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The Venus of Hohle Fels and its diverse interpretations

This is aboHohle-Fels-1ut a mammoth-ivory figurine found in 2008 in the basal Aurignacian deposit at Hohle Fels Cave, Germany. It was made between 35-40,000 years BP. It is the oldest portable art piece found in Europe and one of the oldest artworks in general. Below are some hypotheses around the meaning of this piece (some of them are in turn applicable to most Paleolithic Venus!):

  • According to the traditional identification of these figurines as ‘Venus’, they are considered unfinished or abstract renderings of real or idealized women, which highlights the sexual attributes as an expression of fertility, probably with religious purposes.

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Summary of the 2014 ESHE Meeting

florenceThe 4th annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) took place in Florence, Italy (Sep 18th-20th). This is one of the top conferences we can see in Europe for this field.

Below is a summary of a selection of topics presented in the meeting.

Arsuaga, Juan Luis:

Hominins from Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca are 430 KY old. Most of the other European Middle Pleistocene fossils are apparently younger, including specimens that look more primitive than Sima. If the ancestral stem group of neandertal & sapiens survived after the Neandertal lineage branched off, then a primitive morphology could still be found in fossils that are younger than the derived ones. Current age of Petralona is clearly underestimated. Arago is a bit older and more primitive than Sima.

Bayle, Priscilla et al:

A new Neandertal mandible was discovered (2013) in Sirogne Cave (France). The minimum number of individuals found in that cave is four.

Benazzi, Stefano et al:

Taurodontism is a condition found in the molar teeth whereby the body of the tooth and pulp chamber is enlarged vertically at the expense of the roots. This affects to 1% of modern humans but is quite frequent in Neandertals, due to three possible hypothesis: biomechanical advantage, adaptation to a high attrition diet, genetic drift effects. Finite Element Analysis modelling to the Le Moustier 1 specimen was run to test the first hypothesis, showing that enlarged pulpar chambers do not modify the biomechanical properties of the molars.  Sigue leyendo →

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Human Evolution and Innovation

Paleolithic tools. Photo: Roberto Sáez

Last week I was invited to give a speech in Lisbon for an enterprise forum on Innovation, as introduction to ease the topic and break ice. First challenge was to illustrate how humans are continuously looking for innovation solutions, and always were since the origin of ‘becoming human’. Human Evolution has always been linked to Innovation. Second challenge was to make it understandable for a non-expert and multi-country audience…

Given those premises, I structured 5 key ideas:

1) The journey until reaching the capacity of innovation we currently have is amazing: we can develop projects and build things from the lowest atom level until the greatest global level – and even outside the globe. But we actually started 6 million years ago when our ancestors were ‘normal’ animals, in fact weak animals: they were eaten by predators. Eventually some of them started to use bipedalism occasionally. But yet they did not have anything special that could differentiate us from any other animals. They lived among them, they shared same resources. Sigue leyendo →

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The oldest artworks in Europe

1) Nerja Cave (Málaga, Spain)

Six paintings of seals on stalactites discovered in 2012. Some charcoal remains were found beside the paintings: they were radiocarbon dated about 43,000 years old, although it is pending to date the paint pigment itself. If such dating can be confirmed, this will imply that Nerja Cave art is the earliest human paintings ever found and the oldest Neandertal art (they were the hominids living in that region at that time). They coexist with other 2 groups of paintings, one from the Solutrean period 20,000 years B.P. and another from the Magdalenian period around 12,000 B.P.

Nerja

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Atapuerca: some key figures

In 2014 we had in Spain the privilege of holding the XVII Congress of UISPP (Union International de Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques) in Burgos. The organiser was the Atapuerca Foundation, as a recognition of the decisive value that Atapuerca provides to the world of Prehistory, Archaeology and Paleoanthropology.

At the time, this was the Congress with the highest number of scientific articles submitted ever in the history of UISPP: 2,000 articles presented by 3,000 authors.

Atapuerca is one of the most relevant sites for human evolution in the world, probably the most important one for the last half-million years period. Some key figures below can support this statement.

Sima de los Huesos site in Cueva Mayor:

atapuerca-sima

  • A total of 7,500 fossils found so far, belonging to 29 individuals of the same population from 430,000 years ago.
  • They are ancestor of Neandertals. For one decade this population was assigned to the species Homo heidelbergensis, but the extended study of this huge fossil record discarded this assignment.
  • 17 skulls found. One of them is the most complete skull of a Middle Pleistocene Homo: Cranium number 5 (‘Miguelón’)
  • The most complete pelvis in the fossil record, called ‘Elvis’.
  • Sima also provided some tiny bones of the middle ear, really strange to find.
  • The enormous number of fossils contrast with the area they are buried in Sima. Only 20 centimeters are excavated from a 1 m2 area every season.
  • Only in 2014 200 hominin fossils have been found. This figures doubles the total number of human fossils extracted from the rest of sites worldwide.
  • Since the beginning of excavations in 1978, the Sima has provided more than half of the Homo fossils worldwide.

Gran Dolina has provided more than 100 fossils of 6 individuals from 800,000 years ago classified as a new species, Homo antecessor. They are one of the largest set of the oldest fossils in Western Europe.

Sima del Elefante has provided one of the oldest human fossils in Western Europe, dated to 1.3 million years.

Not only Paleolithic but Atapuerca also has more than 200 Neolithic sites in a 314 km2 area.

Overall, Atapuerca shows a human occupation since 1.3 million years B.P. until Roman age in the 4th century.