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t's seems the height of arrogance for any paleoanthropologist to assume that the bones they have in hand represent all knowledge. That what is certainly the vast majority of still-existing bones and materials still hidden in earth doesn't represent anything they they don't already know from the relative scraps they have found.

On the other hand, the geneticists don't have "evidence", they have hints or suggestions. Sure, they can see existing genes in a modern DNA sampling that have similarities to genes from an older sampling dug from the earth, but how those genes came to be in the modern specimen is completely assumptive guesswork. The geneticists are looking at two end points and are 1. assuming they are of the same linear history and then 2. are assuming all the points in between. Rather grand assumptions.

evolution isn't something you "believe" in it is something you understand.

To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.

Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.

Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes.

The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.

“Every generation has to rewrite its history,” he said. While it used to suit Singapore to see itself as a city-state with a British heritage, modern Singapore needs a different interpretation of history to reinforce a more global perspective, he suggested.

Professor Miksic goes a step further. “A short history puts a nation on shaky ground; a shallowly rooted place could be overturned quickly,” he said. “If you can show a long cohabitation between the Malays and the Chinese, it proves you have a pretty stable arrangement.”

Other factors also may help explain the timing of the rewrite. “Now is a good time,” Professor Heng said. “There’s a need to develop a collective social memory. It’s become a political issue.”

today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe at different stages of history.

The first were hunter-gatherers who arrived some 45,000 years ago in Europe. Then came farmers who arrived from the Near East about 8,000 years ago.

Finally, a group of nomadic sheepherders from western Russia called the Yamnaya arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the new studies also suggest that the Yamnaya language may have given rise to many of the languages spoken in Europe today.

a shift in palaeoanthropological wisdom. Evolution’s little experiments yield a many-branched tree and not just a timeline; physical features arise and disappear or persist in a way that frustrates efforts to define ancestry just on the basis of what old bones look like. As a result, the idea that there is one clear lineage from the australopithecines to humans via some small number of progressively more human-like ancestors must now be thrown out. And the more excavations are carried out far from eastern Africa, where most of the fossils underpinning our current understanding of the human family tree were dug up, the more diverse and interesting the human story will become.

Genetic studies of ancient bones and later American Indians indicate their ancestors came from northeast Asia, possibly across the Bering land bridge at a time of low sea levels during the last ice age. But it has puzzled scientists that nothing like the Clovis technology has ever been found in Siberia.

the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”

the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”

The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago.

Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.

In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago.

They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust’-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians.He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans.

In A.D. 410, Roman authority in Britain collapsed and Romano-British society disappeared from history under the invading tides of Angles and Saxons from northern Europe. Historians have been debating ever since whether the Romano-British were wiped out or survived by adopting their conquerors’ language and culture

A fine-scale genetic analysis of the British population has now provided the answer. The invaders and the existing population lived side by side and eventually intermarried extensively. The people of south and central England are now genetically well mixed, with Saxon genes accounting for only about 20 percent of the mix

The British Isles were wiped clean of people by the glaciers that descended toward the end of the last ice age, and were repopulated some 10,000 years ago by people who trekked over the broad land bridge that then joined eastern England to Europe north of the Rhine. The researchers say they can identify the genetic signature of this early migration, which survives most strongly in people from the western extremity of Wales.

High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.

Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.

the Mahandzhar culture, which flourished there from 7,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C., could be linked to the older figures.

Sarah Zhang: You recently published two papers in which you analyzed over 600 genomes from ancient Europeans

Reich: In our hands, a successful sample costs less than $200. That’s only two or three times more than processing them on a present-day person

Reich: In Europe where we have the best data currently—although that will change over the coming years—we know a lot about how people have migrated. We know of multiple layers of population replacement over the last 50,000 years. Between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago in western Europe, the Neanderthals were replaced by modern human populations. The first modern human samples we have in Europe are about 40,000 years old and are genetically not at all related to present-day Europeans. They seem to be from extinct, dead-end groups.

researchers have used the technique to reveal the full extent of an ancient city in western Mexico, about a half an hour’s drive from Morelia, built by rivals to the Aztecs.

light detection and ranging scanning (lidar) involves directing a rapid succession of laser pulses at the ground from an aircraft.

The time and wavelength of the pulses reflected by the surface are combined with GPS and other data to produce a precise, three-dimensional map of the landscape. Crucially, the technique probes beneath foliage – useful for areas where vegetation is dense.