资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Using lipid residues absorbed in potsherds, the ages of pottery from various archaeological sites are determined and validated using sites for which the dates are well known from other methods.

The cranium from Broken Hill (Kabwe) was recovered from cave deposits in 1921, during metal ore mining in what is now Zambia(1). It is one of the best-preserved skulls of a fossil hominin, and was initially designated as the type specimen of Homo rhodesiensis, but recently it has often been included in the taxon Homo heidelbergensis(2-4). However, the original site has since been completely quarried away, and-although the cranium is often estimated to be around 500 thousand years old(5-7)-its unsystematic recovery impedes its accurate dating and placement in human evolution. Here we carried out analyses directly on the skull and found a best age estimate of 299 +/- 25 thousand years (mean +/- 2s). The result suggests that later Middle Pleistocene Africa contained multiple contemporaneous hominin lineages (that is, Homo sapiens(8,9), H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and Homo naledi(10,11)), similar to Eurasia, where Homo neanderthalensis, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and perhaps also Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus(12) were found contemporaneously. The age estimate also raises further questions about the mode of evolution of H. sapiens in Africa and whether H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis was a direct ancestor of our species(13,14).

Genome-wide ancestry profiles of four individuals, dating to 8,000 and 3,000 years before present, from the archaeological site of Shum Laka (Cameroon) shed light on the deep population history of sub-Saharan Africa.

Our knowledge of ancient human population structure in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly prior to the advent of food production, remains limited. Here we report genome-wide DNA data from four children-two of whom were buried approximately 8,000 years ago and two 3,000 years ago-from Shum Laka (Cameroon), one of the earliest known archaeological sites within the probable homeland of the Bantu language group(1-11). One individual carried the deeply divergent Y chromosome haplogroup A00, which today is found almost exclusively in the same region(12,13). However, the genome-wide ancestry profiles of all four individuals are most similar to those of present-day hunter-gatherers from western Central Africa, which implies that populations in western Cameroon today-as well as speakers of Bantu languages from across the continent-are not descended substantially from the population represented by these four people. We infer an Africa-wide phylogeny that features widespread admixture and three prominent radiations, including one that gave rise to at least four major lineages deep in the history of modern humans.