Nexus - 0109 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Before anyone knew better it was con- population arerelative newcomers to North- sidered prudent for public health bodies toerr ANCIENT Orators em China. on the side of conservatism and assume that Asix year study by Dr Johan Kamminga, AIDS was spread heterosexually. Now that ISRAELI ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE visiting fellow of the Australian National we know it isn’t, a very lucrative health UNEARTHED A 60,000 YEAR-OLD University, centred on comparing a cast of service monster has been created whose ‘NEANDERTHAL’ SKELETON that the “Old Man” skull from the Upper Cave survival depends on our believing it is. shows for the first time that so-called ‘primi- site at Zhoukoudian with other skulls from Don’t waste your life worrying. Itisn’t. It tive’ types of humans could - and did - speak. around the world. The skull was found above is spread mainly to receptive parmers during ‘The finding of a skeleton containing a U- the more ancient site where Homo Erectus analsex and by sharing needles with AIDS- shaped hyoid bone (which lies between the remains of Peking Man were excavated 60 infected people (Charlene herself is an ex- chin and the larynx and anchors the muscles years ago. LY. drug user). And by contaminated blood that move the tongue, lower jaw and larynx) Using a sophisticated computer tech- products. Strangely enough, most developed in Kebara cave in Israel was described in nique, colleague Professor Richard Wright nations including Australia still screen blood Nature earlier this year. In shape, size and of Sydney University took 33 differentmeas- supplies for only a handful-of known dis- position the Neanderthal hyoid bone was urements of cranial features and compared eases. Many ‘under-developed’ nations identical to that of modem humans and indi- them against 2,000 skulls. Professor Wright don’t screen supplies af all. But in late Janu- cated that “the anatomy of speech was the concludes that the skull was not Mongoloid, ary this year, the Indian Government with- same” and that they “could speak in the same but had more African and Australoid fea- drew a vaccine from public distribution - way,” according to Dr Baruch Arensberg, tures. beéause batches of it were found to be con- chief author of the Nature paper. Dr Kamminga cites recent Chinese evi- taminated by the HIV retrovirus. Other Israeli scientists discovered the dence which shows the Upper Cave fossils skeleton.of a more advanced hominid’- ana- are 10,000 years old, not 18,000 as previ- tomically identical to modern humans - who ously thought. He says that if these more lived 30,000 years before the ‘more primi- recent bones cannot by linked to the modem tive’ type, confirming similar puzzling find- Chinese population, then it becomes ex- ings elsewhere. tremely unlikely that the far older (230,000 If both lived in the Mediterranean at the t0460,000 year old) Peking Man fossils from same time and could speak, “you almost have t 2 Lower Cave are either. Dr Colin Groves, to imagine that they would have worked out a leading Australian physical anthropologist, some way to communicate,” says anthro- believes the Upper Cave remains may be pologist Fred Smith of the University of related to the Siberian aboriginals and the Tennessee. : ancient Japanese people, the Jomon, who are The 90,000-year-old ‘modem’ skeleton, partly represented in today’s Ainu people. also reported in the same issue of Nature, was He considers it unlikely that Homo erectus found in the cave of Es Skjul. It was found (early Peking and Java Man) was a direct near other similar remains which tumed up ancestor of modern Homo sapiens. last year and were dated to around 40,000 The modern Mongoloid population was years old. These indicate that the Neander- present in China 5,000 to 6,000 BCE, when thal and modem types may have co-existed rice farming was well established in the continuously for 50,000 years. south. According to Dr Groves, until] about The finding of ‘modern’ humans of 6,000 BCE the world’s humans were more Wh I/ similar antiquity has pushed back the age of robust inform and during the early Holocene 0 e Earth our particular branch of hominids at least (10,000 to about 4,000 BCE, following the C = 100,000 years in the past two decades, forc- end of the last Ice Age) modem forms took omp uterised ing revisions of anthropological theory qver. . whose bewildering implications are only “Over this time in Europe we saw the recently being considered. modemisation of the Cro Magnon types into modern Europeans,” he says. “Tn Australia there was the change from REMEMBER THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE) The famous New Age compendium is now acomputer programme. B Hd P “Our 3 kilogram catalogue showed us we e I I n g e rso n then types represented. by ae fossils by couldn’t get any larger in print,” explained » : Cow Swamp into modem Aborigines and in catalogue founder Stewart Brand. This up- Not C h | n ese? wre here ri oe a ofithe robust . : people... into modem Africans... dating means that users of Apple (and soon “y be 120,000 and 150,000 ‘I think between q ant i en eg i ay oy — =, NEw AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH ON years ago there was a rapid change of these 3,000 i oeeths digilend oh nga THE SPLASTERS CAST Df eset archaic forms [Homo erectus], probably in FROM THE PEKING MAN FOSSIL northeast Africa, and the change was into also listen to excerpts from 700 music re- ivf ; : cordings, bookreadings, or bird calls. The in- SITE near Beijing contradicts the belief that anatomically modem Homo sapiens, who then spread into the rest of the world.” formation is stored on CD-Rom - which the ancient human bones from the site are x : means you need a Compact Disk drive to use linked to modern-day Chinese people. Find- If Peking Man es ie a aicgatr of the it. But the CD can still be used for ordinary ings published in the Journal of Human Evo- modern Chinese, their origins are now un- audio disks as well. lution suggest that the modem Mongoloid known. NEXUS New Times Nine - 1989 Le