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News from Denisova Cave

#1
Yazata Offline
In the Altai region of southern Siberia, Russia. It's famous for its hominin remains, including the first samples of what are known as Denisovans. Seems that the cave was the place to be for both Neanderthals and Denisovans back in the earlier Paleolithic period. But no traces of anatomically modern humans have been found.  

An international team of researchers from Russia, The UK, Australia, Canada and Germany sifted the cave for bones and artifacts, mapped the stratigraphy, then subjected everything to the best dating methods available. They decided that the Denisovans were there first, arriving as early as 300,000 years ago. They continued using the cave until about 50,000 years ago, a whopping 1/4 million years! The Neanderthals appeared about 190,000 years ago and they used the cave for a hundred thousand years, until about 90,000 years ago. The Neanderthal occupation coincides with the Denisovan occupation, though it isn't entirely clear that they were there simultaneously. It may have been used seasonally (winters in Siberia aren't exactly warm) and maybe some years the Denisovans grabbed it and other years the Neanderthals.

But bones of hybrid Neanderthal-Denisovans do show that the two groups were having sex with each other, which suggests some degree of fraternization.

https://gizmodo.com/neanderthals-and-den...1832195445


[Image: sggzpd9ajqabkpqobtqj.jpg]
[Image: sggzpd9ajqabkpqobtqj.jpg]

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#2
C C Offline
(Jan 31, 2019 04:30 AM)Yazata Wrote: . . . They decided that the Denisovans were there first, arriving as early as 300,000 years ago. They continued using the cave until about 50,000 years ago, a whopping 1/4 million years! The Neanderthals appeared about 190,000 years ago and they used the cave for a hundred thousand years, until about 90,000 years ago.


Occasionally it's mind-numbing that hundreds of thousands of years were filled with the same, stale routines and unaltered lifestyle. Come back another 100 centuries later and still no agrarian community or civilization, not even the most mature or developed nomadic existence of hunter-gathering. Humans, but not humans as we know them. As much stuck in an immutable rut or organism limitation as squirrels, ants, robins, or bears.

No abstract space, no landscape of imaginative thought, no headroom of possibilities, no formal disciplines and guidance apart from rudimentary clan customs. No psychological and complex communicative infrastructure for the genesis and play of immaterial entities -- ideas, complex goals, interacting verbal beasts. No "supernatural of conceptual processes" yet to intrude upon the order of tangible things.

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