Fragments of a Face

In a cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountains of northern Spain called Sima del Elefante, researchers have found fossilized bone fragments of the earliest known face in Western Europe. The hominin who owned the face is estimated to be 1.1 million to 1.4 million years old.

Discovered in 2022, portions of the left side of an adult face significantly predate those of Homo antecessor, the oldest hominin species previously found at the site. The remains were named “Pink” after the rock band Pink Floyd.

Hominins include all the groups of modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors.

Pink doesn’t fit into the known hominin species, and has, for now, been classified as Homo affinis erectus, which means they are closely related to Homo erectus, an extinct species of man. In Latin, Homo erectus means “upright man”.

Pink’s facial features are more primitive than modern man. It resembles Homo erectus, especially with its flat nasal structure. But it is possible that pink may belong to another species.

This archaeological site was discovered at the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century. It has been systematically excavated since 1978. Besides ancient human skulls, it has revealed evidence of cannibalism. At the same level of the cave were found animal remains with cut marks and stone tools.

Pink lived in a humid forest landscape with water streaming through the area. It was a wetter, more temperate climate than it is now. These fossilized facial pieces add to our knowledge of some of the first human relatives in Europe. The discovery supports the idea that Pink was a relative of Homo erectus fossils found much further east, as far as Indonesia, as well as in Africa.

The discovery that different hominin populations occupied Western Europe during the early Pleistocene epoch suggests that this region was a key point in man’s evolutionary history. The early Pleistocene epoch extends from 2.6 million years ago to 781,000 years ago.

It seems that Pink occupied an evolutionary space between the oldest known hominins (in South Africa, roughly 3.4 to 3.7 million years ago) and Homo antecessor (about 860,000 years ago). Researchers said that the evidence points to the hominins arrived in Spain via Eastern Europe.

There is more work to do, like excavating lower levels of Sima del Elefante, so they may find even more surprises.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fragments-of-a-face-more-than-a-million-years-old-found-in-spanish-cave/ar-AA1AMV64?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=92b66b3d61ca48d8deba7416e37ab7fb&ei=87

10,500-Year-Old Face

Scientists have reconstructed the face of a 10,500-year-old woman using DNA. The woman lived in what is now Belgium.

The woman had blue eyes, and her skin was slightly lighter than most other Mesolithic-period people living in Western Europe when compared to the analyses made to date. According to archaeologists, the woman came from the same population group as the Cheddar Man, who lived in what is now the United Kingdom at around the same time. The Cheddar Man had even lighter skin than the woman.

These findings challenge previous assumptions that European hunter-gatherers shared the same genetic makeup. It also demonstrates that even that long ago, there was considerable variation in skin color.

The skull indicated the woman was between 35 and 60 years old. Her nose had a high nasal bridge, similar to Cheddar Man. And she had strong brow ridges despite being female.

The woman’s remains were found in an archaeological dig in 1988-1989 in the Margaux cave in Dinant. The bodies of 8 other women were also found there. This was deemed unusual as most Mesolithic burial sites contain a mixture of men, women, and children. Many of the skeletons were sprinkled with ochre, a pigment made of iron oxide, clay, and silica. Most of the bodies were carefully covered with stone fragments, but one individual had cut marks on her skull that were made after her death.

This burial cave was used over a period of several hundred years, which indicates that it was a place of memory that people would go back to despite their mobile lifestyle. Such findings point to complex burial customs and raise questions about the social structure and cultural practices of this early community.

One archaeologist found the ancient woman’s skin color a bit surprising but indicated there is a limited pool of Mesolithic people to make comparisons. Apparently, all Western Europe individuals who have had their DNA analyzed belong to the same genetic group.

When these remains were first recovered, there was no way to conduct research into ancient DNA. But techniques have been developed since then. The DNA was taken from the woman skull, which allowed a very detailed reconstruction.

The woman’s coloring is based on DNA, while such things as jewelry and tattoos are based on data from other excavations in the River Meuse basin. This data also helped build a picture of her daily life.

At a former campsite on the banks of the river, scientists found stone tools, fish remains, and bones from wild game, which proved these people were nomadic. They were forced to move through the landscape because they were dependent on natural resources such as plants, fish, and wild game.

There are still a lot of questions about these Mesolithic communities, which were the last hunter-gatherers in Western Europe.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/scientists-reconstruct-10-500-year-old-woman-s-face-using-dna/ar-AA1H29cO?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=8bfc0715dd4c4b0f92e756baa7f46623&ei=15

Ancient Europeans were Dark

New research finds that most prehistoric Europeans had dark skin, hair, and eyes until about 3,000 years ago.

The genes that cause lighter skin, hair and eyes emerged among early Europeans only about 14,000 years ago, during the Old Stone Age. But light features appeared only sporadically until relatively recently. If I had to guess, I would say that the genes for lighter features are recessive, and a person would have had to get the recessive genes from both mother and father, which wouldn’t have happened that often.

Lighter skin may have had an evolutionary advantage for Europeans because it enabled people to synthesize more vitamin D in Europe’s weaker sunlight. But lighter eye color, like blue or green, does not seem to have any major evolutionary advantages, so its eventual emergence may have been driven by chance or sexual selection.

Scientists analyzed 348 samples of ancient DNA from archaeological sites in 34 countries in Western Europe and Asia. The oldest, from 45,000 years ago, was from western Siberia, and another high-quality DNA sample came from a 9,000-year-old individual from Sweden. But many of the older samples were badly degraded, in which case the researchers estimated their pigmentation using “probabilistic phenotype inference” and the HlrisPlex-S system, which can predict eye, hair, and skin color from an incomplete DNA sample.

Palaeoanthropologists think the first Homo sapiens arrived permanently in Europe between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, which meant they weren’t far removed from African modern human ancestors. Therefore, early Europeans initially only had genetics for dark skin, hair, and eyes. This coloring relies on hundreds of interconnected genes.

The study showed that the frequency of people dark skin was still high in parts of Europe until the Copper Age, about 5,000 years ago. In some areas, dark skin appeared frequently until even later.

Researchers found that light eyes emerged in Northern and Western Europe between 14,000 and 4,000 years ago, even though dark hair and skin were still dominant at that time. There were those who bucked the trend; as a 1-year-old boy living in Europe about 17,000 years ago had dark hair and skin, but blue eyes.

The genetic basis for lighter skin seems to have emerged in Sweden at about the same time as lighter eyes but initially remained relatively rare. The research also showed a statistical “spike” in the incidence of light eyes color at this time, which suggests that blue or green eyes were more prevalent at that time than earlier or later.

So it looks like the Nazis were wrong. Instead of blond hair and blue eyes proving the owners were “pure”, these traits actually proved these individuals were descended from “mutants”.

But then, all of us are, because that’s how evolution works.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/most-ancient-europeans-had-dark-skin-eyes-and-hair-up-until-3-000-years-ago-new-research-finds/ar-AA1AN5EZ?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=92b66b3d61ca48d8deba7416e37ab7fb&ei=36