Showing posts with label human origins. Show all posts

Monday, 17 October 2016

The Most Ancient Civilisation on Earth

Stone houses have just been found off the coast of Australia -

and they’re 9,000 years old

by Jacinta Bowler

Archaeologists working on the Dampier Archipelago, just off the West Australian coast, have found evidence of stone houses dated to shortly after the last ice age, between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago - making them the oldest houses in Australia.

The Dampier Archipelago is a group of 42 islands, and on one of the islands, the team uncovered knee-high rock walls.

"Excavations on Rosemary Island, one of the outer islands, have uncovered evidence of one of the earliest known domestic structures in Australia, dated between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago," said lead researcher Jo McDonald, from the University of Western Australia.

"This is an astounding find and has not only enormous scientific significance, but will be of great benefit to Aboriginal communities in the area, enhancing their connections to their deep past and cultural heritage."

The researchers suggest that the structures’ inhabitants used branches or other plant material to make the roofs. The houses are also quite sophisticated, with multiple ‘rooms’.

"Inside the houses you have separate areas - it could have been a sleeping area and a working area. There is evidence of people grinding seeds on the rock floors inside the houses as well as shell food remains," McDonald told Paige Taylor from The Australian.

"We don’t really know what they were used for as these types of structures were not used in the historic periods."

This particular structure should help researchers to investigate how Aboriginal groups lived after the ice age – a time where sea levels rose 130 metres, at a rate of 1 metre every five to 10 years. This would have eventually cut the Archipelago islands off from the mainland.

"We assume they were a way of marking out social space for groups living close together as the sea level rose after the ice age, pushing groups inland into smaller territories," says McDonald.

"While these people were hunter gatherers, these structures suggest people were developing social strategies to be more sedentary, to cope with environmental change."

The team discovered the houses back in 2014, but they have only recently been dated using shells of edible mangrove gastropods found inside.

Although the researchers haven’t yet published a paper, so we can't get too excited until then, there should be more information released as the team find it, and they will hopefully publish a paper in the next few months.

Murujuga, which includes the islands and the nearby Burrup peninsula, are also hugely culturally important to the Aboriginal people in the area, and important for researchers trying to understand the past. A number of interest groups are pushing for Murujuga to become World Heritage listed.

"As well as containing more than one million rock engravings of great scientific and cultural significance, the Archipelago is home to one of the country’s largest industrial ports," McDonald said in a statement today.

She says that research from the last 12 months indicates that there was human occupation in the area dating back 21,000 years, even before the last ice age.

Just 100 km west, on Barrow Island, researchers have also found evidence of human occupation dating back 50,000 years.

According to McDonald, although there are similar structures around Australia, the houses on Rosemary Island are the oldest found.

We hope this valuable area will be protected for many years to come.

From Science Alert @ http://www.sciencealert.com/stone-houses-have-just-been-found-of-the-coast-of-australia-and-they-re-9-000-years-old

Evidence of 9,000-year-old stone houses found on Australian island

Circular foundations excavated on Rosemary Island date to the end of the last ice age – a time of ‘environmental stress’ for the Indigenous inhabitants

The Dampier archipelago. The evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years adds to the case for the area to get a world heritage listing. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

by Calla Wahlquist

Archeologists working on the Dampier archipelago off Australia’s north-west coast have found evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years – to the end of the last ice age – building the case for the area to get a world heritage listing.

Circular stone foundations were discovered in on Rosemary Island, the outermost of 42 islands that make up the archipelago. The islands and the nearby Burrup peninsula are known as Murujuga – a word meaning “hip bones sticking out” – in the language of the Ngarluma people.

Prof Jo Mcdonald, director of the centre for rock art research and management at the University of Western Australia, said the excavations showed occupation was maintained throughout the ice age and the period of rapid rise in sea levels that followed.

“Around 8,000 years ago, it would have been on the coast,” McDonald told Guardian Australia. “This is the time that the islands were starting to be cut off and it’s a time when people were starting to rearrange themselves.”

The sea level on Australia’s north-west coast rose 130 metres after the end of the ice age, at a rate of about a metre every five to 10 years. “In people’s lifetimes they would have seen loss of territory and would have had to renegotiate – a bit like Miami these days,” McDonald said.

The placement of the stone structures indicated how that sudden space restriction was managed, she said. “The development of housing is really significant in terms of understanding how people actually divided up their space and lived in close proximity to each other in times of environmental stress.”

Research done in the past 12 months had found evidence of human occupation in Murujuga dating back 21,000 years, or before the last ice age, said McDonald.

Earlier research on Barrow Island, about 100km west, found evidence of human occupation dating back 50,000 years.

McDonald said the latest discovery helped build the case for the area to gain a world heritage listing.

Jo McDonald, centre, excavating at a Murujuga rock shelter in Western Australia. Artefacts uncovered in the past year show human occupation dating back 21,000 years. Photograph: University of Western Australia

The Western Australian government is facing increased pressure to support a world heritage application for the area, which has been on the national heritage register since 2007.

It was assessed as meeting Unesco’s six world heritage criteria in 2011 but a formal nomination cannot be made without the support of the state government. The premier, Colin Barnett, said last month that the area would “probably be a world heritage site at some stage”.

“Our responsibility now is to protect these rock carvings and also make it possible for people to come and see this extraordinary place,” he said.

— Colin Barnett (@ColinBarnett) August 25, 2016

Ever seen WA's ancient rock carvings at the Burrup Peninsula? An extraordinary place we are committed to preserve. pic.twitter.com/JFKhsM22ED

There are 2,500 registered Aboriginal heritage sites on the Burrup peninsula and surrounding islands, which are located near Karratha, 1,525km north of Perth.

The area is also home to the US$2bn North West Shelf gas project, the largest oil and gas development in Australia.

The entry to the largest heritage site, a valley containing close to a million rock carvings dating back 40,000 years, is within a kilometre of a fertiliser plant. Last year the WA government removed a large umbrella heritage listing for the peninsula because it complicated development applications.

The research done by McDonald and her team was co-funded by Rio Tinto, which has a mining lease within the national heritage area, and Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation.

McDonald said the state heritage management had been “really hotchpotch” but that existing industry could be co-managed with a world heritage site, providing suitable buffers were put in place.

Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms

Clues left in genes of modern populations in Australian and Papua New Guinea enable scientists to trace remarkable journey made by first human explorers

A new population analysis of Indigenous Australians and Papuans shows they can trace their origins back to the very first arrivals on the continent about 50,000 years ago. Photograph: Matt Turner/Getty Images

by Hannah Devlin

Claims that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed by the first extensive study of their DNA, which dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago.

Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, and reveals evidence of prehistoric liaisons with an unknown hominin cousin.

Prof Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist who led the work at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This story has been missing for a long time in science. Now we know their relatives are the guys who were the first real human explorers. Our ancestors were sitting being kind of scared of the world while they set out on this exceptional journey across Asia and across the sea.”

The findings appear in one of four major human origins papers published in Nature this week, which together give an unprecedented insight into how humans first migrated out of the African continent, splintered into distinct populations and spread across the globe.

Willerslev’s findings, based on a new population analysis of 83 Indigenous Australians and 25 Papuans, shows that these groups can trace their origins back to the very first arrivals on the continent about 50,000 years ago and that they remained almost entirely isolated until around 4,000 years ago. “They are probably the oldest group in the world that you can link to one particular place,” said Willerslev.

En route to Australia, early humans would have encountered a motley assortment of other roving hominin species, including an unknown human relative who has now been shown to have contributed around 4% to the Indigenous Australian genome. Previously, scientists have discovered that prehistoric couplings have left all non-Africans today carrying 1-6% of Neanderthal DNA.

Willerslev said the latest findings added to the view that Neanderthals and other now extinct hominins, traditionally portrayed as low-browed prehistoric thugs, were “in reality not particularly different” from our own ancestors.

Adding to this picture, a second study found that the advent of modern human behaviours around 100,000 years ago, indicated by cave art and more sophisticated tools, does not appear to have been accompanied by any notable genetic mutations.

“Your genome contains the history of every ancestor you ever had,” said Swapan Mallick, a geneticist at Havard Medical School who led the analysis of the genomes of people from 142 distinct populations.

The study also suggests that the KhoeSan (bushmen) and Mbuti (central African pygmies) populations appear to have split off from other early humans sooner than this, again suggesting that there was no intrinsic biological change that suddenly triggered human culture.

“There is no evidence for a magic mutation that made us human,” said Willerslev.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said the findings would be controversial in the field, adding: “It either means that the behaviours were developed earlier, they developed these behaviours independently, they acquired them through exchanges of ideas with other groups, or the estimated split times are too old.”

Willerslev’s study also resolves the apparent discrepancy between genetic findings implying that Indigenous populations have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years and the fact that the languages spoken by these populations are only around 4,000 years old. “You see a movement of people spreading across the continent and leaving signatures across the continent,” said Willerslev. “That is the time that this new language has spread. It’s a tiny genetic signature. It’s almost like two guys entering a village and saying ‘guys, now we have to speak another language and use another stone tool and they have a little bit of sex in that village and then they disappear again.”

Aubrey Lynch, an Indigenous elder from the Goldfields area, said: “This study confirms our beliefs that we have ancient connections to our lands and have been here far longer than anyone else.”

From The Guardian @ https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/21/indigenous-australians-most-ancient-civilisation-on-earth-dna-study-confirms

For more information about the indigenous Australians programs see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/australian%20aborigines

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Thursday, 11 August 2016

New DNA Testing on 2,000-Year-Old Elongated Paracas Skulls Changes Known History

A Paracas elongated skull and an artist’s impression based on a digital reconstruction. Credit: Marcia Moore / Ciamar Studio

By April Holloway

The elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru caused a stir in 2014 when a geneticist that carried out preliminary DNA testing reported that they have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far”. Now a second round of DNA testing has been completed and the results are just as controversial – the skulls tested, which date back as far as 2,000 years, were shown to have European and Middle Eastern Origin. These surprising results change the known history about how the Americas were populated.

Paracas is a desert peninsula located within Pisco Province on the south coast of Peru. It is here where Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, made an amazing discovery in 1928 – a massive and elaborate graveyard containing tombs filled with the remains of individuals with the largest elongated skulls found anywhere in the world. These have come to be known as the ‘Paracas skulls’. In total, Tello found more than 300 of these elongated skulls, some of which date back around 3,000 years.

Elongated skulls on display at Museo Regional de Ica in the city of Ica in Peru (public domain)

Strange Features of the Paracas Skulls

It is well-known that most cases of skull elongation are the result of cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding, in which the skull is intentionally deformed by applying force over a long period of time. It is usually achieved by binding the head between two pieces of wood, or binding in cloth. However, while cranial deformation changes the shape of the skull, it does not alter other features that are characteristic of a regular human skull.

In a recent interview with Ancient Origins, author and researcher LA Marzulli describes how some of the Paracas skulls are different to ordinary human skulls:

“There is a possibility that it might have been cradle headboarded, but the reason why I don’t think so is because the position of the foramen magnum is back towards the rear of the skull. A normal foramen magnum would be closer to the jaw line…”

LA Marzulli points to the position of the foramen magnum in a Paracas skull which is also the point at which they drilled in order to extract bone powder for DNA testing.

Marzulli explained that an archaeologist has written a paper about his study of the position of the foramen magnum in over 1000 skulls. “He states that the Paracas skulls, the position of the foramen magnum is completely different than a normal human being, it is also smaller, which lends itself to our theory that this is not cradle headboarding, this is genetic.”

In addition, Marzulli described how some of the Paracas skulls have a very pronounced zygomatic arch (cheek bone), different eye sockets and no sagittal suture, which is a connective tissue joint between the two parietal bones of the skull.

The pronounced cheek bones can be seen in artist Marcia Moore’s interpretation of how the Paracas people looked based on a digital reconstruction from the skulls. Marcia Moore / Ciamar Studio

In a normal human skull, there should be a suture which goes from the frontal plate … clear over the dome of the skull separating the parietal plates - the two separate plates – and connecting with the occipital plate in the rear,” said Marzulli. “We see many skulls in Paracas that are completely devoid of a sagittal suture.

There is a disease known as craniosynostosis, which results in the fusing together of the two parietal plates, however, Marzulli said there is no evidence of this disease in the Paracas skulls.

The sagittal suture, highlighted in red, separates the two parietal plates (public domain)

LA Marzulli shows the top of one of the Paracas skulls, which has no sagittal suture.

DNA Testing

The late Sr. Juan Navarro, owner and director of the Museo Arqueologico Paracas, which houses a collection of 35 of the Paracas skulls, allowed the taking of samples from three of the elongated skulls for DNA testing, including one infant. Another sample was obtained from a Peruvian skull that had been in the US for 75 years. One of the skulls was dated to around 2,000 years old, while another was 800 years old.

The samples consisted of hair and bone powder, which was extracted by drilling deeply into the foramen magnum. This process, Marzulli explained, is to reduce the risk of contamination. In addition, full protective clothing was worn.

The samples were then sent to three separate labs for testing – one in Canada, and two in the United States. The geneticists were only told that the samples came from an ancient mummy, so as not to create any preconceived ideas.

LA Marzulli holding up a replica of one of the Paracas skulls that was tested

Surprising Results

From the samples, only the mitochondrial DNA (DNA from the mother’s side) could be extracted. Out of four hair samples, one of them couldn’t be sequenced. The remaining three hair samples all showed a Haplogroup (genetic population group) of H2A, which is found most frequently in Eastern Europe, and at a low frequency in Western Europe. The bone powder from the most elongated skull tested came back as T2B, which originates in Mesopotamia and what is now Syria, essentially the heart of the fertile crescent. “It rewrites history as we know it,” said Marzulli.

“If these results hold,” writes Brien Foerster on his website Hidden Inca Tours, “the history of the migration of people to the Americas is far more complex than we have been told previously.”

If these results are confirmed through further tests, it means that peoples from Europe and the Middle East migrated to the Americas long before it is conventionally believed.

Marzulli said that mainstream academics will probably attack these results by pointing to the fact that he is not a scientist, but he urges any skeptic to replicate the study. “Attack the evidence folks. Go down and get your own samples, pay for a DNA lab and then come back to me with your science… do some science like we’ve done,” he said. The full lab reports of the DNA tests are available in LA Marzulli’s book Nephilim Hybrids.

The results are also consistent with the fact that many of the Paracas skulls still contain traces of red hair, a color that is not natively found in South America, but originates in the Middle East and Europe.

“No academics as far as we can tell can explain why some of the skulls that still have hair are red or even blonde,” writes Brien Foerster, “the idea that this is from time or bleaching has NOW been disproven by 2 hair experts. For the ancient Paracas people, at least, they had blonde to reddish hair that is 30% thinner than NATIVE American hair. It is GENETIC!”

A Paracas skull with its red hair. Credit: Brien Foerster

Extra-terrestrial Hypothesis

Due to the unusual shape and features of the Paracas skulls, there has long been speculation that they are extra-terrestrial in origin, and many have hoped that DNA testing would prove that to be the case.

“As regards an “alien” component or ancestry to the skulls, we may never know,” writes Brien Foerster. “The DNA testing programs can only compare sample DNA with those that are known, and those are held in a huge database called Gentech in the US. Further testing with cooperation from Peruvian archaeologists and the Ministry of Culture are now ongoing.”

Nevertheless, LA Marzulli explained that the DNA results fit perfectly with the hypothesis he has held since before any testing was undertaken. That is that the Paracas people are the Nephilim. The Nephilim, according to ancient Biblical texts, are the offspring of the Fallen Angels and the women of earth, resulting in a hybrid entity, and they said to be based in the area of the Levant, the same place that the Paracas DNA traces to.

Whether or not this hypothesis is correct, the results of the DNA tests are dramatic and history changing and further testing may help to unravel the complex history of the Paracas people.

Next Steps

LA Marzulli and colleagues have plans for further testing and are currently working with Peruvian and American archaeologists. They have verbal permission from the head archaeologist of a Peruvian Museum to take more samples. These will then be presented to the Ministry of Culture for final consent before the samples are taking to US labs for testing. This process is expected to take at least a couple of years to complete.

The full account of the investigation and DNA testing is shown in LA Marzulli’s latest video Watchers 10, which can be ordered here.

Top image: A Paracas elongated skull and an artist’s impression based on a digital reconstruction. Credit: Marcia Moore / Ciamar Studio

From Ancient Origins @ http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/breaking-new-dna-testing-2000-year-old-elongated-paracas-skulls-changes-020914?nopaging=1

For more information about elongated skulls see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/elongated%20skulls