Somehow, the end of the line for ancient human ancestors in Europe has long attracted more attention than the beginning, what with painstaking research as well as rampant speculation about how long Neandertals hung on in Spain and Portugal and whether they interbred with Homo sapiens. (If the latter, then modern humans have a little bit of Neandertal in them, something I find easy to believe every time I ride the subway.)

But now scientists are rewriting the beginning of that timeline, too. Teeth and a jaw bone discovered in Atapuerca, in northern Spain, they say, mean that the first direct human ancestors—of Neandertals as well as Homo sapiens (including Cro Magnon, for you Clan of the Cave Bear fans) and the rest—reached Europe 1.2 million years ago, not 800,000 years ago as had long been thought.

The first humans left their natal continent of Africa about two million years ago, walking out of the northeast corner through what is now Egypt. They turned right, anthropologists have long believed, probably because it was too cold and tough-going toward the north and west. Only later did some of the hominids leaving Africa make it to Europe—but that “later” has been vague.

With the stone tools, animal remains and human teeth and jawbone found in Spain by a team led by Eudald Carbonell of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Tarragona, Spain, “later” now means 1.2 million years old. As the team reports today in the journal Nature, these first Europeans were enthusiastic carnivores; the animal bones found along with the human ones, and dated to the same 1.2 million years, show signs of a butcher’s fine hand.

Who were these pioneers? The oldest known hominid fossils in Eurasia were found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and have been dated at 1.8 million years. Paleoanthropologists believe that Homo ergaster was the species that left Africa, and that’s who—along with, perhaps, another species—settled in Dmanisi. But Carbonell and his team conclude that the Atapuerca fossils look sufficiently different to be a distinct species, and so give them the name Homo antecessor.

She—for the fossil jawbone and teeth seem to come from a female—is now the best candidate for the last common ancestor of Neandertal and modern humans, Homo sapiens.

Antecessorapparently knew how to hunt, make stone tools with sharp edges for butchering their prey, and hammer. They probably doubled back from Asia and headed west into Europe. It is possible, though, that they represent a second wave of out-of-Africa wanderers, turning left at Egypt—rugged terrain and cold climate be damned. The new date for the first Europeans means there's a lot more fossils—400,000 years worth—to be found that anthropologists dreamed of, all of them offering the possibility of revealing how the children of a little band of primitive primates that left Africa 2 million years ago came to rule the world.

Although the Europeans got silver, gold, converts and tobacco out of their conquest of the New World in the 1500s, the Native Americans got nothing but genocide, as what UCLA biologist Jared Diamond called “guns, germs and steel” killed an estimated 90 to 95 percent of the Native Americans—a horrifying 20 million souls. Nothing was more one-sided than the direction that germs traveled. European conquistadors thoughtfully introduced smallpox, influenza and measles, against which the populations of the Americas had no immunity. Result: disease killed more of them than guns or steel.

Only one disease, scholars have long suspected, might have made the trip east to Europe: syphilis. Circumstantial evidence supported an America-to-Europe trajectory: the first recorded epidemic of syphilis occurred in Europe in 1495, upon Columbus’s return. Although some medical historians have argued that the syphilis pathogen (the bacterium Treponema pallidum) existed in Renaissance Europe long before Columbus returned from his voyage to the New World, the most sophisticated study to date, being published today in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, concludes otherwise: a genetic analysis of the treponeme bacteria supports the “Columbian theory” of syphilis’s origins in the Americas. Call it Montezuma’s revenge, squared.

To trace the origins of syphilis, scientists have mostly studied old bones, which preserve evidence of late-stage syphilis. But because it is tough to pinpoint the exact age of the bones, these studies have been inconclusive. Kristin Harper of Emory University and colleagues therefore studied 21 genetic regions in the genomes of 26 geographically disparate strains of treponemes. Based on how much the different strains had diverged from the basic genetic blueprint, the scientists were able to create a family tree for treponemes. It showed that the strains that cause venereal syphilis originated most recently. Their closest relatives were strains collected in South America that cause the disease yaws. Together, they say, the analyses supports the idea that syphilis originated in the Americas.

But wait. The syphilis that was present in the Americas when Columbus landed (there was a treponemal infection in the Dominican Republic when he arrived) might not have been venereal—that is, spread sexually. “Therefore, it is not clear whether venereal syphilis existed in the New World prior to Columbus’s arrival,” write the scientists. “While it is possible that Columbus and his crew imported venereal syphilis from the New World to Europe, it is also possible that the explorers imported a non-venereal progenitor that rapidly evolved into the pathogen we know today only after it was introduced into the Old World.” If so, then the Americas provided the ancestral germ, but that germ assumed its deadly venereal form only after it became ensconced in Europe.

Critics of the new study say the analysis compared too few DNA sites to reach the conclusions it did, arguing that “no evolutionary order” for the syphilis family of bacteria can be inferred, and urging “caution” in accepting Harper’s claim. Still, this study, combined with earlier work, presents the strongest evidence that the Native Americans got at least a modicum of revenge on their killers.

Nigersaurus: 500 teeth and a vegetarian diet. Photo by Mike Hettwer, courtesy of Project Exploration. ©2007 National Geographic.

Discovered in 1999 in the Sahara desert by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno of  the University of Chicago, Nigersaurus taqueti was a vegetarian originally known only by a few distinctive hand bones. But further excavation has fleshed (boned?) him out.

Those Geico (and now ABC) cavemen might not be as fictional as you’d think (well, okay, the tennis playing and working on a thesis, maybe). I’m talking about talking.

Language is supposed to be the trait that distinguishes modern humans both from other animals and from our grunting ancestors. But a new study, published online today in Current Biology, suggests that while we might be special, we might not be unique. Contrary to the claim that the only gene known to play a role in speech and language arose in its current form some 20,000 years ago—long after modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged evolutionarily—it looks like Neanderthals had this FOXP2 gene. That raises the possibility that Neanderthals possessed some of the biological machinery necessary for language.

“From the point of view of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neanderthals would not have had the ability for language,” said Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But since FOXP2 is not the only gene that underlies the capacity for language, Neanderthals would presumably have needed them, too, in order to have the gift of gab.

For the new study, Krause and his colleagues extracted DNA from Neanderthal fossils found in a cave in northern Spain, one of the species’ last redoubts before going extinct. They then identified and sequenced the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene. It was identical to the version found in modern humans.

Other studies of Neanderthal genes have turned out to be flawed due to contamination (what was thought to be an ancient gene actually came from DNA lying around the lab, as in sloughed-off skin cells). The scientists say they have taken pains to make sure this didn’t happen, including by sequencing parts of the Neanderthal Y chromosome, which was found to be different from the version in today’s men.

The finding, say the researchers, “establishes that these changes [in FOXP2 that distinguish it from the chimp version and, thus, presumably help confer the capacity for speech and language] were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals.” Our lineage might have been a much chattier past than anyone suspected.

This guy was not playing by the rules.

Most theories of dinosaur evolution say that carnivorous dinosaurs, the ancestors of today’s birds, got smaller as they became more bird-like. But the remains of a new species and genus of dinosaur, discovered in Inner Mongolia and announced at a press conference in Beijing this morning, throw a wrench into that idea.

Gigantoraptor, as he has been named, is surprisingly bird-like in his skeleton, and probably had feathers. He lived in the Late Cretaceous about 70 million years ago, and an analysis of his skeleton puts him in the same family as the beaked, bird-like Oviraptor, say Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the discovery, and colleagues. By all rights, a birdlike dinosaur should have been evolving toward the size of birds living today—if not crows, then at least emus.

Gigantoraptor stood about 3.5 meters (10 feet) high at its shoulder, twice the height of a person today. He stretched 8 meters (24 feet) in length and weighed in at 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds). Or, in an artist’s conception,

Artist's reconstruction of Gigantoraptor with much smaller feathered ornithomimids. Credit: Zhao Chuang and Xing Lida/IVPP

 (Our boy is the dino on the far left.)