Bianfu Cave

 

Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, China, has yielded fossil remains of at least three Denisovan humans who lived between 167,000 and 134,000 years ago. Denisovan fossils have been identified in only five places: China, Laos, Russia, Siberia and Tibet. The fossils found in the Bianfu Cave are the southernmost Denisovan remains found to date. Read what John Hawks has to say about this recent discovery.

"The site of Bianfu Cave provides evidence that this group spanned all of China during the later Middle Pleistocene." (1) New Denisovans from China’s southwest - John Hawks

Healthcare Among Archaic Humans

 

The skull of a child of around 12 years of age at time of death found among other human remains at Qafzeh in Israel. This individual - Qafzeh 11 - suffered a compound cranial trauma, indicated with arrows, with signs of healing. This individual was buried after people cared for him, possibly for an extended period of time.

Dr. Johnn Hawks, a world renown paleoanthropologist, has written:

There is growing evidence of healthcare in the archaeological and skeletal record of hominins. In our article we point to some of the famous cases, like the KNM-ER 1808 individual, who lived around 1.6 million years ago and survived for some time with debilitating and painful periosteal reaction and cortical bone thickening. In the Middle Pleistocene, the case of craniosynostosis of the Cranium 14 individual from Sima de los Huesos is notable; in the Late Pleistocene record, Neanderthals with evidence of extensive osteoarthritis, losses of limbs, and near-complete loss of teeth are also very well known.

Some of the humans buried at Qafzeh Cave were covered with red ocher, a symbolic blood covering, suggesting the hope for life after death.

Read more here:  Bringing emotional cognition to deep time - John Hawks

What Paleoanthropologists Want to Discover

This image depicts the "linear evolution theory" and is called the "March of Progress" image. However, the evidence of many groups of archaic humans living at the same time requires a new hypothesis. The linear evolution theory was dismissed 50 years ago. If similar images appear in science texts, it reveals how most textbooks are 40-50 years behind the front edge of the sciences.

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

Paleoanthropologists recognize that there were many groups of archaic humans. Among them were the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. A recent genome study revealed that the Denisovans "diverged from Neanderthals 400,000 years ago and that at least two distinct Denisovan populations mixed with ancestors of present-day Asians."

There are limited physical remains of Denisovans. These include a finger bone, three teeth, and a skull fragment from the Denisova Cave; and a jawbone and the Xiahe mandible from Baishiya Karst Cave at the northeastern Tibetan Plateau.

In a November 8, 2024 interview, Dr. L. Ongaro said, “It’s a common misconception that humans evolved suddenly and neatly from one common ancestor, but the more we learn the more we realize interbreeding with different hominins occurred and helped to shape the people we are today."

Richard Leakey long ago abandoned the linear evolution misconception, saying:

Current findings on human evolution have brought us to the position where much of what we believed to have theoretically happened proves to be incorrect. Much that is in the textbooks, much that is still being taught in universities about human evolution is no longer true, but it continues to be taught because the implications of recent discoveries are insufficiently understood.

It was principally Weidenreich, Le Gros Clark, and a few of the people of that generation, just previous to mine, who put forward and strongly defended the idea that man had gone through a very simple series of stages of evolution: the pongid stage, an Australopithecine stage, a Pithecanthropus stage, and then man as we know him today. Theoretically, this had always seemed highly unlikely to some of us, since it meant that man had done something which no other mammal had done: evolved in a single straight line instead of having one main branch, with many experimental side branches which failed to make the grade. Yet the old theory persists. Linked with it is the concept, still very, very widely taught and very widely believed, that man in the relatively near past was at a pongid or ape stage of evolution. In such a very short time, three or four million years, as the books and many of my colleagues put it, we are supposed to have lost our huge canine teeth, lost our simian shelves, lost our long, brachiating arms, ceased to dwell in the trees, and many other similar but, I fear, erroneous concepts. These were theories which in the light of current facts no longer stand up."

Anthropologists such as John Hawks note that there is a wider range of anatomical features among Neanderthals than is generally recognized. Hawks also believes that there are limits to what can be determined by genetic tests of archaic fossils. He relies on morphological studies. 

The story of human origins cannot be understood from DNA alone. That can take us back only to about 500,000 years ago. What about the humans who lived before that? We have artifactual evidence of humans that date to over 500,000 years ago. Some human fossils found in Eastern Africa date to well before 500,000 years ago.

When Jeremy DeSilva, a British anthropologist, compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus fossils of human ancestors ("hominins") between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old, he discovered that all of the ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes. Chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position. This makes it possible for apes to climb trees with great ease. While walking, humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees. The human ankle bones are quite distinct from those of apes.

The discovery of a complete fourth metatarsal of A. afarensis at Hadar that shows the deep, flat base and tarsal facets that "imply that its midfoot had no ape-like midtarsal break. These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like that of modern humans." (Carol Ward, William H. Kimbel, Donald C. Johanson, Feb. 2011) 

The Ward, Kimbel and Johanson study reveals how scientists can change their minds. Donald Johanson was the person who announced to the world that Lucy was "ape of the South" or Australopithecus. Has he since reconsidered that assessment?

Excavations at the Boker Tachtit archaeological site in the Negev Desert revealed that modern humans and Neanderthals lived together.

Today various groups of Australopithecus are recognized. Some are gracile and others are robust. There are Australopithecus afarensis (including Lucy), Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus sediba, Kenyanthropus platyops, and "robust" specimens like Paranthropus robustus and Paranthropus aethiopicus.

In 2011 researchers discovered jaw bones and teeth of four individuals in the Afar region of Ethiopia that date to between 3.3m and 3.5m years. These archaic humans were alive at the same time as other groups of early humans, suggesting that it is time to abandon the linear evolution hypothesis. Clearly, there were more archaic humans living 3 million years ago than is generally recognized. How they may be related is the great question facing paleoanthropologists.

Related reading: A look at the Neanderthal from Altamura, John Hawks; Can Molecular Models be aligned with Human Morphology?; Many Groups of Archaic Humans (video); Ancient human ancestor Lucy lived alongside at least 4 other proto-human species | Live Science; “Lucy”, superstar of evolution, at fifty; When hominins walked in each others' tracks

Stone Age Humans Used Wood

 

Humans of the Stone Age were extremely resourceful. They used organic materials close at hand to fabricate tools and useful implements. Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, is an ancient site on the bank of the Jordan River south of the historic Lake Hula. Excavations exposed the remains of fires from 780,000 years ago. There is evidence of cooked plant foods, nuts, and fish. Some wood is also preserved in the sediments, including a wooden plank with intentional shaping. This currently is the oldest modified wooden artifact in the archaeological record.

Dr. John Hawks, a world renown paleoanthropologist, recently wrote a fascinating article about the prehistoric use of organic materials. The article focuses mainly on the use of wood. Hawks wrote: 

"The most well-known archaeological site with ancient wood is Schöningen, in central Germany. At the edge of a lake 300,000 years ago, people hunted horses and left behind the butchered horse bones, stone tools, and many wooden spears, throwing sticks, and other artifacts."

 

Another site where Stone Age wooden artifacts have been found is in Italy. Hawks explains:

"Poggetti Vecchi, Italy, is a site with thermal pools that preserve evidence of straight-tusked elephants and other animals from around 170,000 years ago. Archaeologists have uncovered least 39 wooden tools, many of them interpreted as digging sticks. Many of them were described in 2018 in an article led by Biancamaria Aranguren.

All the artifacts identified at Poggetti Vecchi were made from boxwood, Buxus sempervirens."

 

Another discovery too place at Kalambo Falls. The Kalambo Falls is just upstream of where it enters Lake Tanganyika. Hawks reports:

"Last year, Lawrence Barham and collaborators reported an unexpected discovery from their recent work at Kalambo Falls. Opening new excavations into the riverbank deposits, they uncovered many wood artifacts. These include an apparent digging stick, logs that were cut by stone blades, and a remarkable pair of logs that had been notched to fit one over the other. Barham and coworkers are not sure what the function of the notched log structure may have been, but they speculate that it may have served as the foundation of a hut or shelter, or it may have served as a platform or part of a walkway, or even as a workbench. What is clear is that ancient hominins applied patterned effort to shape the logs and build with them. This structure is around 476,000 years old."

 

Also in Africa, Hawks notes:

"one of the earliest wooden artifacts from Africa is from Florisbad, South Africa. That site is a natural spring with peat deposits that can preserve organic materials for a very long time. A number of wooden artifacts were identified during excavation of the springs in the 1930s and thereafter, but these tended to disintegrate quickly after excavation. The anthropologist Kenneth Oakley visited Florisbad and took one wooden artifact to London, where the wood was treated with chemicals similar to those used to preserve artifacts from later waterlogged sites. The artifact was later examined by Desmond Clark, who interpreted it as the broken point of a larger throwing stick. In 2003, Marion Bamford and Zoë Henderson carried out a re-examination of this artifact to provide some modern detail. One of the most interesting aspects was the wood that it is made from: kundanyoka knobwood (Zanthoxylum chalybeum), which today occurs no further south than Zimbabwe. The implication is that a very much warmer climate occurred around Florisbad at the time this tool was made, although the dating and context of the artifact are still uncertain."

Hawks points out that wooden artifacts also have been found in southwestern China. Xing Gao and collaborators excavated a large area south of the city of Kunming and exposed levels of ancient lakeshore between 361,000 and 250,000 years old. The excavations revealed stone artifacts, remains of varied plants and pollen, and 35 wooden tools.

Additionally, Hawks notes that "Aranbaltza is a floodplain site in northern Spain, with several archaeological localities dating back to between 140,000 and 50,000 years ago. One of these localities is Aranbaltza III, where in 2015 Joseba Rios-Garaizar and coworkers recovered a pointed wooden tool, around 20 cm in length. The evidence of crushing and wear at the pointed end suggested that this stick had been used for digging."

Read more about Stone Age wooden artifacts here: "Four amazing Stone Age sites with ancient wooden artifacts"

Related reading: Materials Science (Part 1 - Metals); Materials Science (Part 2 - Ores); Materials Science (Part 3 - Resins and Oils); Materials Science (Part 4 - Conglomerates); Archaic Shell Technology