Ther Tall el-Hammam excavation came to an end in the 2023 season. However, a lot of work is still going on back in the US, cataloguing pottery assemblages and analysing such things as the human bones that were incinerated on the surface of the MB city, and so on. A bone specialist at the University of Manitoba in Canada has also been involved – a husband and wife team, specialising in human and animal bones. They were provided with a lot of bones, mostly fragments I would guess, in order to assess them. He informed Steve Collins that although he and his wife were long time bone experts, they had never encountered bones like those from Hammam. They are used to burnt bones, charred bones, boiled bones, fire grilled bones, and cooked bones of all kinds but the Hammam bones are quite different. They have been heated in a way they have never seen before. An extreme form of heat.
At https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240402140323.htm …. the journal Nature Communications has published an article that shows the domestic chicken, and its ability to lay eggs for most of the year, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even more succinctly, it claims the egg laying chicken that has colonised the four corners of the world was originally, in all probability, another product that arrived from central Asia courtesy of the Silk Road. The humble chicken is thought to have an origin in the Red Jungle Fowl of SE Asia, including southern China. However, in the wild these birds nest and lay a clutch of eggs, once a year. At some point one of them developed the ability to lay eggs on multiple occasions and this was exploited by humans via intensive breeding. The egg and the chicken became part of a staple diet in many parts of the world as a result of this cheap source of meat and protein.
At https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/early-humans-lived-on-persian-plateau-for-20000-years-after-leaving-africa-study-suggests …. the title of the link suggests that it might not be true, and one may note it is another attempt to bolster and keep the Out of Africa theory onboard. It begins by telling us that modern humans left Africa around 70,000 years ago, in the sort of language that is confident they are right on this. Elsewhere, in other studies, we were told there was a human bottle neck around 70,000 years ago – so how do the two support each other. It seems there is very little evidence of modern humans between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago. The former coincides with the Toba super volcano and the latter with the Laschamp Event. The disappearance of modern humans, only to emerge in a dominant position post Laschamp, has to be explained. The authors of the study suggest modern humans spent 20,000 years on the Persian plateau – even though the evidence of their occupation is scant. Originally, Out of Africa had modern humans turning up at 50,000 years ago, but as Australian Aborigines appear to have been alive and well long before that it is now thought they must have arrived earlier – but did they.
We are also informed there is a lack of human fossils across Eurasia between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago. Not all biological anthropologists would agree with the new study, it seems. The Persian plateau is not exactly teeming with human fossils.