My ancestors were head-banging Pleistocene scavenger cannibals

[kaizor]

I just finished a new book called Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice Age Saga of Homo erectus (Noah Boaz & Russel Ciochon, 2004) which offers some very interesting new interpretations of the Peking man site at Zhoukoudian, not far from here. Has anyone read it? I'm insterested in hearing feedback on some of the ideas the authors posit. Amazon has some

Comments

I haven't read the book but...

[immortaleve]

I do know that my teeth freak out dentists, as white girls aren't supposed to have teeth like this.

[niubi]

my understanding is that the bottleneck was around 75,000 years ago which ties in with a catastrophic event at that time. if i recall correctly it was the eruption of a super-volcano - damn i need to pay more attention to those discovery channel and pbs shows.

[niubi]

i'm no expert on this but I understand that the bottleneck theory 75K-80K years ago is dominant at the moment with a small population moving out of Africa. Interesting because 80,000 years ago is not all that long ago (in an evolutionary sense) and that means fast bipedal spead over the planet over a short period of time. Bottom line is that all humans come from a small gene pool from recent past meaning we're all pretty closely related genetically compared to other animals (ironic that we're so close genetically but have a propensity to kill each other inter tribally al la read the newspaper, must be hard coded and selected for!). Other interesting feature is that Aboriginal colonisation of Australia is estimated at 50,000 - 60,000 years ago, not all that long after breaking out of Africa.