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China Tomb uneaths Ancient Mass Sacrifice and artifacts

A Tomb dating back 2,500 years has been excavated containing close to 50 victims of human sacrifice. The Chinese tomb also held many precious artifacts and new insights into the ritual customs of the Confucius era.

following on from recent posts regarding the Chinese archeology excavations the following information has been adapted from the National Geographic website.

The burial chamber was constructed for the patriarch of an aristocratic family and contains 47 dead buried side by side, Xu said (A scholar at the Archaeology Institute of Jiangxi). In the tomb the excavators found gold and bronze artifacts, along with elaborate silk gowns among the dead. However the most fascinating artifacts discovered in the tomb is a black, gold, and blood-red sword inscribed with pictures of dragons. Xu described it as "the most beautiful and best-preserved sword ever found in this part of China."

But the most startling discovery was that "most of those buried had been sacrificed to accompany their master into the afterlife," said Xu. Some aristocrats arranged for the sacrifice of their servants, their concubines, or others closest to them upon their death so they could travel together into the next life, he said.

The Jiangxi tomb is "one of the most important archaeological finds from this era in this part of China," he added.

Adapted from source:(NatGeo)

Cave men wore boots too!

Footwear is a fashionable item that has been oogled over by Women around the world for years, However it seems that toe bones from a cave in China suggest that people have been wearing shoes for atleast 40,000 years !!!

Erik Trinkaus  from Washington University in St Louis, measured the shape and density of toe bones from the 40,000 year old skeleton that was found in Tianyuan cave near Beijing. They compared these bones with those from 20th century Americans, and bones from various periods in between.                                                                                 
Shoes alter the way a person walks. With a rigid sole the toes curl far less than when barefoot and less force is passed through the bones, leading to obvious differences in the three recent populations. "Modern shoe-wearing Americans have wimpy little toes," says Trinkaus. Barefoot native Americans have strong, large toes. Shoe-wearing predecessors lie somewhere in between.

Trinkaus and Shang found that the Tianyuan toe bones were most si
milar to the more recent bones, showing that this person from the past regularly wore shoes!

The Origin of man may be in debate once again!

An human skull, in 16 pieces almost making a full fossil, that could date back 100,000 years has been unearthed in China.

Archaeologists from China have a 100,000-year-old human skull that may help prove Chinese people originated locally instead of from the African area's

The human skull fossil was unearthed when Chinese archaeologists were excavating a 260 m2 paleolithic site in Xuchang City, It has been name the Xuchang Man, ironically following on from the Peking Man!

The 16 piece Skull has protruding eyebrows and a shallower forehead. It is well preserved, and scientists at the university of Peking have confirmed the skull 'could' date back up to 100,000 years ago. If this is true then it may be able to provide clues about the evolution of Chinese people.

Other Chinese finds have been the two-million-year-old fossils of Wushan man in 1984 and the woman skull fossils of Lantian man in 1964 that date back 800,000 years.

The country found skull fossils of Peking Man in 1929 that date back 200,000 to 700,000 years. In 1984, fossils of Jinniushan Man, who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, were discovered in Liaoning Province also the 10,000 to 40,000-year-old fossils of upper cave man which was unearthed in Beijing in 1933.

The evolution of Chinese people lacks one key period between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, which led to a theory that modern Chinese people were descendants of Africans, so you can see the significance of this find.

Columbus gave us syphilis!!

Is Columbus to blame for bringing the nasty syphilis pathogen to Europe? Kristin Harper (Emory University, Atlanta, USA) Has been looking back in time to figure out the source of this pain in the crutch!

The syphilis-causing treponemes strains originated most recently in South America with their closest relatives of the disease. Harper says this information supports the hypothesis that syphilis came from the 'New World', but while it is generally agreed that the first recorded epidemic of syphilis occurred in Europe in 1495, controversy has raged ever since over the origin of the pathogen. In many cases, skeletal analysis has been inconclusive, due to faults with dating the bones and lack of further evidence.

To make the research even harder the family of treponema bacteria causes different diseases that share some symptoms but have different methods of transmission, for example syphilis is sexually transmitted, but yaws and endemic syphilis are tropical diseases that are transmitted through skin-to-skin or oral contact.

One theory for this European invasion of the disease is that a mutation took place to allow the pathogen to survive in much cooler harsher conditions.

Read the full article at DailyScience!

Can Monkeys really be using primative writing - Susan Rumbaugh believes they are!

I was browsing the web for something that would interest me and came across the following video on www.ted.com (click link to view video). This intrigued me into looking more closely at the part of evolution that humans could well have been at this stage, however we did not have the interaction from more advanced species as the bonobo have had.

In this 17 minute long video Susan"Savage" Rumbaugh asks whether uniquely human traits, and other animals' behaviors, are hardwired by species. Then she rolls footage out that will make you think again: maybe not.

The bonobo apes she works with understand spoken English. One follows her instructions to take a cigarette lighter from her pocket and use it to start a fire. Bonobos are shown making tools, drawing symbols to communicate, and playing Pac-Man -- all tasks learned just by watching. Maybe it's not always biology that causes a species to act as it does, she suggests. Maybe it's cultural exposure to how things are done.

Having us "humans" interact with the bonobo could have been the breaking point for a new cultural community that should be viewed and studied, from a distance. This could answer some questions have only had suggestive answers to in the past.

In more recent articles on chimps, It has shown that they have an incredibly memory and other than the need to breed, the male chimp must impress or overpower the female before the mating can begin. Isnt this what humans used to do with big clubs during our part of evolution?

Unfortunately i will have to end this post here but ill re edit this with more links to information later tonight.

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