the convex hulls of two âgroupsâ of neanderthals, the recent findings of nearly complete skeletons in South Africa that possess a mixture of ancestral and distinct bone shapes acts as a cautionary tale to species designation based on single characteristics/isolated remains. Although it may seem like a stretch we know very little about hominin variation during this time and, even if the shoulder matches the skull, this specimen is heavily calcified. Â
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Rethinking the Dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa
by Huw S. Groucutt, Michael D. Petraglia, Geoff Bailey, Eleanor M. L. Scerri, Ash Parton, Laine Clark-Balzan, Richard P. Jennings, Laura Lewis, James Blinkhorn, Nick A. Drake, Paul S. Breeze, Robyn H. Inglis, Maud H. Devès, Matthew Meredith-Williams, Nicole Boivin, Mark G. Thomas and Aylwyn Scally
âCurrent fossil, genetic, and archeological data indicate that Homo sapiens originated in Africa in the late Middle Pleistocene. By the end of the Late Pleistocene, our species was distributed across every continent except Antarctica, setting the foundations for the subsequent demographic and cultural changes of the Holocene. The intervening processes remain intensely debated and a key theme in hominin evolutionary studies. We review archeological, fossil, environmental, and genetic data to evaluate the current state of knowledge on the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa. The emerging picture of the dispersalprocess suggests dynamic behavioral variability, complex interactions between populations, and an intricate genetic and cultural legacy. This evolutionary and historical complexity challenges simple narratives and suggests that hybrid models and the testing of explicit hypotheses are required to understand the expansion of Homo sapiens into Eurasiaâ (read more/open access).
(Open access source: Evolutionary Anthropology 24(4):149-164, 2015 via Academia.edu)Â
DNA from Neandertal relative may shake up human family tree
by Ann Gibbons
âIn a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestorâor close relativeâof Neandertals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neandertals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution.
Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals in the mid-1990s from Sima de los Huesos (âpit of bonesâ), a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, they had noted that the fossils looked a lot like primitive Neandertals. The Sima people, who lived before Neandertals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neandertals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neandertals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so.But in 2013, the Sima fossilsâ identity suddenly became complicated when a study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the bones revealed that it did not resemble that of a Neandertal. Instead, it more closely matched the mtDNA of a Denisovan, an elusive type of extinct human discovered when its DNA was sequenced from a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia.Â
That finding was puzzling, prompting researchers to speculate that perhaps the Sima fossils had interbred with very early Denisovans or that the âDenisovanâ mtDNA was the signature of an even more ancient hominin lineage, such as H. erectus. At the time, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who had obtained the mtDNA announced that they would try to sequence the nuclear DNA of the fossils to solve the mysteryâ (read more).
