After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived.
The research, which the Chinese government has appeared to have delayed making public out of concerns of fueling Uighur Muslim separatism in its western-most Xinjiang region, is based on a cache of ancient dried-out corpses that have been found around the Tarim Basin in recent decades.
“It is unfortunate that the issue has been so politicized because it has created a lot of difficulties,” Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of “Mummies of the Tarim Basin”, told AFP.
And we thought Kennewick Man was causing a stink. . . .
Albanian Temple Unearthed By UC Archeologists
It took a hunch, hard work and a heck of a lot of diplomacy. But the payoff is spectacular: Archeologists from the University of Cincinnati have discovered a previously unknown Greek temple outside the ancient Greek city-state of Apollonia.
The monumental temple is "the third of its kind to be discovered at Apollonia and only the fifth in all of Albania," said Jack L. Davis, the Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati. Davis is co-director of the international team that has located the temple in a rural site in what is now modern-day Albania.
Layers of clustered apartments hide artifacts of ancient urban life
In the long, long history of humanity's shift from tiny clans of hunter-gatherers to settled societies of crowded city dwellers, no step was more momentous than the emergence of the first clustered towns and the sophisticated cultures their inhabitants created.
Intriguing evidence of early urbanization is now emerging at one of the largest and most significant digs in the history of archaeology, a 26-acre site in Turkey's Anatolian plain known as Çatalhöyük.
Quite a good article.
Way cool non-archaeological news Whale fossil found in Egyptian desert
An American palaeontologist and a team of Egyptians have found the most complete fossilised skeleton of the primitive whale Basilosaurus isis in Egypt's Western Desert, a university spokesperson said on Monday.
Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan excavated the well-preserved skeleton, which is about 40 million years old, in a desert valley known as Wadi Hitan (the Valley of the Whales) south-west of Cairo, spokesperson Karl Bates said.
"His feeling is that it's the most complete - the whole skeleton from stem to stern," said Bates.
We believe this is part of the Fayum Depression, that has yielded numerous important fossils for both the cetacean (whale) and primate lines. The Fayum is similar to other depressions in the eastern Sahara (e.g., Dakhla, Kharga), with a vertical wall of exposed deposits in the north, gently sloping upwards to the south.
These fossils probablty originated in the Qasr el-Sagha formation, a series of Eocene (ca. 55-33 million years ago) crossbedded sandstones, mudstone, limestone and carbonaceous shales. The shoreline of the Mediterranean (called the Tethys) was then far inland of the current coast of Egypt, putting it in the vicinity of the Fayum. The different strata indicate more or less the position of the shoreline at that point, representing the types of sediments found at different water depths and proximities to the shoreline. These deposits are named after the Qasr el-Sagha temple, which probably dates from Middle Kingdom times. You can see the formation behind the temple here:
The important fossils found in these deposits related directly to the evolution of modern whales. It was established as early as 1693 that whales were, in fact, mammals, and that they probably descended from some sort of terrestrial mammal was proposed by Darwin in 1859. The exact ancestor of whales has been somewhat controversial. It is known from immunological and DNA studies of modern species that whales are closely associated with artiodactyls, a group that includes modern deer, pig, and bison. In fact, the most recent DNA analyses indicate that whales are most closely related to hippopotami
For many years it was thought that both whales and artiodactyls shared a similar pair of ancestors in a group of early Tertiary mammals called "condylarths'. Artiodactyls were thought to have arisen from 'arctocyonid' condylarths while whales arose from closely related 'mesonychid' condylarths. More recent fossil finds in Pakistan have since seemed to show that both whales and artiodactyls both arose from the primitive artiodactyl ancestor (arctocyonid) rather than the mesonychids. At any rate, what IS clear is that whales and artiodactyls are closely related today and the best evidence today suggests a common ancestor sometime around 47 million years ago.
The Fayum comes into this a bit later during the late Eocene when Basilosaurus was found which takes whale evolution further down the fully aquatic path. Basilosaurus was one of the earliest fossils found that really cemented the relationship of whales to land mammals, but it may not be directly ancestral. Their vertebrae are extremely elongated compared to modern whales and may have represented a specialty adaptation, and only tangentially related to whale evolution.
Thus endeth the sermon on the Fayum whale fossils.