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Human finger fossil found in Saudi Arabia suggests people expanded into Asia via Arabia at least 86K years ago

Bruce Bower
Science News
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 11:00 UTC
out of africa, human migration out of africa via saudi arabia
© Ian CartwrightARABIAN POINTER A human finger fossil found in a Saudi Arabian desert dates to between 95,000 and 86,000 years ago, researchers say. This find, shown here from different angles, strengthens the view that ancient humans expanded into Asia via Arabia.
A single human finger bone from at least 86,000 years ago points to Arabia as a key destination for Stone Age excursions out of Africa that allowed people to rapidly spread across Asia.

Excavations at Al Wusta, a site in Saudi Arabia's Nefud desert, produced this diminutive discovery. It's the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the narrow strip of the Middle East that joins Africa with Asia, based on dating of the bone itself, says a team led by archaeologists Huw Groucutt and Michael Petraglia. This new find strengthens the idea that early human dispersals out of Africa began well before the traditional estimated departure time of 60,000 years ago and extended deep into Arabia, the scientists report April 9 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"Although long considered to be far from the main stage of human evolution, Arabia was a stepping stone from Africa into Asia," says Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Comment: Humans may have left Africa earlier than thought according to some paleoanthropologists
Scientists have generally agreed that humans first migrated out of Africa 40,000 to 70,000 years ago, culminating in settlements that span the globe. That estimate has been rocked in recent years however, by discoveries of stone artifacts in the Arabian Desert that date back at least 100,000 years (close to the time that modern humans were thought to have arisen). In this new effort, the researchers have expanded on the idea that humans may have left Africa sooner than most had thought, and that it likely happened via multiple routes, rather than just one.

After completing their models, the team compared them with actual population data regarding people now living in Africa, Australia and Asia. They report that the models they built showing multi-path dispersal most closely aligned with modern genetic histories and skull shapes. Their models also showed people leaving Africa as early as 130,000 years ago for Asia and Australia and then again in another wave approximately 50,000 years ago taking a more northerly route.


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Dig

'Unprecedented' 7,000 year old Native American burial site discovered off Florida's Gulf Coast (VIDEO)

Andrew Krietz
WTSP
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:48 UTC
Florida ice age coast


Divers in 2016 reported possible human skeletal material off the coast of Manasota Key in Charlotte County, Florida.

Venice, Fla. -- A burial site hidden for some 7,000 years beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico likely has archeologists picking their jaws up from the floor.

As Dr. Ryan Duggins, an underwater archeology supervisor for the Florida Bureau of Archeological Research put it, in part: "Seeing a 7,000-year-old site that is so well preserved in the Gulf of Mexico is awe inspiring. We are truly humbled by this experience."


Comment: See also National Geographic's report with more videos:

7,000-Year-Old Native American Burial Site Found Underwater

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Comet

Did cometary catastrophes cause the Justinian Plague and end the Roman Empire?


Thunderbolts Project
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 10:30 UTC
justinian plague painting
For nearly half-a-century, the chief principals of The Thunderbolts Project have been presenting a scientific case for relatively recent celestial catastrophes in the inner solar system, within human memory. These events were recorded in the myths and storytelling of ancient man in pre-history, the dramas reverberating through generations and shaping the earliest civilizations.

The catastrophes were electromagnetic in nature -- planets seen in the Earthly sky discharging electrically, the thunderbolts of the gods. But what about more recent disasters, in the A.D. time periods, disasters that also may have been triggered by fundamentally electromagnetic phenomena in the solar system?

In this episode, Thunderbolts colleague Peter Mungo Jupp offers the provocative conjecture that an encounter between our own planet and a cometary intruder may have caused an AD catastrophe, leading to the deaths of tens millions of human beings - the so-called Plague of Justinian.

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Blackbox

4,000-year-old mutilated mummy solves century-old mystery

Rafi Letzter
Live Science
Mon, 02 Apr 2018 11:08 UTC
4,000-Year-Old Mummy egypt decapitated
A team of forensic scientists has managed to extract DNA from a 4,000-year-old mummy, and their finding has solved a century-old mystery of its ransacked tomb.

The Egyptian mummy wasn't a fully preserved corpse, but rather a decapitated, mutilated, bandage-wrapped head that archaeologists found on top of a coffin when they excavated a tomb back in 1915. And that was the source of the mystery.

As the researchers explained in a paper published March 1 in the journal Genes, the tomb belonged to an Egyptian Middle Kingdom governor named Djehutynakht. But by the time modern scientists found the tomb, it had been ransacked; it was robbed in ancient times. In an article describing the discovery, The New York Times reported that the robbers had set the place on fire "to cover their tracks." [Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]

Comment: See also:

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Roses

4,000 photos, 4 social networks, 1 family: #Romanovs100 kicks off with release of its first stories


RT
Mon, 09 Apr 2018 15:46 UTC
#Romanovs100
Thousands of rare photos from the Romanovs' private archives are hitting the web, starting April 8, in a hundred-day-long project dedicated to the lives of Russia's last reigning royal family.

Nicholas II was a real photo buff and his wife and five children followed suit: they used different cameras, including the legendary Kodak Brownie, to take photos of their daily lives. #Romanovs100 will publish these images via four major social media accounts: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram
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Archaeology

Greco-Roman temple unearthed in remote Egyptian oasis

Elaina Zachos
National Geographic
Thu, 05 Apr 2018 16:01 UTC
greco roman temple egypt
© Egyptian Antiquities MinistryA newly discovered Greco-Roman temple was unearthed in Egypt's Western Desert.
A sculpture of a man's head and two limestone lion statues were among the artifacts uncovered at the archaeological site.

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced Wednesday that archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a Greco-Roman temple in Egypt's Western Desert. Found at the Al-Salam site, which is roughly 200 miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, the ruins include the front section of the temple and parts of its foundation and main entrance. The archaeologists also found a three-feet-thick outer wall leading to a front courtyard, which is surrounded on both sides by entrances to other chambers.

Ayman Ashmawi, the head of the Ministry's Ancient Egyptian Antiquities department, says the archaeologists expect to find more temple remains after other excavations are carried out later this year.
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Airplane

March 1952: U.S. dropped plague-infected fleas on North Korea

Jeffrey Kaye
Medium
Tue, 03 Apr 2018 15:35 UTC
plague flea
© International Scientific Commission (“Needham”) Report
There is a great deal of misunderstanding between the people of the United States and North Korea. This is largely due to the lack of information the average U.S. citizen has about the suffering endured by Koreans during the Korean War, including war crimes committed by U.S. forces.

While U.S. forces carpet bombed North Korea, bombed irrigation dams, and threatened nuclear attack, their most controversial action was the use of bacteriological or biological weapons during the war.

For decades, the U.S. has strenuously denied the use of such weapons. At the same time, evidence of such use was kept from the American people. Even today, very few are aware of what really happened. Only in February 2018 was a full documentary report on the U.S. use of germ warfare during the Korean War, prepared and written by mostly West European scientists 66 years ago, released online in easy-to-read format.Some former Cold War researchers have maintained that China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea perpetuated a fraud in their claims of germ warfare. They rely on a dozen or so documents supposedly found by a rightwing Japanese journalist in Soviet archives. But these researchers never counted on the fact that someday the public could read documentary accounts of the biowar campaign for themselves.
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Dig

3,000 year old drawing of god found in Sinai could undermine our entire idea of Judaism

Nir Hasson
Haaretz
Wed, 04 Apr 2018 12:00 UTC
Is that a 3,000-year-old picture of god, his penis and his wife depicted by early Jews at Kuntillet Ajrud?
FILE PHOTO: Is that a 3,000-year-old picture of god, his penis and his wife depicted by early Jews at Kuntillet Ajrud?
More than four decades after its excavation wound down, a small hill in the Sinai Desert continues to bedevil archaeologists. The extraordinary discoveries made at Kuntillet Ajrud, an otherwise nondescript slope in the northern Sinai, seem to undermine one of the foundations of Judaism as we know it.

Then, it seems, "the Lord our God" wasn't "one God." He may have even had a wife, going by the completely unique "portrait" of the Jewish deity that archaeologists found at the site, which may well be the only existing depiction of YHWH.

Kuntillet Ajrud got its name, meaning "the isolated hill of the water sources," from wells at the foot of the hill. It is a remote spot in the heart of the desert, far from any town or or trade route. But for a short time around 3,000 years ago, it served as a small way station.

Comment: What is clear is the tales mainstream history tells us is far from the truth, as Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in Judaism and Christianity - Two Thousand Years of Lies - 60 Years of State Terrorism:
Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel" as depicted in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe.
Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Fish

Scientists are starting to care about cultures that talk to whales. Why?

Krista Langlois
Smithsonian Magazine
Sat, 07 Apr 2018 19:33 UTC
Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries. The rest of the world is finally listening in
“Tattooed Whale, 2016” by Tim Pitsiulak. Screen-print on Arches Cover Black.
© Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts“Tattooed Whale, 2016” by Tim Pitsiulak. Screen-print on Arches Cover Black.
Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.

Although Brower's body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower's family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf's mother.

Comment: Scandinavian Stone Age society more reliant on fishing than previously thought - particularly aquatic mammals

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Microscope 1

DNA from unknown ancestor lingers in Africa's Yoruba tribe

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Wed, 04 Apr 2018 12:00 UTC
The majority of Yoruba people live in Nigeria
© Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty ImagesThe majority of Yoruba people live in Nigeria
Some of us carry mysterious genes that may belong to another species of early human. The finding in people from West Africa hints that primitive hominins lingered in Africa until fairly recently.

Our species has repeatedly interbred with other hominins, in particular with the Neanderthals and a less well-known species called the Denisovans. This happened after some members of our species first left our African homeland, probably within the last 100,000 years. As a result, all people whose recent descent is non-African carry some Neanderthal DNA, and some Asian people also have Denisovan DNA.

But it is hard to spot if people whose ancestors never left Africa also carry DNA from other species. We don't have DNA from any extinct African hominins to compare because the hot and wet climate there tends to destroy preserved DNA.

Comment: See also: There's a lot of misleading nonsense in this article. The reader is advised to check out Wolpoff's and Caspari's book: Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction.

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