Originally Posted By headstoner:
https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/464920/Screenshot_2019-08-14-11-52-49_2-1053997.png

Those pieces look like they came from one large slab to me. Like the bottom line just above the arrow, I say that was one stone that was cut into shape then put back together after the edges were ground off rather than many stones that were cut to fit precisely.

Same with the top semi cicular line, note some of the colors and natural lines in the stone match up to their corresponding stones.

Edit: im not saying ALL of them came from one giant piece but large areas appear to have come from large pieces cut and shaped.

Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.

The site also points to a new location for where modern humans may have first encountered their mysterious cousins, the now extinct Denisovans, said Nicolas Zwyns, an associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.

Zwyns led excavations from 2011 to 2016 at the Tolbor-16 site along the Tolbor River in the Northern Hangai Mountains between Siberia and northern Mongolia.

The excavations yielded thousands of stone artifacts, with 826 stone artifacts associated with the oldest human occupation at the site. With long and regular blades, the tools resemble those found at other sites in Siberia and Northwest China—indicating a large-scale dispersal of humans across the region, Zwyns said.

"These objects existed before, in Siberia, but not to such a degree of standardization," Zwyns said. "The most intriguing (aspect) is that they are produced in a complicated yet systematic way—and that seems to be the signature of a human group that shares a common technical and cultural background."

That technology, known in the region as the Initial Upper Palaeolithic, led the researchers to rule out Neanderthals or Denisovans as the site's occupants. "Although we found no human remains at the site, the dates we obtained match the age of the earliest Homo sapiens found in Siberia," Zwyns said. "After carefully considering other options, we suggest that this change in technology illustrates movements of Homo sapiens in the region."

Their findings were published online in an article in Scientific Reports.

The age of the site—determined by luminescence dating on the sediment and radiocarbon dating of animal bones found near the tools—is about 10,000 years earlier than the fossil of a human skullcap from Mongolia, and roughly 15,000 years after modern humans left Africa.

Evidence of soil development (grass and other organic matter) associated with the stone tools suggests that the climate for a period became warmer and wetter, making the normally cold and dry region more hospitable to grazing animals and humans.

Preliminary analysis identifies bone fragments at the site as large (wild cattle or bison) and medium size bovids (wild sheep, goat) and horses, which frequented the open steppe, forests and tundra during the Pleistocene—another sign of human occupation at the site.

The dates for the stone tools also match the age estimates obtained from genetic data for the earliest encounter between Homo sapiens and the Denisovans.

(More at link...)

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions across Europe has found evidence that suggests humans were responsible for the extinction of cave bears thousands of years ago, not the climate effects of the last Ice Age. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes their mitochondrial DNA study of cave bear remains and what they learned from it.

The cave bear was one of the large species that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age. Prior research has suggested the bears simply could not cope with the changing climate, and thus met their end. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence that suggests it was not just the cold that killed off the cave bears—humans appear to have played a large role, as well.

The work by the team involved mitochondrial testing of 59 cave bear remains from across Europe. Study of the data showed that populations of the bears began to decline long before the onset of the last ice-age approximately 40,000 years ago. They also found that the bears managed to make it through prior ice ages without major reductions in population. The researchers note that modern humans began populating the areas where the bears lived roughly 40,000 years ago. They further note that Neanderthals also lived in the area, but had coexisted with the cave bears for thousands of years, and are thus unlikely to have contributed to the extinction of the bears.

(Pictures and More at link...)

Originally Posted By a555:
I think we have an answer to some of the questions here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqOLCXYznE