sábado, 21 de diciembre de 2013
New paleontology exhibit shows development of man
To the south of Rome, an Italian museum is about to open a new exhibit. It sheds light on what life was like 600,000 years ago.
Slowly, painstakingly, paleontologist Anna Rosa removes the wrapping from an old tusk and brushes off the dust. it is a fragment of elefantus anticus. It's from about 600,000 years ago.
Back then Italy was a different place, hot and dry most of the year, and home to not just elephants but also rhinos, water buffalo, hippos and hyenas. It was also the stomping grounds for homo erectus, who came before the Neanderthals and well before us homo sapiens.
The workers were rushing to put the finishing touches on the displays of the soon to be opened new wing of the National Museum of Paleontology in Isernia, south east of Rome. This is where some of the earliest traces of man in Europe have been found.
Inside the display cases you can see what was the height of hi-tech 700,000: purpose-designed rocks for killing prey, breaking their bones and stripping their skin.
Where some would see a sharp rock, Professor Antonella Minelli sees the brilliance of early man. She said, "It is, par excellence, the tool that man was able to produce, she tells me. It shows their great cognitive, mental and technical abilities."
What attracted man and the other animals here was an ancient river bank, discovered in 1978 when a road was being built; it's littered with prehistoric bones.
And on the banks of this river, says the professor, man preyed on the animals, perhaps dragging the biggest pieces over here and eating them on the spot. Minelli said, "It was no doubt very messy, the stench of rotting flesh overwhelming. But it allowed our great great-great-great and so on grandparents to survive."
This is really the prehistoric equivalent of our supermarkets. there was lots of food to be had, but our ancestors, known in this case as homo erectus, had to be very quick about it because the problem was there were other animals looking for food, and there was always the chance that homo erectus could be the main course.
Life was short and brutal, ruled, as paleontologists put it, by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow. Maybe we have come a long way after all. thv11.com
Actualización 30-12-13. Vídeo. Apre Paleolitico, a Isernia arriva anche la CNN
Vídeo YouTube por Telemolise el 19/12/2013 añadido a Paleo Vídeos > Prehistoria Universal > L.R.2.6 nº 13.
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"What attracted man and the other animals here was an ancient river bank." They were not only attracted to the river, it was their habitat. What discerns archaic Homo (erectus- & neandertal-like) from apes-australopiths are, eg, a flattened skull-cap (platycephaly), projecting nasal bones (ie, an external nose) & mid-face, very heavy cranial & postcranial bones (thick & dense: pachyosteosclerosis), a very broad body with wide thorax & pelvis (platypelloidy, with flaring ilia) & very valgus knees (for better femoral abduction), dorso-ventrally flattened femora (platymeria), dispersal to coastal sites as far as Indonesia (Mojokerto & Flores), southern Africa (the Cape & Namibia) & England (Pakefield & Boxgrove), colonisation of islands that could only be reached overseas (Flores), sites always in association with large masses of water & edible shellfish & sometimes marine shells & barnacles. Cranial pachyosteosclerosis is exclusively seen in slow littoral tetrapods diving for sessile foods such as shellfish or seaweeds. All this leaves no doubt that archaic Homo dispersed along the coasts, collecting seafood, & from there ventured inland along the rivers, probably initially seasonally, possibly following anadromous pecies such as salmon. They were much too heavy & their bodies too broad to have regularly run over plains as some paleo-anthropologists still believe, they were much too heavy & slow, and their dense skulls were much too brittle to have been engaged regularly with dangerous land animals. Rahter they collected all sorts of aquatic & waterside animal & plant foods, eg, carcasses of drowned ungulates, hard-shelled invertebrates, waterside cattails & rice in shallow water.
Human Evolution publishes in 2 special editions the proceedings of the symposium (with David Attenborough & Donald Johanson) on human waterside evolution "Human Evolution: Past, Present & Future" in London 8-10 May 2013:
Special Edition Part 1 (end 2013):
- Peter Rhys-Evans: Introduction
- Stephen Oppenheimer: Human's Association with Water Bodies: the 'Exaggerated Diving Reflex' and its Relationship with the Evolutionary Allometry of Human Pelvic and Brain Sizes
- JH Langdon: Human Ecological Breadth: Why Neither Savanna nor Aquatic Hypotheses can Hold Water
- Stephen Munro: Endurance Running versus Underwater Foraging: an Anatomical and Palaeoecological Perspective
- Algis Kuliukas: Wading Hypotheses of the Origin of Human Bipedalism
- Marc Verhaegen: The Aquatic Ape Evolves: Common Misconceptions and Unproven Assumptions about the So-Called Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
- CL Broadhurst & Michael Crawford: The Epigenetic Emergence of Culture at the Coastline: Interaction of Genes, Nutrition, Environment and Demography,
Special Edition Part 2 (begin 2014) with 12 contributions.
For more information, google "econiche Homo" or "Greg Laden blog Verhaegen" or send me an email.
Actualización. Vídeo. Apre Paleolitico, a Isernia arriva anche la CNN
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