prehistoric (Page 8)

Human footprints that are 40,000 years old have been discovered beside an ancient lake in Mexico. This means that human beings were in the Americas 30,000 years earlier than archeologists once thought.

Robert Adler writes in the July 9-15 issue of New Scientist that archeologists Chris Stringer and Silvia Gonzalez discovered the footprints in a quarry near the town of Puebla in ash from a nearby volcano. The fossilized footprints were made when the humans walked along the shore of a lake. They were submerged when the water level rose and thus were preserved in the lake sediment. Some of them were made by children. The scientists were able to date the prints because they found shells in the sediment, which have been carbon-dated to 38,000 years ago.
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Unlike the recent footprints discovered in Mexico, a skull fragment discovered in a peat bog in Germany that was said to be 36,000 years old?the “missing link” between Neanderthals and modern man?has been found to be a fraud. This isn’t the first time this has happened.

Luke Harding writes in The Guardian that German anthropologist Reiner Protsch von Zieten has admitted falsifying the dating of important fossils. His discoveries changed much of our knowledge about ancient history?finding they are fake will change this even more. Protsch’s fake fossils seemed to prove that modern humans and Neanderthals co-existed, and perhaps even interbred.
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For years, paleontologists have believed that ice blockedoverland migration from Asia to the Americas until 13,000years ago. As a result, the profession has routinely ignoredevidence of a human presence in the Americas prior to thisdate, no matter how compelling.

Now brown bear fossils in Canada reveal that migration waspossible at least 25,000 years ago, long before the Berengialand bridge was supposedly open. The fossil fragments werefound in Alberta, Canada, and dated to a much earlier erathan has previously been thought possible. Previously,35,000 year old brown bear fossils have been found inBerengia itself (now submerged between Alaska and Siberia),but nothing older than 13,000 years had been found south ofthe land bridge itself.
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Fossil records show that societies do better if there areold folks around, and scientists think they know why.

Will Knight writes in New Scientist that seniors played animportant role in the spread of human civilization 30,000years ago, according to a new study of the human fossilrecord. Researchers Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee studieddental fossils belonging to early humans and pre-humanspecies dating back 3 million years, in order to judge theirages. In those days, you were “old” at age 30. There wereseveral kinds of pre-humans but only one of them lastedlonger enough to become the ancestors of modern man. Thedifference may have been the number of seniors.
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