Adam & Eve :Imaginery Friends Of Mentally Challenged People!!

Adam & Eve For Dummies

Why should we look at human evolution?

Figure 1:   Lateral and frontal views of Narmada fossil

• To see if the dates given by anthropology and the evidence provided by human fossils validate or contradict what is stated in our Itihasas(History).
• Astronomical dating of the Vedas and Itihasas indicates that the Saraswathi-Yamuna-Ganga River Civilization that flourished from about 20000 BC to 3000 BC, and that it was a pre-cursor to the Sindhu River Valley Civilization.
• I believe that the Vedas belong to this period and that the Narmada, Krishna, Tungabhadra, Cauvery and Godavari River valleys also had their own civilizations at this time.
• Christian Apologists claim that Amdam and Eve were the only Humans alive around 4000 BCE and that we all are their children.

      A human skull was found in the Narmada Excavation in a layer of volcanic ash     between 75000 and 750,000 years ago, closer to the 750000 boundary. It is either a homo erectus or a homo sapiens.

Tool Based Classification:

• It is commonly believed that humans first used stones, then bronze and later iron to make tools with.
• These lead to the names of old stone age (paleolithic) new stone age (neolithic), bronze age and iron age.
• Iron age occured later in the cold climates and earlier in the warm climates. In the warmer climates, the charcoal heats to higher temperatures. 

In India, all tool ages live simultaneously. I have some stone tools in my kitchen, sitting next to my microwave oven and this sort of variety is even more true of my neighbours than it is of me. Anyone who excavated my stone tools and mud pots should not assume that I did not have microwaves and tupperware.

Where was the oldest human fossil found? The Homo Sapiens Idaltu is a 160,000 year old sub-species of Homo Sapiens whose skull was found inHerto, Middle Awash, Ethiopia. These were very, very large robust people. The link gives a picture of the skull and an artist’s drawing of the person. Their skulls were larger than our skulls. “Radioisotopically dated to between 160,000 and 154,000 years ago, these new fossils predate classic Neanderthals and lack their derived features. The Herto hominids are morphologically and chronologically intermediate between archaic African fossils and later anatomically modern Late Pleistocene humans. They therefore represent the probable immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans. Their anatomy and antiquity constitute strong evidence of modern-human emergence in Africa.” quoted from :http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6941/full/nature01669.html

How old is the oldest human fossil found in India?

  600,000 years old, the skull of a 30-year old woman in the western Narmada region of Madhya Pradesh. “Dr Arun Sonakia, director, Nagpur Circle, GSI was the one who discovered the skull along with other mammalian fossils in late 1982.  Explaining with a plaster cast of the skull, Sonakia pointed out the differences that evolution had wrought. ‘‘This skull has a gently sloping forehead with massive eyebrow ridges and a cranial capacity of 1,100cc. Prehistoric man had better visual faculties and less grey matter. The skull of modern man has a more vertical forehead and not such deep-set ridges. Other sensory faculties are more developed and the cranial capacity is 1,400-1,500cc, indicating the presence of more grey matter,’’ Sonakia remarked. Radio carbon dating could not be done on the skull because the process can’t be used on any fossil that is more than 40,000 years old. Sonakia and his team managed to date the antiquity of the skull through faunal dating – by analysing animal fossils found with the skull. These fossils are of animals that flourished between a certain period all across the world in Europe, Africa and Asia. They all belong to the Quartenary period. Fauna of this period is 18 lakh years old and younger. ‘‘We also used changes in the earth’s magnetic field to date the skull. These changes in the magnetic field take place over a long time and affect these fossils,’’ Sonakia explained. The cast of the skull along with other discoveries of GSI are on display at the India Habitat Centre as part of the GEOSAS Congress taking place in the city. ” 

Early human fossils unearthed in Ukraine

Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe, experts have claimed.

Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at the Buran-Kaya cave site.

The 32,000-year-old fossils bear cut marks suggesting they were defleshed as part of a post-mortem ritual.

Details have been published in the journal PLoS One.

Archaeologist Dr Alexander Yanevich from the National Ukrainian Academy of Science in Kiev discovered the four Buran-Kaya caves in the Crimean mountains in 1991.

Since then, roughly two hundred human bone fragments have been unearthed at the site.

Among the shards of human bones and teeth, archaeologists have found ornaments fashioned from ivory, along with the abundant remains of animals.

The artefacts made by humans at the site allowed archaeologists to tie the ancient people to a cultural tradition known as the Gravettian.

This culture came to span the entire European continent and is named after the site of La Gravette in France, where this stone age culture was first studied.

Researchers were able to directly date the human fossils using radiocarbon techniques. The shape and form of the remains told the scientists they were dealing with modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).

Eastern promise

One thing that intrigued researchers was the scarcity of human long bones (bones from the limbs) in the caves.

The site yielded countless limb bones from antelope, foxes and hares.

Remains at the site bear cut marks where stone tools were used to remove flesh

But the human remains consisted of vertebrae, teeth and skull bones no larger than 12cm.

What is more, the positions of cut marks found on the human fragments were distinct from those found on the animal bones.

And while the bone marrow had been removed from butchered animals, it had been left alone in the case of the human remains at the site, explained co-author Sandrine Prat from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

She suspects this demonstrates that human bones were processed differently from those of animals. Human flesh was removed as part of ritual "cleaning", not to be eaten.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13846262

How did man evolve: DNA tells the true story

The tip of a girl's 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. 

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before. 

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time. Their DNA

lives on in us even though they are extinct. 

                           Figure2 : Denisovans

"In a sense, we are a hybrid species," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview. 

The Denisovans were first described a year ago in a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature made possible by genetic sequencing of the girl's pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult. Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses. 

Scientists are trying to envision the ancient couplings and their consequences: when and where they took place, how they happened, how many produced offspring and what effect the archaic genes have on humans today. Other scientists are trying to learn more about Denisovans: who they were, where they lived and how they became extinct. 

A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of genesequencing technology have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig , Germany, to map the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today's humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5% Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5% Denisovan DNA. 

A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1% Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred. 

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "the hobbits" because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. 

It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores impairs the preservation of DNA. 

This means that our modern era, since H floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive, said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. 

For scientists, the epicenter of the story on human origins is the Denisova cave in Altai Mountains of Siberia, where the girl's finger bone was found. It is the only known place where three types of humans - Denisovan, Neanderthal , modern - lived.

Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/How-did-man-evolve-DNA-tells-the-true-story/articleshow/11708186.cms