Chi furono i primi australiani?

Una popolazione di uomini anatomicamente moderni che uscì dall'Africa circa 75.000 anni fa e che si è stanziata in Australia circa 60.000 anni fa, producendo così una discendenza di 2500 generazioni ininterrotte ed isolate, fino ad oggi.


Who were the first Australians? 

ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Australasia, Australia, Breakingnews, Genetics, Indigenous Cultures, Oceania 

The Bradshaw rock paintings, or the Gwion Gwion figures, found in the north-west Kimberly region of West Australia have in the past been used to argue that Indigenous Australians were not the first Australians.

The Bradshaw, or Gwion Gwion, rock paintings  [Credit: WikiCommons] 

Archaeologists claimed these paintings were produced by a different race. 
About 20,000 years old, the Gwion Gwion figures are more recent than other paintings in the area, which have been dated as being up to 40,000 years old. But Dr Michael Westaway, biological anthropologist from Griffith University, said genome sequencing dispels the myth that Indigenous Australians were not the first Australians.

"This is absolutely not in doubt," Dr Westaway told Richard Glover on 702 ABC Sydney. "Many decades ago there were many hypotheses around but that hasn't really stood against any of the evidence." 
A lock of hair taken from an unknown young Indigenous man in the 1920s has provided genetic evidence that Aboriginal Australians are descended from the first modern humans to walk out of Africa nearly 75,000 years ago. 
The research was conducted by a team led by evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, and published in 2011. 
"This proves an unbroken lineage over 2,500 generations — about 65 to 70,000 years," Dr Westaway said. 
The first Aboriginal genome reinforces archaeological evidence that people arrived on the Australian continent at least 50,000 years ago, and that they share one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world. 
"The DNA evidence is extraordinary," Dr Westaway said. "We know that they moved out of Africa over 60,000 years ago. We have this remarkable trail that has been recovered for the genomic sequence of the first Australians."

Lake Mungo in New South Wales is another key site. 

It contains some of the oldest human remains outside Africa — including Mungo Man and Mungo Woman dating back 42,000 years.

"The morphology of Mungo Man is very similar to the first Australians of today," Dr Westaway said. "We have some of the earliest evidence of first Australians in Arnhem Land 55,000 years ago." 
Dr Westaway said there was no archaeological, DNA, or human paleontological evidence to suggest there were people here prior to the first Australians. 
Nineteenth century observational theories existed that there were genetic links between Indigenous Australians and Indians. 
"This just doesn't hold up against the huge body of scientific evidence," Dr Westaway explained. He said the weight of scientific evidence supported the notion that the first Australians were a continuous population isolated from the rest of the world for over 50,000 years.


Author: John Donegan | Source: ABC News Website [June 30, 2015]

Elmo di guerra

Rare 

Tlingit war helmet 

discovered at museum

 The mystery began to unfold when Museum staffers began to select objects from the over 200,000 items in the Museum’s collections for a new display titled “People of the Northwest Coast.” Dr. Ellen Savulis, the Science Museum’s Curator of Anthropology, was intrigued by one of the items described in collections records as simply an “Aleutian hat.” 
Stored on a shelf for over 100 hundred years, a rare anthropological treasure was recently discovered in the Springfield Science Museum’s permanent collections. Museum Director David Stier, who has worked in museums collections for almost 30 years, describes the discovery as nothing less than “the find of a lifetime” [Credit: Springfield Museum] The object was relatively large, ornately carved, and made from a single piece of dense wood. Although Dr. Savulis’ main area of expertise is Northeastern United States archaeology, she had the foresight to question whether hats made by the Unangax, the inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands, were typically made from such dense wood. Upon further investigation, Dr. Savulis found that the only type of wooden hat made in the treeless Aleutians is the hunting hat or visor, made from a thin plank of driftwood bent into a lopsided cone. None of this information matched the object she had in front of her. Dr. Savulis suspected that she had a helmet of some kind, and enlisted the help of Steve Henrikson, Curator of Collections at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau.  After hearing the description and an extensive viewing of artifact images, Mr. Henrikson responded enthusiastically, “This is a Tlingit war helmet, absolutely, no question!”  He went on to say that “it’s very rare - there are less than 100 Tlingit war helmets in existence that we know of. I’ve been studying them for over 20 years and I’m sure I’ve seen most of them.” Museum records show that the artifact was accepted into collections sometime after 1899, the year that the Springfield Science Museum (formerly the Museum of Natural History) moved into its own building at the Quadrangle.  The source of the artifact was not known, and it carried the simple label “Aleutian hat.” Having limited experience with cultural materials, museum specialist Albertus Lovejoy Dakin accepted the accuracy of the object’s label and entered it as such in the collection records. Some 40 years later the artifact received a permanent museum collection number from museum director Leo D. Otis, who still had no reason to dispute the “Aleutian hat” claim. There the artifact remained in its spot in the permanent collections, carefully preserved and unheralded, waiting to be found. According to Mr. Henrikson, we now know that the object is indeed a war helmet from the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska.  The style of the carving and decoration on the helmet (probably the emblem of a clan) dates it to the mid-19th century or earlier. With the mass importation of firearms to the region in the mid-1800’s, this sort of body armor became relegated to ceremonial uses. Today, a few helmets are still brought out at ceremonial gatherings, such as potlatches, to commemorate prominent events and honor past clan elders.  Because they are associated with combat, the helmets are not actually worn on the head during such peaceful gatherings, but are instead held in hand or perhaps held over the head of someone needing spiritual support. Henrikson estimates that there are approximately 95 war helmets in existence today, mostly in large museum collections. Many of these were collected by Russian explorers on the battlefield following clashes with the Tlingit. The largest collection of Tlingit armor is at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology in St. Petersburg. Beginning as protection for Tlingit warriors in battle, war helmets today serve the Tlingit as healing reminders of their rich and ancient history.  A glimpse of this rich history can be seen starting Thursday, December 26, when the helmet will be placed on display for the first time since arriving in Springfield over a century ago. Source: Springfield Museum [December 18, 2013]

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Pattern matematico.

Mathematical pattern 

describes hunter-gatherer movement.


A mathematical pattern of movement called a Lévy walk describes the foraging behavior of animals from sharks to honey bees, and now for the first time has been shown to describe human hunter-gatherer movement as well. The study, led by University of Arizona anthropologist David Raichlen, was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One of the last hunter-gatherer tribes on Earth, the Hadza people of Tanzania still hunt on foot with traditional foraging methods. "If you want to understand human hunter-gatherer movement, you have to work with a group like the Hadza," said UA anthropologist David Raichlen, who led the study [Credit: Brian Wood/Yale University] The Lévy walk pattern appears to be ubiquitous in animals, similar to the golden ratio, phi, a mathematical ratio that has been found to describe proportions in plants and animals throughout nature. "Scientists have been interested in characterizing how animals search for a long time," Raichlen said, "so we decided to look at whether human hunter-gatherers use similar patterns." Funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded to study co-author Herman Pontzer, Raichlen and his colleagues worked with the Hadza people of Tanzania. The Hadza are one of the last big-game hunters in Africa, and one of the last groups on Earth to still forage on foot with traditional methods. "If you want to understand human hunter-gatherer movement, you have to work with a group like the Hadza," Raichlen said. 
Members of the tribe wore wristwatches with GPS units that tracked their movement while on hunting or foraging bouts. The GPS data showed that while the Hadza use other movement patterns, the dominant theme of their foraging movements is a Lévy walk – the same pattern used by many other animals when hunting or foraging. "Detecting this pattern among the Hadza, as has been found in several other species, tells us that such patterns are likely the result of general foraging strategies that many species adopt, across a wide variety of contexts," said study co-author Brian Wood, an anthropologist at Yale University who has worked with the Hadza people since 2004. "This movement pattern seems to occur across species and across environments in humans, from East Africa to urban areas," said Adam Gordon, study coauthor and a physical anthropologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York. "It shows up all across the world in different species and links the way that we move around in the natural world. This suggests that it's a fundamental pattern likely present in our evolutionary history." The Hadza people of Tanzania wore wristwatches with GPS trackers that followed their movements while hunting or foraging. Data showed that humans join a variety of other species including sharks and honeybees in using a Lévy walk pattern while foraging [Credit: Brian Wood/Yale University] The Lévy walk, which involves a series of short movements in one area and then a longer trek to another area, is not limited to searching for food. Studies have shown that humans sometimes follow a Lévy walk while ambling around an amusement park. The pattern also can be used as a predictor for urban development. "Think about your life," Raichlen said. "What do you do on a normal day? Go to work and come back, walk short distances around your house? Then every once in a while you take these long steps, on foot, bike, in a car or on a plane. We tend to take short steps in one area and then take longer strides to get to another area." Following a Lévy walk pattern does not mean that humans don't consciously decide where they are going, Raichlen said. "We definitely use memories and cues from the environment as we search," he explained, "but this pattern seems to emerge in the process." In future studies, Raichlen and his colleagues hope to understand the reasons for using a Lévy walk and whether the pattern is determined by the distribution of resources in the environment. "We're very interested in studying why the Hadza use this pattern, what's driving their hunting strategies and when they use this pattern versus another pattern," said Pontzer, a member of the research team and an anthropologist at Hunter College in New York. "We'd really like to know how and why specific environmental conditions or individual traits influence movement patterns," added Wood. Describing human movement patterns could also help anthropologists to understand how humans transported raw materials in the past, how our home ranges expanded and how we interact with our environment today, Raichlen noted. "We can characterize these movement patterns across different human environments, and that means we can use this movement pattern to understand past mobility," Raichlen said. "Also, finding patterns in nature is always fun." Author: Shelley Littin | Source: University of Arizona [December 23, 2013] 

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