A 67,000-year-old foot bone discovered deep in the Callao cave network suggests that the Philippines were settled 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. The bones of deer and wild boar were found near the foot bone, and although they bear cut marks, no tools were recovered. Scientists will look for more fossils in order to determine if the foot bone belonged to a modern human or a human ancestor.  

Paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University thinks that caring for animals shaped human evolution and is therefore still deeply ingrained in many people today. “If you have a dog that can hunt, you don’t need to turn into a fast-moving animal with sharp teeth,” she explained.  

The modern human shoulder allows the arm to move in almost any direction, and to throw with power and accuracy, especially with an atlatl, or “catapult for the arm.” NPR reporter Christopher Joyce visited archaeologist John Shea at Stony Brook University to learn about the human shoulder and evolution.   Joyce has also written about how eating meat and learning to cook fueled human evolution. “Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain. And I think that comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that’s because we cook,” said Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.  All of the installments in this NPR series on human evolution are still available.  

Stones decorated with painted designs during the Neolithic period have been found in Scotland. “This is a first for the UK, if not for northern Europe,” said Nick Card of the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology.  

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has added 21 sites to its list, bringing the total to 911.  

The excavation of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, a free African American community dating to the early nineteenth century, is still making headlines. This article in The Washington Post also has a photo gallery featuring the site and archaeologists from Temple University.  

A tract of land slated for industrial development in Etna, Ohio, was a fall and winter camp for a Hopewell family group 1,500 to 2,000 years ago.  

German archaeologists have reconstructed 60 Aramaean artifacts from Syria from stone fragments that survived the bombing of Berlin’s Tell Halaf archaeological museum during World War II. “We didn’t know how far we’d get because we didn’t know how much of the original material was recovered from the destroyed museum,” said chief restorer Stefan Geismeier.  

Irving Finkel of the British Museum has examined two fossilized horse bones incised with cuneiform text and thinks they are authentic. The bones, which have been housed in China, have been assumed to be fakes. “The text used by the copier on the bones was not the Cyrus Cylinder, but another version, probably originally written in Persia, rather than Babylon,” he said.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, August 3, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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