Tag: Homo sapiens

Rehabilitating the Neanderthals – Accusations Uluzzian Man Took H. Sapiens Tools Prove False

Neanderthals are not stupid For decades scientists believed Neanderthals developed ‘modern’ tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, and it is often said that the cavemen weren’t able to adapt their hunting techniques to the changing climate quickly enough to prevent their extinction.

A new study nowsuggests these sturdy ancients were well capable of innovating without our help, adding to the growing pool of evidence that Neanderthal man was not a primitive, clumbering caveman.

Basically, I am rehabilitating neanderthals, explainsJulien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Denver. They were far more resourceful than we have given them credit for.

Uluzzian Innovation

About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to modern Homo sapiens, appeared in northern Italy while central Italy continued to be occupied by Neanderthals of the Mousterian culture which had been around for at least 100,000 years. At this time a new culture arose in the south of Italy, one also thought to be created by Neanderthals. They were the Uluzzian and they were very different.

But when southern Italy too experienced a shift in climate, and the trees were replaced by grasslands, the regio’s inhabitants faced the stark choice of adapting or dying out.

This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The evidence suggests the Uluzzian began using darts or arrows to hunt smaller game to supplement the increasingly scarce larger mammals they traditionally hunted. Riel-Salvatore identified projectile points, ochre, bone tools, ornaments and possible evidence of fishing and small game hunting at Uluzzian archaeological sites throughout southern Italy.

These innovations are not traditionally associated with Neanderthals, suggesting they evolved independently, likely as a reaction to the dramatic changes in climate. But more importantly, they emerged in an area geographically separated from modern humans.

My conclusion is that if the Uluzzian is a Neanderthal culture it suggests that contacts with modern humans are not necessary to explain the origin of this new behaviour. This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology, he said. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The Neanderthal as Intelligent Being

We credit dolphins, monkeys and even pigs with ‘intelligence’, but common perceptionis only to oftenthatof the Neanderthals as thick-skulled, primitive ‘cavemen’. Yet, the Neanderthal weren’t ‘dumb’.

For starters, they had larger cranial capacities than our own species, andmammalian DNA retrieved from Neandertal stone tools suggests theysuccesfully huntend largegame.Neanderthals evenused a primitive form of make-up, although not if this was for ornamental or symbolic reasons (likely both).

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Also,a study comparing the amount of cutting-edge, production efficiency and life time of Neanderthal tools (flint flakes) with the narrow flint blades used by more modern human argued that there was no technical advantage to the blades. Upper Paleolithic technology was not necessarily better, just different. (If you think ofotherexamples, !)

Where did the Neanderthals go?

The powerfully built (and steroid-fuelled, if you like) Neanderthals were first discovered in Germanys Neander Valley in 1856. The oldest remains with Neanderthal characteristics date to about 130,000 years ago. These Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record in Asia about 50,000 years ago and in Europe about 20,000 years later. Why the Neanderthal vanished remains unclear.

The ‘interbreeding hypothesis’ suggests that they were a subspecies that bred with Homo sapiens, disappearing through absorbtion. An alternative scenario is that Neanderthals were a separate species and got replaced by the Homo sapiens overrun by more advanced modern humans arriving in Europe from Africa.

Riel-Salvatore rejects that the Neanderthals were exterminated by modern humans. Homo sapiens might simply have existed in larger groups and had slightly higher birthrates, he said.

A recent study shows the Neanderthals share between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic material to the people of Asia and Europe. It has been suggested it is due to interbreeding between Neanderthals and the ancestors of non-Africans after they left Africa. But even if we did to some extent sleep with the ‘primitive caveman’, the populations that remained100% Neanderthal were probably out-competed and marginalized to extinction.

Riel-Salvatore’s research, to be published in Decembers Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, isbased on seven years of studying Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture.

Neanderthal DNA Sequenced – How Similar are they to Modern Humans?

svante paabo with reconstructed neanderthal skull Some 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals diverged from the primate line that led to present-day humans. The Homo neanderthalis died out 30,000 years ago, while we managed to evolve into the handsomely built, technically skilled, and somewhat reasonable animal we are today. Research into Neanderthal DNA now shows that our extinct relatives did leave their mark in the genomes of some modern humans, leading researchers to believe that our species ‘paired up’ with our less evolutionary successful cousins when we were both living in the Middle East, about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago and before we left to populate Europe and Asia.

Neanderthals are the most recent, extinct relatives of modern humans. The current fossil records suggest they diverged from the primate line that led to the Homo sapiens some 400,000 years ago in Africa. Neanderthals then migrated north into Eurasia, where they became a geographically isolated group, evolving independent of the line that led to modern humans in Africa. They lived in Europe and western Asia, and Neanderthal remains have been found as far east as southern Siberia and as far south as the Middle East. Until 370,000 years later about 30,000 years or approximately 1500 generations ago they disappeared.

For comparison, another of our relatives, the chimpanzee not extinct yet, but endangered diverged from the same primate line some five to seven million years ago. Currently there are about half a million chimps populating Planet Earth, almost seven billion humans and zero Neanderthals.

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In the last decades, controversy has surrounded the question of whether Neanderthals interbred with anatomically modern humans. Both physical properties of early man (derived from fossils) and DNA research have been used to argue both for and against an, errr, genetic contribution by Neanderthals towards the kind of animal we are today. Previous studies comparing Neanderthal and human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have failed to provide a match, and thus evidence for interbreeding or ‘admixture’. However, this does not exclude the possibility of Neanderthal-on-human action, leading to Neanderthals contributing other parts of their genome to our present day genetic make-up.

Researchers have now produced the first whole Neanderthal sequence written as a succession of three billion letters using DNA samples from the bones of three female Neanderthals who lived and died at the Vindija Cave in Croatia some 40,000 years ago. The study was published in last week’s Science.

Complete Neanderthal Genome Sequenced

Working with ancient, sample-derived DNA is tough when compared with fresh samples, said Andy Bhattacharjee of Agilent’s Life Sciences Group. Thirty to forty thousand years have passed since Neanderthals walked on earth, and all that is left are ancient bones containing severely degraded DNA. The DNA itself has also undergone a sort of chemical aging, deamination.

Svante Pbo, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, says the main problem that arose when doing this was contamination by other organisms. Over 95 percent of the DNA in one sample originated from bacteria and microorganisms which colonized the Neanderthals after their death.

Therefore, removal of this contaminant DNA is of paramount importance, as this allows more coverage of the endogenous genome and therefore allows one to better decipher the genetic code. The capture methodology solves this big problem by enriching for Neanderthal sequences and depleting contaminant DNA. It’s an elegant solution, adds Bhattacharjee.

The method, published in the same May 2010 issue of the journal Science as the Neanderthal study, uses two rounds of ‘target enrichment’ procedure to enrich ancient DNA from rare and precious bone samples so it can be sequenced.

Another factor was human DNA, which could enter the samples during excavation or in the laboratory, jeopardizing the results. Various techniques were used to prevent this from influencing the results: each DNA fragment was marked with a short synthetic piece of DNA as a label, the samples were processed in ultra-clean rooms and various tests were run on the date to ensure contamination was minimized.

Comparing the draft Neanderthal genome sequence with the genetic sequence of humans and chimpanzees allows scientists to catalog the genetic differences. The researchers do so by identifying features that are unique to present-day humans and estimating when these mutations took place, as well as checking their findings against the fossil record for the evolution of hominins.

However, the new data suggests evolution did not proceed in a straight line. The diagram that shows how the different branches of hominins split off from one another that we were shown in high school might, as we suspected, just be too simplistic. Rather, evolution appeared to be a messier process, with emerging species merging back into the lines from which they diverged.

The comparison of these two genetic sequences enables us to find out where our genome differs from that of our closest relatives, said Svante Pbo.

Cataloging What Makes us Human

reconstructed neanderthal skeleton

By comparing the Neanderthal and modern genetic sequences, researchers have tried to discover genes that distinguish modern humans from their close relatives and which may have given us certain advantages over the course of evolution. For example, the catalogue includes differences in genes that code for functional elements, such as proteins, in which the Neanderthal versions are more like those of the chimpanzee than present-day humans. Some evolutionary changes were found in genes involved in cognitive development, skull structure, energy metabolism, skin morphology and wound healing.

This was done by identifying sites in the genome alignment where the human genome sequence which was decoded about ten years ago does not match that of chimpanzee, orangutan or rhesus macaque and are likely to have changed since the ancestor we shared with chimps and then comparing these to the Neanderthal DNA.

Two notable genes that emerged from the results are a gene influencing the pigmentation of the skin, and differences in genetic make-up that could affect aspects of energy metabolism how effectively mammoth steak is rendered into human action.

Another gene that differs is RUNX2. When affected in the Homo sapiens (that’s us!) it can cause a series of abnormalities, which can easily be associated with the Neanderthal physique: a bell-shaped rib cage, a more prominent cranial frontal bone and differences in the architecture of the shoulder joint. It is thus reasonable to assume that an evolutionary change in this gene was of importance to the origin of modern humans.

The Neanderthal in you

The study found Neanderthals are equally close to Europeans and East-Asians, but significantly closer to non-Africans than to Africans. The Neanderthal exchanged genes with ancestors of non-Africans, more particular, the researchers concluded that the gene flow was from Neanderthal into modern humans.

A 2009 study estimated the amount of non-African genomes affected by gene flow from ‘archaic’ hominids, including Neanderthals, to be 14%, however Pbo’s team claim that this figure is over-estimated. They conclude that between 1 to 4% of ‘Eurasian DNA’ is derived from Neanderthal.

Thus the genomic data seems to suggest that Neanderthals re-encountered anatomically modern humans, who began migrating out of Africa some 80,000 years ago. When we were leaving Africa in small pioneering groups, we must have encountered of the seventh kind a bunch of Neanderthals living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, before the human population spread across East Asia.

These are preliminary data based on a very limited number of samples, so it is not clear how widely applicable these findings are to all populations. The findings do not change our basic understanding that humans originated in Africa and dispersed around the world in a migration out of that continent.

The study does stipulate that the actual amount of interbreeding between Neanderthal and modern humans may have been very limited, given that it only contributed to 1 to 4% of the genome of present-day non-Africans.

It was a very unique series of events, with a founding population of modern humans of greatly reduced size tens to hundreds of individuals, Jim Mullikin commented. Geneticists can detect a population constriction or bottleneck where certain genetic markers are concentrated; that only occurs when the population is small. At that time, Dr Mullikin continued, where the population was greatly reduced, the modern humans migrating out of Africa encountered Neanderthals and interbreeding occurred between the two groups, leaving an additional, but subtle, genetic signature in the out-of-Africa group of modern humans.

The researchers have not yet detected any signs that the DNA from modern humans can be found in the Neanderthal genome. Neither is it known whether a more systematic sampling of African populations will reveal the presence of Neanderthal DNA in some indigenous Africans.

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These are preliminary data based on a very limited number of samples, so it is not clear how widely applicable these findings are to all populations, said Vence Bonham. The findings do not change our basic understanding that humans originated in Africa and dispersed around the world in a migration out of that continent.

So nothing is ‘really’ certain, yet again. But don’t let that put you off: the methodology developed during these studies can also be applied to other challenging studies in paleontology and archaeology as well as other human forensics. And having overcome multiple technical challenges, the scholars look optimistically into the future: We will also decode the remaining parts of the Neanderthal genome and learn much more about ourselves and our closest relatives, said Svante Pbo.

This did lead to an entertaining challenge over the weekend: explaining all this over a pint, and accurately estimating the amount of Neanderthal (or other primitive hominins) DNA in the specimens of male Homo sapiens we observed or interacted with. The conclusion was that this study must still underestimate the amount of DNA the more primitive hominids have contributed, unless they did not take alcohol intoxication of said specimens into account. We’d also appreciate a heads up on any more research into a) if ‘addiction’ is mapped into our genes or rather a Pavlov effect (fruits beyond conservation date make me merry, so I’ll consume more) and b) spatial awareness, in particular, theoretically, whether a monkey can learn to beat a human at foosball?

New Species of Human Ancestor Discovered in Africa is “Rosetta Stone” of Genus Homo

Archaeologists in South Africa have discovered a previously unknown species of human ancestor in the form of the 1.9 million-year-old partial skeletons of an adult female and a young male hidden deep in an underground cave outside Johannesburg.

Theyre thought to represent a key period of evolutionary transition between ape and man. The find is believed to be so important that the lead scientist behind their research has described the species dubbed Australopithecus sediba as potentially being the Rosetta Stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

The find comes hot on the heels of the discovery of the remains of a 40,000-year-old human finger in Siberia, thought to belong to another previously unknown ancestor of Homo sapiens. The find suggests an undocumented species of man that lived alongside Neanderthals and early modern humans in parts of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago.

Its represents the first new human ancestor identified since the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the strange hobbits who are thought to have inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores until 13,000 years ago.

Climbing Down From the Evolutionary Tree

Lee Berger, a palaeontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is the expert currently working hard to explain the story of Australopithecus sediba, which is represented by a pair of unlucky souls possibly mother and son who met their fate by falling together through a fissure in ground, before being carried a few metres by mud or water into a subterranean pool where they were gradually encased in rock.

Theyre believed to originate from the very foot of the human family tree, and are therefore thought to be of enormous importance to the study of mans evolution from primates.

These fossils give us an extraordinarily detailed look into a new chapter of human evolution, Berger told The Guardian, and provide a window into a critical period when hominids made the committed change from dependency on life in the trees to life on the ground. Sediba may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

Some experts have voiced skepticism about the importance of Australopithecus sediba, however, because it shares such prominent anatomical features with both early humans from the genus Homo (long legs and a pelvis well adapted to walking upright), and their ancient predecessors the Australopithecines or southern apes (long arms like orang-utans).

The transition to Homo continues to be almost totally confusing, Donald Johanson of Arizona State University in Tempe an opponent of Bergers theory told Science magazine. Its Homo, he concluded.

The debate promises to continue.

DNA Evidence Points Finger in Direction of New Human Species

There was nothing so immediately dramatic about the remains found in Siberia specifically Denisova cave in the Altai mountains, a range that straddles Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan. The finger, which may have belonged to a young child and was recovered from a layer of rock in the cave dated to between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago is tiny, and offers no visible hint of unusual origins.

It was genetic testing that yielded results that left its researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany stunned. There was no match with the DNA profile of either Neanderthals or early modern humans. It is the first time a new type of human has been identified purely from DNA analysis.

It really looked like something I had never seen before. It was a sequence which is similar in some ways to humans, but still quite distinct.

It really looked like something I had never seen before, the Max Planck Institutes Johannes Krause told The Guardian. It was a sequence which is similar in some ways to humans, but still quite distinct.

Project leader Svante Pbo could hardly believe it when Krause called him to reveal the results of the test. It was absolutely amazing, I didnt believe him, Pbo said. I thought he was pulling my leg.

Krause and co are now concentrating on DNA from the nuclei of cells in the finger in a bid to figure out where the species fits into the human family tree, and also if it interbred at all with Neanderthals and modern humans.

Alex Reid to Play Intellectual Caveman in New BBC Historical Costume Drama

Knuckle-dragging, bare-chested, monosyllabic men who once had to rely on violence and brute strength to get by arent as stupid as we think at least judging by the news that ex-cage fighter Alex ‘Mr Katie Price’ Reid is to try his hand at acting, in a new BBC historical costume drama called 200BC.

Oh, and cavemen were quite clever too it seems. Reids role is going to be as a prehistoric intellectual in the show, which will be based on growing evidence that Homo sapiens actually lived relatively sophisticated lives, contrary to our idea of them as club-wielding simpletons little brighter than primates.

Just last month, archaeologists in South Africa announced that they have unearthed a cache of ostrich eggs dating back 60,000 years and etched with intricate geometric designs proof that Homo sapiens were capable of symbolic thinking 20,000 years earlier than previously believed.

Last year, it was revealed by archaeologists in North Africa that stashes of symbolic jewellery dating back 82,000 years had been found in the Moroccan desert, giving vital proof of the earliest juncture between human culture and cognition.

Earlier in 2009, archaeologists working in the south-west of Germany at the cave of Hohle Fels discovered a small carved female erotic figurine, aged 35,000 years, plus a portion of a thin rudimentary flute carved from bird bone and dating from around the same time, which has been described as unambiguously the oldest musical instrument in the world. More proof still that early man started thinking outside of the box way sooner than anyone had until now thought possible.

Homo sapiens actually lived relatively sophisticated lives, contrary to our idea of them as club-wielding simpletons.

Its a big blockbuster thing, six or seven episodes, Reid told Heat magazine of the new BBC drama (as quoted by STV News).

Im quite excited to play a Homo sapien, the Celebrity Big Brother winner added. Its like a different take that cavemen werent actually stupid, they were quite intellectual.

Rumours that Reid just marginally out-acted a shaven ape in auditions remain unconfirmed.

Research On Sex Lives of Ancestors Hints At Why Monogamous Humans Out-Competed Neanderthals

A research team from the University of Liverpool, led by Evolutionary Anthropology PhD student Emma Nelson, reckon theyve made some tenuous inroads into establishing just how much early human-like primates liked to play the field when it came to sex. With it, they may have found some clues as to why Homo sapiens managed to see off Neanderthals as the dominant species on the planet.

The secret is in the ratio between the index and ring fingers on human hands, which are thought to be telltale indicators of how much androgen and with it, testosterone a person is exposed to in the womb. More androgen means longer ring fingers and a lower index-to-ring finger ratio, and vice-versa; studies (highly contentious ones) have suggested that men and in some cases women exposed to a larger amount of androgen will probably be physically and sexually more competitive, whereas those with shorter ring fingers are more likely to be monogamous.

Nelson and co hunted down male primate fossils that contained hands with intact index and ring fingers two Neanderthals and one Australopithecus afarensis (an extinct hominid ancestor of modern humans) and got their measuring tapes out. The Neanderthal had longer ring digits, suggesting he was a promiscuous chap who spent more time chasing skirt than feathering the nest; the Australopithecus afarensis had shorter ring fingers, suggesting he was a faithful chap who cared for his mate.

They were, in technical terms, a non-pair bonded and pair-bonded male respectively. What theyre seeing is very interesting, commented Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University, speaking to Discovery News, on Nelson and her teams findings. The difference between being pair-bonded and non pair-bonded mating is a major watershed within primates. If a distinction is that Neanderthals werent pair-bonded and modern humans were, that would be a major consideration in trying to figure out why modern humans out-competed Neanderthals in Europe.

The Neanderthal had longer digits, suggesting he was a promiscuous chap who spent more time chasing skirt than feathering the nest.

The difference would have been most crucial, Snow pointed out, when it came to pregnancy. A pair-bonded male would stick around to help his partner out with food and protection while she was in such a vulnerable condition, greatly improving her and her childs chances of survival. This monogamy would be beneficial to the future of the species too.

Its of course a massive leap from a set of stubby digits to solving one of the great conundrums of human evolution, and Nelson acknowledges that there is much more work to be done. Many more fossil hominids in particular skeletons of Homo sapiens that lived at the same time as Neanderthals need looked at. But it seems there is much to be learned from the sex lives of our ancestors, and as much to be learned from the backs of our own hands.

Picture by Dan Shouse. Some rights reserved.

Humans and Hobbits ‘Lived Together’

Six years ago, archaeologists digging in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores made one of the most shocking and controversial discoveries in scientific history. They found a brilliantly preserved, one metre-high skeleton which would soon be known as Homo floresiensis – or the Hobbit, as it has become affectionately known. Some were gobsmacked by the find, believing it to throw open the theory of evolution; others scoffed, believing it to be nothing more than a human being struck by a deformity known as microcephaly. Many believe the hobbit to have lived as late as 12,000 years ago, and a new paper hopes to prove this monumental paradigm correct. Debbie Argue, a PhD student from the Australian National University (ANU)’s Archaeology and Anthropology, has been comparing bone fragments of the Hobbit with other hominids, and believes that its inception overlapped with the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. This would shatter conventional wisdom, which says that we were the only hominids left on the planet following the demise of Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.

The aptly-named Ms Argue has had her contentious work published in the Journal of Human Evolution, and tells Australia’s ABC News she believes the paper to be a paradigm shift in the field: “We compared (the Hobbits) with almost every species in our genus, as well as Australopithecine, which was a genus before Homo evolved. Of course, we included Homo Sapiens. We discovered that Homo floresiensis ranged off the family tree almost at the beginning of the evolution of our genus, Homo. So that would have been over two million years ago, and as such a very, very primitive being.” Ms Argue is cautious about the proof of her work, but is confident it blows apart existing theories on the evolution of man. “This is science, so maybe [it’s] not the definitive proof but a very, very solid hypothesis,” she said. “This is the first time such a huge and comprehensive set of characteristics about the whole of the body of Homo floresiensis has been but into one analysis. This means that something very, very primitive came out of Africa.

“Here we were sharing the planet, where we thought we’d been the only people that survived after the end of the Neanderthals.”

“Previous to this we thought that what came out of Africa had modern body proportions and an expanded brain case, but this is a much more primitive being,” Ms Argue adds. “We know that Homo floresiensis was, in Flores at least, from 100,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago. And at that time, or at least from 40,000 years ago, we had modern humans in Asia and New Guinea and Australia. So here we were sharing the planet where we thought we’d been the only people that survived after the end of the Neanderthals.”

Images by Rosinoand Ryan Somma.

Making Sweet Music Aurignacian-Style

Stone Age man in a cave in south-west Germany 35,000 years ago really knew how to party it seems. Not only has an example of pre-historic porn been found in the cave of Hohle Fels, near the town of Schelklingen in the region of Swabia, but now too a portion of a thin rudimentary flute carved from bird bone which experts are calling unambiguously the oldest musical instrument in the world.

Its not the first such example found in the cave, which is an ongoing source of spectacular archaeological finds dating from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period. A bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes were uncovered there last year, while a three-hole mammoth ivory-carved flute plus two flutes made from the wing bones of a swan were excavated at another site nearby a few years ago. But this latest find made in September 2008 and revealed to the public just this week is by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves.

Measuring almost 22 centimetres long and 2.2 centimetres wide, it was carved from the bone of a griffon vulture (the remains of many of which have been found in the area) and includes the end of the instrument into which the Stone Age musician would have blown, as marked by two deep V-shaped indents. It has five holes, each of which bears the engraving of a fine line nearby. Part of the flute has been snapped off; judging by the average length of griffon bones, we can assume that perhaps as much as another eight centimetres of the instrument is missing.

Independent radiocarbon tests carried out in England and Germany led scientists to agree that the artefact is as much as 35,000 years old 5,000 years older than the next oldest known example yet found. Homo sapiens are believed to have settled extensively in the region about 40,000 years ago, which was 10,000 years before the extinction of Neanderthals although the instrument has been firmly attributed to the Homo sapiens.

Other artefacts found in the cave point to further examples of creative expression from its Stone Age residents. As mentioned above, a small erotic figurine was discovered there recently too, in sediment just a few metres away from the spot of the flute. Various cave drawings have been found on the caves walls too, along with multiple stone and ivory artefacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals.

We can now conclude that music played an important role in Aurignacian life in the Ach and Lone valleys, commented Nicholas Conard, a professor at the University of Tubingen, which has been leading research at Hohle Fels. It has been speculated that it would have served as a means of social bonding or as a simple celebration post-hunt for Hohle Fels’ pre-historic tenants. The bone flute is far too fragile to play, but a wooden replica has been tested extensively apparently its possible to perform the opening bars of the Star Spangled Banner. Great, but do you have something we can dance to?

Nice figure, a bit toothy though: the Venus of Hohle Fels

She may not be to everyone’s taste, but don’t knock her – this tiny mammoth tusk temptress is looking good for her 35,000 years. Discovered last year in the southwest German cave of Hohle Fels, the somewhat ironically-named Venus is believed to be the earliest form of figurative art – made by the first homo sapiens to settle in Europe. It predates other finds by up to 5,000 years, bringing Europe further in line with engravings found in Africa, which still predate the find. Dr Nicholas Conard of Tubingen University, Germany, told pre-eminent journal Nature that the discovery ‘radically changes our view of the origins of Paleolithic art.’

The 6cm (2.3″) vixen is said to be a fertility symbol – and was found in the cave alongside various tools used by early humans. And if today’s lad’s mags are anything to go by, the Venus of Hohle Fels wouldn’t look out of place alongside glamour girls like Jordan, with her big breasts and pert bottom. Maybe not Paleolithic porn, but certainly a prehistoric princess.