Anthro

Samantha Kiser

Professer Sasso

Anthropology 100

The article, "Jawbone Found in England is from the Earliest Known Modern Human in Northwestern Europe", explains how a piece of jawbone that was excavated from a prehistoric cave in England. This jawbone is considered to be the earliest known evidence for modern humans in Europe. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University as well as a member of the research team, talks about how the fragment of maxilla, upper jaw, that contained three teeth was discovered during the year of 1927 inside of a prehistoric limestone cave, Kent's Cavern, located on the southwestern part of England.

Records from the original excavations indicate that the jawbone was discovered nearly 10 feet 6 inches beneath the surface sealed in stalagmite deposits. According to a group of diverse scientists, this bone was at first believed to be over 35,000 years old. In 1989, scientists at Oxford University then dated the bone as being about 35,000 years old. Doubts on the reliability of the date were brought up since traces of modern glue, which was used to conserve the bone after discovery, were found on the surface.

Scientists then had to do additional testing with the remaining uncontaminated area of bone. Unfortunately, this area of the bone happened to be too small to re-date so researchers then had to search through the excavation archives and collections in the Torquay Museum to gather samples of other animal bones. These animal bones had recorded depths both above and below the spot where the maxilla was found. Members of the research team then gathered radiocarbon dates for the bones of a wolf, deer, cave bear, and woolly rhinoceros; which according to Tom Higham, Deputy Director of Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, is a very difficult task to accomplish. This information gathered could be dated between 50,000 and 26,000 years old.

Using a Bayesian statistical-modeling...