Ya I meant its scientific Latin name, I'll look it up oh and btw, quadruple post Marked.
ADDIS ABABA, 12 June (IRIN) - The world’s oldest human remains, unearthed in Africa, may finally solve the puzzle of the origins of man, scientists said on Wednesday.
The 160,000-year-old fossils, the oldest ever Homo sapiens and excavated in a remote region of Ethiopia, appear to prove that the continent was the cradle of humanity, the scientists said.
"This is the definitive answer to whether humans evolved from Africa," archeologist Dr Berhane Asfaw told a news conference in Addis Ababa. "We are waiting to be proved wrong," he said.
Scientists say the three near-complete skulls * one being a child - are the best-preserved remains and between 30,000 and 60,000 years older than previous finds. They are almost five times older than those found in Europe, and the oldest ever direct predecessors of humans. The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens found in Africa had been dated to about 100,000 years, although they were less complete and missing bones.
"Ethiopia is the Garden of Eden," Asfaw said, as he unveiled one of the skulls from the archaeological dig. "The whole history of human evolution is here."
The most famous remains found in Ethiopia was Lucy * a three and a half million-year-old complete skeleton that was discovered in 1974. Archaeologists working in the country have also discovered a skeleton dating back 5.8 million years.
The latest finds - which scientists have named 'Idaltu', meaning 'elder' - were made in a desolate area 224 km miles northeast of Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. Scattered across the same area were thousands of stone tools, including hand axes, along with the butchered bones of hippopotamus and antelope * their staple food.
"These African fossils are now the world’s oldest near modern humans," said Asfaw, who discovered the skull of the child in 200 pieces. It has taken the last three years, since the bones were excavated, for meticulous cleaning and research work to be complete. The region where the excavations took place is one of the most inhospitable on earth, where temperatures often reach more than 50 degrees centigrade.
Archaeologists, under a joint 20-strong United States and Ethiopian team, have been working in the area for the last six years. Skull fragments from a total of 10 individuals were unearthed but were lacking their jaws and any bones below the neck.
The scientists say that Idaltu has almost identical features to modern humans. The skulls have a prominent forehead, flattened face and reduced brow that contrast with older humans’ projecting, heavy-browed skulls. He has a slightly larger head and brain than modern humans, but the scientists do not believe he was brighter.
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This would mean that humans from 5.8 million years are pretty much us, and just as smart, we have just compunded knowledge from many years, so despite physical differences, we are mostly the same, although their brains were larger.
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After the discovery of Archanthropus europaeus petraloniensis (750,000 + - years-old), and the 500,000 +- year-old "proto-artisans workshop" in the Petralona Cave [at Halkidiki, in Northern Greece], the elephant hunters of Ptolemaīda (3,000,000 +- years-old), and Homo Erectus Trigliensis (11,000,000 +- years-old), the indefatigable paleoanthropologist, president emeritus and founder of the Anthropological Association of Hellas (AAH), Dr. Aris Poulianos, is now presenting us with new and tangible evidence concerning the appearance and evolution of human life on Hellenic soil. Evidence that will, on the one hand, deal a crushing blow to the Afro-centrist theory about the origin of our common ancestors, and, on the other, prove vital for chronologically evaluating Hellenic prehistory.
In December of 2003, Dr. Poulianos unearthed the petrified remains of seven erectus humans who lived in Halkidiki approximately 12,000,000 years ago.
We met Dr. Poulianos in the places where he does most of his work; the Petralona Cave and the adjacent Museum of the AAH in Halkidiki. It is here that Dr. Poulianos continues to resist the persistent provocations by the rulers of the Byzantine-Romaic, client state known as Hellas. These provocations go back more than twenty years, and their purpose is to remove him from the Cave and Museum by any devious means possible (1). He graciously granted us the following interview.
Q. Dr. Poulianos, what are your latest findings regarding the origin of man on the soil of Hellas?
A. Based upon the stratigraphy of the soil in the area around the town of Nea Trigliea, Halkidiki [about 40 kilometers south of Thessalonica], and the new discoveries we've made, we can say that the "man-bearing" strata is that of the Upper Miocene, which relates chronologically to 12 million years before our time. (Emphasis in original.)
Q. After your discovery of the Standing Man of Trigliea (Homo Erectus Trigliensis), in 1997, has your research yielded any further information regarding the appearance of humans during the Miocene period?
A. Yes, it has. Aside from the fossilized tibia [shinbone] of Trigliensis in '97, we've found an additional 7 tibiae from individuals in the Miocene community, for a total of 8; in addition to which we've unearthed numerous long bones from boars.
Q. When were these found and where?
A. This past December, on the other side of Mount Kalavros.
Q. Did these individuals walk upright?
A. Completely upright. This is shown by the torzine angle of their tibiae, which is 23 degrees; in other words, the same as that of contemporary man.
Plus a 17 million year-old Anthropopithicus
Q. Why did humans adopt the upright position, Dr. Poulianos?
A. Helladopithecus (2) originally seems to have stood semi-upright. His upper thighbone was discovered in Euboea in 1974, and it showed a torzine angle of 15 degrees. Among all the other species of apes (Dryopithecus, Ouranopithecus, etc.) discovered in Greece, only Helladopithecus, 17,000,000 +- years-old, stands in a semi-upright position. One explanation for this may be because he was required to come down from the trees and run to escape the fires caused by the lava spewing out from the volcanoes that were active in the Aegean region during the epoch in which he lived. The newly discovered pieces of charred trees that are on display here at the museum are representative -- as shown by the stratigraphy of the soil -- of the flora that existed in the environment in which Helladopithecus lived. (Emphasis in original.)
Q. You mean to say that the lava from the volcanoes in the Aegean reached all the way to here?
A. Most assuredly. Helladopithecus lived throughout Hellas, and the lava reached all the way here and to other parts of his territory as well. Later on, I will show you a monolithic layer of that lava not very far from here. I really marvel at why this has not piqued the interest of the Department of Geology of the University of Thessalonica.
Q. In other words, Helladopithecus is the ancestor of mankind?
A. Yes, he represents the "connecting link" between ape and man.
Q. To the ears of a "non-expert," that statement sounds as if you are confirming Darwin's theory of evolution.
A. I am by no means confirming Darwin; it is Aristotle I am confirming. It was he who introduced the theory of the Evolution of Species in his 10-volume work Historia Animalium [Περί τά ζώα ίστορίαι], that Darwin copied without ever once citing Aristotle, or acknowledging his debt to the great philosopher.
The first toolmaker
Q. Let us return to our 12,000,000 year-old man. Based on what's known so far, is it possible to come to some sort of conclusions as to his nature?
A. The most important is that, by necessity, he stood and walked in an upright position. Further, that it was he who grasped and developed the technology required to make the first tools. This man was a rational and inventive being, in whom we see the development of not only an upright stance, but cognition and speech as well.
Q. Was he capable of articulated speech?
A. I suspect that he was. This is because he lived by hunting in a group; an activity that presupposes elementary communicative skills.
Q. With what other kinds of animals did Homo erectus trigliensis share his environment?
A. He lived with rhinoceroses, deer, a variety of grazing animals, horses, and even the early giraffe. Recently, among other things, we found a bone from the leg of a giraffe that was dated to the same period as Homo erectus trigliensis, and is on display here at the museum.
Q. I can't help wondering what Mr. Leakey (the originator of the Afro-centrist theory) would say were he to see it.
A. He would most likely ask: "How is it possible that the giraffes of Greece are older than those of Africa?" But ... this is not my fault!
Q. If we were to try to mentally recreate the environment of Hellas 12,000,000 years ago, would we most likely imagine it to be like a jungle?
A. Exactly. It was a jungle in a naturally temperate climate that bordered on the tropical, and it included all of the fauna I mentioned.
Q. Aside from the stratigraphy, have you utilized any other dating method to determine the ages of your new discoveries?
A. Yes. In cooperation with the University of South Carolina in the U.S.A., and with Professor Alan Nairn of that institution, they've all been dated using the method of paleomagnetism. This is how it was determined that the Homo erectus trigliensis remains were 12,000,000 +- years-old, and that the fossilized flora we unearthed are 17,000,000 +- years-old
http://www.grecoreport.com/twelve_mi..._halkidiki.htm
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Three fossil skulls from Ethiopia have been revealed as the oldest human remains yet discovered.
The 160,000-year-old finds plug an important gap in the fossil record around the time our species first appeared and provides strong new evidence that Homo sapiens originated only in Africa.
"These are landmark finds in unravelling our origins," says Chris Stringer, at the Natural History Museum in London, and a champion of the 'Out of Africa' hypothesis. He believes modern humans evolved in Africa before migrating across the globe, rather than evolving in parallel in different places.
"The problem with the African record is that it has been really sketchy," says Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the team that made the discoveries. There are good human fossils from 100,000 years ago, he adds, but from then back to 300,000 years ago the remains are either highly fragmented, poorly dated or both.
In contrast, the newly revealed skulls have precise dates thanks to the fragments of volcanic rocks found with the fossils. When rocks cool, they begin to accumulate argon gas from the decay of a potassium isotope. Analysing the gas gives the rock's age, in this case 154,000 to 160,000 years old.
Neanderthal influence
Homo sapiens appeared sometime between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago, and controversy has raged over whether there was a single African origin or whether other hominids such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals made a significant contribution to the evolution of modern humans by interbreeding.
The latest fossils provide substantial support for the Out of Africa camp, but proponents of the alternative 'multi-regional' hypothesis do not believe the argument is over. "This could easily be one of the ancestors of modern Europeans, but I don't believe it is the only ancestor," says Milford Wolpoff at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The skulls look almost human, but retain some slight primitive features and so the team has given them their own subspecies - Homo sapiens idāltu. The skulls, from two men and a child, are also very large by human standards suggesting the adults cut an imposing figure.
The recovery of the fossils began in 1997, near the Ethiopian village of Herto, when White stumbled across a fossilised hippopotamus skull. His team eventually recovered skull fragments from 10 humans, along with many stone tools and animal fossils. The child's skull was in over 200 pieces strewn over hundreds of metres and it took two years of painstaking work to reconstruct it.
Ancestor worship
Some of the most intriguing aspects of the skulls are the modifications made after death. One of the adult skulls has parallel grooves around the perimeter cut with a stone tool.
"There's no meat in the places they're finding the cut marks," points out Sally McBrearty, a stone tool expert at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, so they did not result from cannibalism.
The child's skull is also marked and broken edges have been polished. This suggests to White that the skull was carried around after death and buffed up in the process - possibly as part of an ancestor worshipping ritual. This is the earliest evidence that bones were kept by descendants and points to an advanced level of cultural development. Journal reference: Nature (vol 423, p 737)
Skull
What they might have looked like
