Bordeaux
I'm in Bordeaux for the rest of this week, taking part in the meetings of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. The city is just as beautiful as I remember!
France
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Kids leave their traces in caves with art
Several stories last week related the story (from a conference talk by Jessica Cooney) about evidence that very young children had left finger grooves in the Grotte de Rouffignac. Alan Boyle's gives the most details: "Prehistoric kids left marks in caves".
Like Lascaux, the 5-mile (8-kilometer) Rouffignac cave network has plenty of drawings, depicting mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and even a cave bear. But Cooney focuses on a different kind of art: impressions left behind in clay or "moonmilk" — a soft, white, crystalline precipitate that forms inside limestone caves. The ancient artists created the impressions by pressing or dragging their fingers through the soft material on the cave walls. Those markings are what Cooney and her research colleague, Walden University's Leslie Van Gelder, used to estimate how old the artists were.
Rouffignac is an immense cave network. The main tourist route into the cave involves riding on an electric train for nearly a kilometer into the hillside. One problem posed by the cave is that tourists have been coming into it for hundreds of years -- there is graffiti dating to the 18th century on the ceiling near some of the most famous artwork. But it is an amazing place, in part for that long history of people interacting with the very ancient art.
Dale Guthrie's wonderful book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, discusses the idea that children and adolescents were involved in making much of the classic "cave art" in Europe. The famous paintings and engravings with high levels of technical execution are really exceptional, and are usually surrounded or accompanied by vastly more numerous, cruder, representations. Many of those can be analogized to art created by children today, some of them actually occur in areas where children are the most likely artists. And already we know about children's footprints in some caves, and handprint-negatives sized for young people.
Lazaret frontal
Julien Riel-Salvatore points to news from Lazaret Cave, France: "170,000 year-old human skull fragment found at Lazaret". There's a new 170,000-year-old frontal fragment.
Combe Capelle redated
I missed this earlier this month, but Julien Riel-Salvatore did not: "Burial Site at Combe Capelle in France is Not as Old as Previously Assumed, by Several Thousands Years"
After an initial sample of the famous skull failed to yield results in radiocarbon dating, a second sample was taken from a molar in the lower jaw for testing in June 2009 in Kiel. In previous cases, compact tooth enamel had shown better preservation conditions of the collagen needed for radiocarbon dating. A sufficient amount of collagen was able to be extracted after preparation and intense cleaning of the tooth substance. Subsequent analysis using accelerator mass spectrometry at the laboratory in Kiel assigned a date of 7575 BCE to the remains of what had previously been assumed to be an early Homo sapiens specimen, meaning earlier assumptions had been out by several thousands of years.
This does not come as a surprise; the provenience of the skeleton has always been doubtful. It was unearthed by Otto Hauser in 1909. Excavations from a century ago were not often conducted with a fastidiousness for stratigraphy, Hauser being a prime offender. Remember this is three years before Piltdown; a time when finding "modern" looking skeletons in association with old archaeology could make someone's fame.
There are some great pictures of the discovery and Hauser posing with the bones, at the Past Horizons site.
LIFE photo-essay at Lascaux, 1947
A LIFE magazine photo-essay brings 15 previously unpublished pictures of Lascaux by Ralph Morse, who was the first professional photographer to enter the site: "Inside Lascaux: Rare, Unpublished."
"LIFE re-opened its Paris bureau after the second World War ended, in the same offices we rented before the war" Morse recalls. "One day we get a message from New York about some cave that people have been talking about. We do a little research, and find out that even though the cave was discovered a few years before, no one's ever photographed the paintings. In fact, hardly anyone has ever been down there, except some guys who climb around in caves for fun. We know that the first thing we need is a generator to power our lights, but getting a generator anywhere after the war was almost impossible. We had to have people in London ship one over. Once it arrived, we were ready to go."
This is starting to seem like "cave art" week around here, but there have just been a lot of interesting links.
(via Savage Minds)
Arthouse cave art
A new film to debut at the Toronto Film Festival is a 90-minute 3-D exploration of Chauvet Cave, directed by Werner Herzog. The LA Times reports on the film: "Is Werner Herzog's new 3-D documentary a huge forward leap or total folly?"
For Herzog, 3-D was the perfect tool to capture the drawings, since after all, the cave that held the drawings was akin to a modern-day theater or gallery where primitive people could view, by torchlight, this mysterious new form of art. "Once you see the cave with your own eyes, you realize it had to be filmed in 3-D," Herzog says. "I've never used the process in the 58 films I made before and I have no plans to do it ever again, but it was important to capture the intentions of the painters. Once you saw the crazy niches and bulges and rock pendants in the walls, it was obvious it had to be in 3-D."
I really hope it comes to Madison. I think this is a great use for 3-D. Truly some aspects of the cave art depend on the actual 3-dimensional form of the underlying rock. Ninety minutes is a long tour, and I hope that the film uses the time to explore the place -- not jam it with speculative narration.
French Neolithic discontinuities
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues [1] present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, between the Loire and Garonne valleys of western France.
The mtDNA sample in the end was only three individuals -- one haplogroup X2, one U5a and one N1a. Each is intriguing, as far as a single sequence can be, because all are rare or absent from France today. I think one shouldn't go far interpreting three samples, but they contribute to the view that Neolithic mitochondrial variation in Europe was very different from recent Europeans. The N1a and U5b sequences fit within the already-known Neolithic (and for U5a, Mesolithic) variation in central and northern Europe.
It is from the U5a that Deguilloux and colleagues make a point about possible Mesolithic population continuity.
Subhaplogroup U5b has also been encountered in German Neolithic remains from the Corded Ware Culture (Haak et al., 2008) and in the hunter-gatherers studied by Bramanti et al. (2009), although in both instances, the branches concerned were distinct from the U5b in the Prissé sample. It is, however, worth noting that haplogroup U5 has been encountered in surprising frequency in the hunter-gatherers studied by Bramanti et al. (2009) and could correspond to a Mesolithic heritage.
The story of N1a is that it was very common in the central European Neolithic, even though it is very rare today. That was first noted by Wolfgang Haak and colleagues [2], and has in subsequent years been joined by the observation that the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers had yet other common haplogroups. The population history of Europe was a lot more interesting than we suspected 10 years ago.
Deguilloux and colleagues attempt a conservative explanation for the frequencies of N1a in Neolithic samples:
The widespread distribution of the N1a lineage in Early and Middle Neolithic northwestern Europe may indicate genetic continuity from Mesolithic populations. This scenario would support a Mesolithic contribution to the earliest Neolithic of Atlantic Europe. This would imply that the N1a lineage was already common in indigenous north European populations and that the spread of the Neolithic was principally the result of cultural diffusion. Although so far the N1a lineage has not been encountered among late European hunter-gatherers in central and north Europe (Bramanti et al., 2009; Malmström et al., 2009), it is worth noting that less than half of the hunter-gatherers' paleogenetic data come indeed from the pre-Neolithic period (predating LBK expansion). Finally, no paleogenetic data currently exist for the Mesolithic period in Western Europe. This prevents any conclusion being drawn about N1a occurrence during the Mesolithic period in those regions.
I will note this -- the more that N1a is replicated across the Neolithic of Europe, the less and less likely that its subsequent vast reduction in frequency could result from genetic drift. When there was only one or two samples from Central Europe with high N1a, it was at least possible that this was a local founder population that did not spread its mtDNA diversity very far. If it were localized, even in the central Danube (a fairly big region) it might be possible to maintain that the later decline of N1a to its present low frequency had been due to population replacement.
Now N1a seems like a real marker of the LBK, spread widely into Western Europe. It may be, as Deguilloux and colleagues suggest, that it will be found at substantial frequencies in earlier samples somewhere in Europe. We do want some explanation for how it got to be common in this culture area.
Dienekes has written about the study. His point is a good one: If N1a were present somewhere in pre-Neolithic Europe, it would require some kind of "partition" of the pre-Neolithic population, along with its propagation -- presumably southeastward -- into the LBK of central Europe. Seems doubtful.
The study includes an illuminating paragraph about the sources of contaminating sequence in these Neolithic extractions.
Strict precautions were followed during all procedures (including precautions during excavation) and proved to be effective, because all researchers who directly participated in this study (from people working in the field to those working in the laboratory) were genotyped and their sequences were never observed during analyses. However, European sequences were randomly found in clones (28% of the sequences obtained). These specific sequences are regularly observed in the laboratory, whatever the project tackled (including samples from Polynesia or South America), in clones from samples or negative controls. They are not reproducible for a specific sample and are different from researchers' sequences. These facts lead us to suspect the contamination of PCR reagents (Leonard et al., 2007). It was relatively easy, however, to discard those contaminating sequences from our analyses because they were largely in the minority when compared with endogenous sequences.
It would not be very difficult to compare the results from different labs and do a forensic-quality analysis of these reagent contamination events. Surely a good fraction of ancient DNA results prior to the last few years must represent such contamination. Nowadays people have the expectation that Neolithic-era remains may have rare or exotic haplogroups, but it hasn't been so long since people assumed that French equals French. I expressed some concern about this criterion before -- "strange" stands in for "non-contaminated" in too many studies.
It might be very helpful to have a paper outlining the actual contamination pathways that have been found to affect multiple labs. Then the results could be compared against reports that have come out over the years. If people are reluctant to cull doubtful ancient DNA results, at the very least they can target a set for replication studies.
References
- . 2011. News from the west: Ancient DNA from a French megalithic burial chamber. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. [Internet] 144:108–118. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.21376
- 2005. Ancient DNA from the First European Farmers in 7500-Year-Old Neolithic Sites. Science [Internet] 310:1016–1018. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1118725
Synopsis:Study of mtDNA from a Neolithic-era burial in France contributes to an overall picture of Neolithic population replacement in EuropeSketchbook
Today's sketchbook:
This is a reconstruction based on the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints.
Mailbag: First Europeans
Regarding Lézignan-le-Cèbe:
Now that's interesting. Few thoughts:
1. Can you be more specific about the artifact skepticism?The question is whether they may be geofacts. If the ones pictured in the article are the best they have, out of a total of around 20, it's a fair question.
2. Assuming it's real & it's about 1.6Ma, I think this has interesting implications about the initial Out of Africa expansion. It seems clear between this & Dmanisi that the earliest people in Europe did not have Acheulean technology. This leads me to two questions:
A. Is the Acheulean really that superior to the Oldowan, in terms of straight up functionality? People have kicked around the idea that the handaxe might have been more important in terms of social interactions (i.e. the big handaxes as signs of competence/sexiness/whatever). I don't know enough about archeology to answer this question.I think we have to answer this with reference to the mechanism that causes Acheulean artifacts to be so widespread and persistent. This means not only bifaces but also aspects of procurement and other element of artifact reduction. It's easy to see why Oldowan is widespread and persistent: If you can maintain the idea of stone tools, knocking flakes off rocks, you've got Oldowan.
But why bifaces? One possible answer is the same as the Oldowan -- they're really quite obvious. But if they were so obvious and easy, why didn't anybody make them earlier?
My preferred explanation: They were functionally valuable, not too difficult, and were therefore recurrently invented again and again. This is the explanation for the fire drill in recent contexts -- independent invention. The test is whether there are non-biface aspects of the Acheulean that are too persistent to be compatible with independent invention. I don't know. Some obvious objections: If bifaces were so good, why were they ultimately replaced most everywhere? And why didn't they use them more often in East or Southeast Asia?
Bifaces could be easier than we might suspect for another reason: Maybe there were genetic biases maintaining them.
B. If the Acheulean is simply better technology, were humans really spread so thinly on the landscape at this time that they couldn't transmit a better technology across continents? If they were, it certainly highlights the appropriateness of source/sink models of human expansion out of Africa.
I agree. The question is how hard were they to transmit? If we knew, we could say much about the demography.
3. Assuming the site is legit & the Acheulean is plain better, does this have implications for the Out of Africa 2/Replacement model? The linchpin of that is that better technology allowed modern humans to once again expand out of Africa & replace the archaic peoples. But if ancient humans could expand out of Africa initially with nothing more than pebble tools, doesn't that seem to mitigate the logic of advanced technology facilitating a later expansion & replacement? Maybe the two out of Africa events are apples & oranges & this comparison simply isn't valid. (That is there was no one to outcompete initially, relative success is not a factor for the initial expansion.)
4. Makes you wonder what else is in Europe at this early age.
Don't forget Sima de Elefante. It's not as old, but it already raises many of the same questions. Was early European occupation constant? Was it an expansion out of Africa or Asia? Was it predictable as a consequence of Homo's ecology, or did it depend on some unique climatic conditions?
5. Imagine they find hominin fossils. How much would you bet they're similar to the Dmanisians?
Not too long ago, we had two options -- they were like Ceprano, or they were like Gran Dolina. Now Ceprano looks a lot less likely. And Gran Dolina, which gives us basically a face, isn't so awfully different from the Zhoukoudian faces. How hard would it be to derive these from Dmanisi? On the other hand, what do we know about the faces Africans after 1.5 million years ago? We've got OH 12 and Buia.
Of course, we might predict that faces should be extremely variable, considering that the mandibles are. I'll be writing something about KNM-ER 1482 before long, which strikes me as an interesting case.
Another Aurignacian Neandertal, or just dinner?
I said I was going to do my best to scoop the press this week. How about this piece of undernews: at one of the few early Aurignacian sites to preserve skeletal remains, Les Rois, France, one of the Aurignacian-associated mandibles looks like it may have been a Neandertal.
Before I tell the whole story, let me telegraph the bottom line: Do I think this specimen was really an Aurignacian Neandertal?
My opinion has always been that Europeans in the time span from 40,000 to 25,000 radiocarbon years presented a varying mixture of "Neandertal" and "modern" morphological features. From that standpoint, it is not surprising to find a mandible that has the combination of features reported here. In this case, the most significant mandible (which is really quite a small fragment) shows one very interesting characteristic: a perikymata count and packing pattern similar to Neandertals and different from other Upper Paleolithic European teeth. But as I'll point out below, living humans are variable in their enamel formation in ways that reduce the significance of the differences between Neandertals and later Europeans.
But the story is significant -- not only do these remains extend the biological variability of known Aurignacian-associated people to include Neandertal-like developmental patterns, but also they help to inform us about the potential of cultural associations at other sites, including Vindija.
The morphology
Let's consider what the authors wrote about the specimens. Here's most of the abstract of the paper, in Journal of Anthropological Sciences, by Fernando Ramirez Rozzi and colleagues:
Here we reassess the taxonomic attribution of the human remains, their cultural affiliation, and provide five new radiocarbon dates for the site. Patterns of tooth growth along with the morphological and morphometric analysis of the human remains indicate that a juvenile mandible showing cutmarks presents some Neandertal features, whereas another mandible is attributed to Anatomically Modern Humans. Reappraisal of the archaeological sequence demonstrates that human remains derive from two layers dated to 28–30 kyr BP attributed to the Aurignacian, the only cultural tradition detected at the site. Three possible explanations may account for this unexpected evidence. The first one is that the Aurignacian was exclusively produced by AMH and that the child mandible from unit A2 represents evidence for consumption or, more likely, symbolic use of a Neandertal child by Aurignacian AMH. The second possible explanation is that Aurignacian technologies were produced at Les Rois by human groups bearing both AMH and Neandertal features. Human remains from Les Rois would be in this case the first evidence of a biological contact between the two human groups. The third possibility is that all human remains from Les Rois represent an AMH population with conserved plesiomorphic characters suggesting a larger variation in modern humans from the Upper Palaeolithic (Ramirez Rozzi et al. 2009:153).
So what is this "child mandible from unit A2"? Here's a picture showing pretty much every view:
Figure 3B from Ramirez Rozzi et al. 2009, picturing the Les Rois mandible B
As you can see from the picture, the mandible is far from complete. It has its adult premolars it lacks any posterior teeth and the base of the mandibular corpus. If I were looking for a diagnosis, I would not necessarily expect to find one. In that respect, the mandible is similar to the Kent's Cavern maxilla. As in that case, for Les Rois B I don't think you can do much to substantiate either Neandertal or non-Neandertal affinity based on external morphology alone. The absolute dimensions of the teeth overlap with both Neandertals and modern humans, as do the root dimensions (as determined by scans).
The text also includes this:
The change in orientation of the mandibular surface at the canine level evokes a flat or slightly arched anterior mandibular surface, characteristic of Neandertals (Schwartz & Tattersall, 2000) (Ramirez Rozzi et al. 2009:161).
This is correct but not strongly probative; the morphology is hard to judge and overlaps between these groups of humans.
Another mandible from the side, mandible A, the authors diagnose as a modern human with no specific Neandertal-like characteristics. Confusingly, mandible A comes from unit B, which overlies the unit A2 where the mandible B was found. And the site has a number of isolated teeth from both these units, some of which figure into the story.
The radiocarbon dates for the units A1 through B are clustered in a range around 30,000 radiocarbon years. That makes them far from the earliest Aurignacian, and they postdate substantially any Neandertal remains in France -- really, they overlap only with the latest Mousterian sites in southern Spain.
Perikymata
So given the scant morphological evidence, why does the paper conclude so strongly in favor of some Neandertal affinity for the specimen?
The answer has to do with enamel formation. The authors examined the perikymata counts and packing patterns on the Les Rois teeth -- an observation that was simply unavailable to earlier scientists who examined and reported on the remains. Whereas the eyeball-level morphological features of the specimens are relatively undiagnostic, the perikymata patterns appear to be more interesting. The slightly later specimens including mandible A, in unit B of the site, all look like other Upper Paleolithic non-Neandertal specimens. But the teeth in mandible B have enamel development profiles like Neandertals and unlike "anatomically modern" specimens from the Upper Paleolithic of Europe.
Mandible B is not alone in having a Neandertal-like developmental profile. From the same unit of the site, A2, there is one other canine tooth and three incisors, representing at least two individuals, all of which also have low perikymata counts. The paper represents these teeth as falling within the Neandertal distribution and outside the range represented by modern humans.
Unlike mandible B, the teeth present in mandible A all have high perikymata counts, there are no nonmetric characters present that would suggest Neanderthal affinity. If you found this at a much later site, you wouldn't notice anything unusual about it. Does it matter that the "modern" looking specimens are the later ones, and the "Neandertal" looking specimens are earlier? Not clear -- there are really too few remains to make this into a significant story, particularly in the context where the two units do not differ significantly in radiocarbon ages.
Should we believe that the dental remains from unit A2 are Neandertal? The dental development information is directly relevant to the variability of early Upper Paleolithic Europeans -- the Les Rois specimens here extend that variability into significant overlap with Neandertal dental development schedules. I think that's quite important -- there's no clean break denoting the demise of the Neandertals. That observation reflects other early Upper Paleolithic European samples, many of which also present Neandertal-like morphological characters.
But it's unclear to what extent enamel formation profiles, reflected by perikymata counts, accurately inform about phylogeny. Modern humans are quite variable in these perikymata counts and packing patterns. When it comes to total counts of perikymata, Neandertals cannot be distinguished from the variability among recent human populations (Guatelli-Steinberg et al. 2005; 2007). In this study, molars are not an issue, because they are not preserved for the relevant teeth. Perikymata packing patterns do separate known Neandertal specimens from samples of recent humans (Guatelli-Steinberg et al. 2007), and in that respect the Les Rois A2 teeth are similar to Neandertals.
How important are these observations of dental development? That's a broader question than I am prepared to answer here, except to note my earlier posts on dental development in Neandertals ("Neandertal teeth: the other shoe", "How modern is 'modern tooth development'?"). I can also point to a current review of the issue by Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg (2009), which introduces the recent literature. The short answer is that nobody really knows.
Cutmarks
The mandible B is also cutmarked:
Cutmarks on mandible B consist of three parallel striations located on the lingual aspect, below the right lateral canine and P3 (Fig. 5 and Fig. 4 Suppl. Mat.). Two of them bear diagnostic features of flint cutting-edge generated marks in form of v-shaped cross sections, “barbs” and, in one case, a typical splitting (Fisher 1995) (Ramirez Rozzi et al. 2009:170).
The authors point out that many of the faunal remains are also cutmarked, including mandibles apparently smashed open. I suppose this may be construed as evidence for cannibalism -- at the extreme, that the fearsome modern humans were hunting down the last Neandertals. And there's no particular reason to think that this isn't cannibalism at Les Rois, but given the scarcity of the sample, it's not nearly so strong as the evidence at some other sites.
The authors suggest that this may fit in with a pattern evident at other Upper Paleolithic sites, in which human remains were deliberately altered or processed for symbolic purposes. There is a perforated human tooth at the site, evidently created for use as a pendant. Some kind of mortuary practice is probably just as consistent with the scanty information we have as cannibalism.
Vindija
Regardless of whether the Les Rois hominids are Early Aurignacian or somewhat later in date, they appear to represent a population that includes substantial variability not present in later Europeans, but overlapping with earlier Neandertals. That observation of variability is consistent with a mixture of populations, possibly representing a declining fraction of Neandertal-derived genes over time.
So I would guess that Les Rois represents part of a larger range of variation. Further, we should keep in mind that the morphology of Neandertals in late Mousterian or Châtelperronian contexts also has variability that overlaps with contemporary human populations elsewhere.
On that topic, the Les Rois dental remains should make us return to the other Aurignacian-associated Neandertals: the Vindija G1 Neandertals. These remains are also fragmentary, but much more substantial and numerous than those from Les Rois. The anatomy of the specimens is covered in the review paper by Karavanic and Smith (1998), which itself reiterates earlier observations made by Fred Smith, Milford Wolpoff and others. This is a younger assemblage than the G3 layer where the Vindija genetic samples were taken, and represents the final Neandertals at the site.
The dating of the G1 layer has fluctuated back and forth, as I discussed in 2006. The most recent date puts the G1 Vi 207 and Vi 208 specimens at approximately 33,000 radiocarbon years -- possibly overlapping in date with Les Rois specimens, but probably a couple of thousand years older.
In addition to the physical remains, Vindija G1 is notable for the presence of several bone artifacts, including a split-base bone point, type artifact of the Aurignacian. The layer also includes some leaf-shaped bifacial points. There has been considerable controversy about whether these Aurignacian-like elements of the assemblage are actually associated with the Neandertal remains, or whether some mixing of the layers occurred due to cryoturbation (freezing-induced sediment disturbance). The strongest argument in favor of disturbance is that individuals with Neandertal-like morphologies have never before been clearly associated with Aurignacian tools. It seems to me that the Les Rois remains pretty well demolish that argument.
Vindija deserves a longer discussion than this short note. Karavanic and Smith (1998) argued that the G1 assemblage should not be called "Aurignacian" but that the Upper Paleolithic elements of it be recognized as novel parts of a regional cultural tradition with roots in the local Mousterian. That would accord with other "transitional" technocomplexes like the Châtelperronian and Bohunician, which appear to combine new Upper Paleolithic tool forms with lithic procurement and processing strategies common in earlier Mousterian assemblages.
In that light, the concept of "Early Aurignacian" deserves close examination: it seems that almost everywhere in Europe we look, we find evidence of conceptual mixture. That's certainly true of the biological remains, and when we consider that these sites and assemblages cover thousands of years of time -- extending up to hundreds of human generations -- it seems hard to believe that we can't make some more sense out of them.
Anyway, this post has gone on long enough. I have a lot more notes as background, and I'll see if I can't shape them up for posting over the next couple of weeks.
References:
Guatelli-Steinberg D, Reid DJ, Bishop TA, Larsen CS. 2005. Anterior tooth growth periods in Neandertals were comparable to those of modern humans. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 102:14197-14202. doi:10.1073/pnas.0503108102
Guatelli-Steinberg D. 2009. Recent studies of dental development in Neandertals: Implications for Neandertal life histories. Evol Anthropol 18:9-20. doi:10.1002/evan.20190
Ramirez Rozzi FV, d'Errico F, Vanhaeren M, Grootes PM, Kerautret B, Dujardin V. 2009. Cutmarked human remains bearing Neandertal features and modern human remains associated with the Aurignacian at Les Rois. J Anthropol Sci 87:153-185.
Neandertals
For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.
Denisova
From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.
Acceleration
The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.
Malapa
Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.