Adam's Calendar

"A 75,000 year-old stone calendar - In the cradle of humankind.

A new discovery of an ancient circular monolithic stone calendar site in Mpumalanga has proven to be at least 75,000 years old, pre-dating any other structure found to date. Southern Africa holds some of the deepest mysteries in all of human history... at around 60,000 years ago the early humans migrated from Africa and populated the rest of the world.... Modern historians have been speculating about the origins of these ruins, often calling them ‘cattle kraal of little historic importance’. The truth of the matter is that closer scientific inspection shows that we actually know very little about these spectacular ancient ruins. ...Adam’s Calendar is the flagship among these ruins because we can date this monolithic calendar with relative certainty to at least 75,000 years of age based on a number of scientific evaluations."

http://www.adamscalendar.com/

Human, All Too Human - 4 - Lifespan

"A new study by a Washington University in St. Louis suggests life expectancy was probably the same for early modern and late archaic humans and did not factor in the extinction of Neanderthals. Our species, Homo sapiens, is the only surviving lineage of the genus Homo. Still, there once were many others, all of whom could also be called human. One puzzle was the lack of elderly individuals. It was therefore suggested that early hominins might have had a shorter life expectancy than early modern humans, with our lineage ultimately outnumbering Neanderthals, contributing to their demise." But  Neanderthals and early modern humans had same lifespan.

Read more http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/01/2011/longevity-unlikely-to-have-aided-early-modern-humans

Human, All Too Human - 3 - Denisova

The Denisova hominin is the name given to the remains of a member of the genus Homo that may be a previously unknown species. The discover is based on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, obtained from a bone of a juvenile that lived about 41,000 years ago. The find happened in  the Denisova Cave (Altai Krai, Russia), a region also inhabited at about the same time by Neanderthals and modern humans. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin

Human, All Too Human - 2 - DNA

Researchers compared the Neanderthal DNA to the DNA of three modern people (French, Han Chinese, Polynesian). The team found that all three had inherited between 1 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. They also compared the Neanderthal sequence to two African individuals (Yoruba, San) and found no indication that they had inherited genes from Neanderthals, who evolved outside Africa. The research supports the idea that Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens between 100,000 and 80,000 years ago as our anatomically modern ancestors left Africa and spread across the globe, as we can read from http://www.archaeology.org/1101/topten/germany.html
See also http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.com/2010/12/human-all-too-human.html

Human, All Too Human - 1 - New

The sequencing of the nuclear genome from an ancient finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows that the cave dwellers were neither Neanderthals nor modern humans.
An international team of researchers led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) has sequenced the nuclear genome from a finger bone of an extinct hominin that is at least 30,000 years old and was excavated by archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, in 2008.
Read more
http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/12/2010/siberian-human-sheds-new-light-on-our-origins