Wednesday, May 27, 2009

More about our Origins from National Geographic

I've always been fascinated by National Geographic articles, especially the ones about anthropological findings that shed light on what the world might have been like eons ago...our ancestors and the face of the planet, itself. I'm enclosing a photo from this article as well as a few teasers. It's worth the time to take a peek. Just click HERE.




In March of 1994 some spelunkers exploring an extensive cave system in northern Spain poked their lights into a small side gallery and noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the sandy soil. The cave, called El Sidrón, lay in the midst of a remote upland forest of chestnut and oak trees in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay.In addition to the fractures, cut marks left on the bones by stone tools clearly indicate that the individuals were cannibalized. Whoever ate their flesh, and for whatever reason—starvation? ritual?—the subsequent fate of their remains bestowed upon them a distinct and marvelous kind of immortality. Shortly after the nine individuals died—possibly within days—the ground below them suddenly collapsed, leaving little time for hyenas and other scavengers to scatter the remains.


The bones from El Sidrón were not Republican soldiers, but the fossilized remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. The locale places them at one of the most important geographical intersections of prehistory, and the date puts them squarely at the center of one of the most enduring mysteries in all of human evolution.



So, while the new genetic evidence appears to confirm that Neanderthals were a separate species from us, it also suggests that they may have possessed human language and were successful over a far larger sweep of Eurasia than previously thought. Which brings us back to the same hauntingly persistent question that has shadowed them from the beginning: Why did they disappear?




When teeth are imaged at high resolution, they reveal a complex, three-dimensional hatch of daily and longer periodic growth lines, like tree rings, along with stress lines that encode key moments in an individual's life history. The trauma of birth etches a sharp neonatal stress line on the enamel; the time of weaning and episodes of nutritional deprivation or other environmental stresses similarly leave distinct marks on developing teeth. "Teeth preserve a continuous, permanent record of growth, from before birth until they finish growing at the end of adolescence," Smith explained

11 comments:

Nic Sebastian said...

oh wow, fascinating! thanks for sharing (there has to be more than one poem in there!)

Dusty Bogwrangler said...

I enjoyed that, thanks!

Pris said...

Jozephine, thanks for reading....and Nic, definitely poems in there!

Anonymous said...

Bad hair day and bad skin day...but what the heck, it's allowed at their age...

Middle Ditch said...

Oh this is great. I knew about teeth collecting all the evidence. Off to have a look now and yes, why did they disappear? That answer is still not found.

Brian Campbell said...

Thanks for sharing that, Pris.

Seems to me this Neanderthal could could be dropped onto the streets of New York or Montreal and blend in perfectly. If she saw a crowd of soccer (or hockey) hooligans, she might wonder what's happened to civilization.

Pris said...

Thanks all of you for reading. M, how did you know about the teeth? This was new to me.

Brian, I have the hunch you're right:-)

mouse said...

Hi Pris, I'm still about, still loving your poems and posts. Did they really die out or just evolve. Will we ever know. What's the opposite to evolve?

me/cfs warrior said...

That was fascinating reading. Thanks for posting it. It makes me want to subscribe to this magazine again.

Terri

Pris said...

mouse, I put most of my poems on my website these days and now have a code that tells the search engines to skip them if I'm going to submit. More and more journals are considering anything on blog or website published in the sense they've been seen. Since I do submit I'm between a rock and a hard place. I get invitations to submit based on editors seeing my poetry and yet other editors now won't take it if its seen. I still do post some on Facebook, then remove them since my profile can only be read by friends there and is one more level under the search engines. I had a poem down to the wire of being accepted in a journal I like and one of the final reasons for discounting it was that it showed up in the search engines. Ouch.

Terri...it's a great mag. I never get to everything in the online one but do enough that it's worth it!

Jim K. said...

Reminds me of the movie
"Quest For Fire". That was cool.