NEW HOMINID

[rowe@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu (Mickey Rowe)]

This message also was rejected before I went back to the old version: 

  From: steve.cole@genie.geis.com
  Date: Sat, 26 Aug 95 00:38:00 UTC
  To: dinosaur@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu
  Subject: NEW HOMINID

  It's not a dino, but it was interesting, so here it is (all of it):
  =====
  Early human migrated to Europe sooner than thought
   By Joanne Kenen

  WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Archeological findings in northern Spain
  strongly suggest that early humans migrated to Europe far earlier
  than previously believed, scientists said Thursday.
   A site in Spain called Gran Dolina, part of a honeycomb of
  limestone caves at Atapuerca, was the site of early bones and stone
  tools that date back 780,000 years -- about 250,000 years earlier
  than human ancestors were believed to have found their way to
  Europe.
   A description of the findings and the geological techniques used to
  date them appear in twin papers in Friday's edition of the journal
  Science.
   "This has enormous implications for human evolution in Europe,"
  Josep Pares, a geomagnetist at the Institute of Earth Sciences in
  Barcelona and guest researcher at the University of Michigan, said
  in a telephone interview from Ann Arbor.
   Anthropologists generally agree that human life originated in
  Africa and that early humans or hominids began migrating to Asia and
  the Middle East about 1.5 million years ago.
   Until this find, no archaeological sites in Europe were believed to
  be more than a half-million years old.
   The early human bones appear very primitive and might be a new
  species of distant ancestors of the better known Neanderthals who
  inhabited Europe hundreds of thousands of years later, wrote Eudald
  Carbonell of the University of Tarragona, a team leader and
  co-author of the study.
   "Enlargement of the sample in the future may result in naming of a
  new species," he wrote.
   The stone tools were also more primitive than the hand axes early
  humans were making in Africa at that time.
   The fragmented remains represent at least four early humans, or
  hominids, including an adolescent and a child.
   If the dates hold up to further study and analysis by others, the
  researchers said the implications are enormous.
   "We now have good dates, hominids, tools, and fauna where we had
  nothing before. We've gone from zero to 100 percent," Clark Howell,
  an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told
  Science.
   Even these researchers at first did not suspect quite how old Gran
  Dolina was until Pares did a more elaborate study of the
  magnetization of 11 layers of rocks that create a geological
  calender in the earth.
   "The archeologists were finding so many human remains, they asked
  me to restudy this," he said.
  =====
  That's all the info I have.