"Ida" 47 million year old primate.

The article, entitled, Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology, documents the discovery of a remarkably complete and well-preserved fossil of an extinct early primate in Messel Pit, Germany, a site of great significance for fossils of the Eocene epoch.

The creature, named Darwinius masillae by the paper’s authors, lived an estimated 47 million years ago and is the first example of a previously unknown genus of primate. The fossil, known as “Ida,” is 95% complete and includes the skeleton, an outline of the creature’s body and the contents of her gut, allowing the researchers to reconstruct her life history and diet. Ida was an agile, young, herbivorous, female, about the size of a small monkey, who feasted on fruit and leaves in the trees of the Messel rain forest and died, aged about nine months, at the edge of a volcanic lake.

Although Darwinius masillae shares some characteristics with prosimians, such as the lemur, X-rays of the fossil crucially reveal the lack of a “toothcomb” and a “grooming claw,” an attribute of lemurs. Meanwhile, the fossil’s opposable big toes and nail-bearing fingers and toes confirm it to be a primate, and a foot bone called the talus bone links Ida directly to humans. Ida thus provides the most complete understanding of the paleobiology of any Eocene primate so far discovered.

“This fossil is so complete,” said Dr Hurum. “Everything’s there. It’s unheard of in the primate record at all. You have to get to human burial to see something that’s this complete.”

Ardi's feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees

Picture courtesy J. H. Matternes via Science/AAAS

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.
The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
(Interactive time line: how the Ardipithecus ramidus discovery changes human evolutionary theory.)
Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi's key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.
The analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online.
"This find is far more important than Lucy," said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. "It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between."

Ardi Surrounded by Family
The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.
Older hominid fossils have been uncovered, including a skull from Chad  at least six million years old and some more fragmentary, slightly younger remains from Kenya and nearby in the Middle Awash.
While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi's partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.
"All of a sudden you've got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth," said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"That allows you to do something you can't do with isolated specimens," White said. "It allows you to do biology."


Ardi's Weird Way of Moving
The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus's biology is its bizarre means of moving about.
All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi's feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.
Her big toe, for instance, splays out from her foot like an ape's, the better to grasp tree limbs. Unlike a chimpanzee foot, however, Ardipithecus's contains a special small bone inside a tendon, passed down from more primitive ancestors, that keeps the divergent toe more rigid. Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.
According to the researchers, the pelvis shows a similar mosaic of traits. The large flaring bones of the upper pelvis were positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp. But the lower pelvis was built like an ape's, to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.
Even in the trees, Ardi was nothing like a modern ape, the researchers say.
Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.
While these behaviors require very rigid wrist bones, for instance, the wrists and finger joints of Ardipithecus were highly flexible. As a result Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.
"What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about," said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi's bones below the neck. "It changes everything."
Against All Odds, Ardi Emerges
The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.
After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.
They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in Addis, the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding "millimeter by submillimeter," as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.
Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.
In the end, the research team recovered more than 125 pieces of the skeleton, including much of the feet and virtually all of the hands—an extreme rarity among hominid fossils of any age, let alone one so very ancient.
"Finding this skeleton was more than luck," said White. "It was against all odds."
Ardi's World
The team also found some 6,000 animal fossils and other specimens that offer a picture of the world Ardi inhabited: a moist woodland very different from the region's current, parched landscape. In addition to antelope and monkey species associated with forests, the deposits contained forest-dwelling birds and seeds from fig and palm trees.
Wear patterns and isotopes in the hominid teeth suggest a diet that included fruits, nuts, and other forest foods.
If White and his team are right that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the "savanna hypothesis"—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment.
Sex for Food
Some researchers, however, are unconvinced that Ardipithecus was quite so versatile.
"This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best," said William Jungers, an anatomist at Stony Brook University in New York State.
"Divergent big toes are associated with grasping, and this has one of the most divergent big toes you can imagine," Jungers said. "Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?"
One provocative answer to that question—originally proposed by Lovejoy in the early 1980s and refined now in light of the Ardipithecus discoveries—attributes the origin of bipedality to another trademark of humankind: monogamous sex.
Virtually all apes and monkeys, especially males, have long upper canine teeth—formidable weapons in fights for mating opportunities.
But Ardipithecus appears to have already embarked on a uniquely human evolutionary path, with canines reduced in size and dramatically "feminized" to a stubby, diamond shape, according to the researchers. Males and female specimens are also close to each other in body size.
Lovejoy sees these changes as part of an epochal shift in social behavior: Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a "targeted female" and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.
To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the "sex for food" contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game (more: "Did Early Humans Start Walking for Sex?").
Two hundred thousand years after Ardipithecus, another species called Australopithecus anamensis appeared in the region. By most accounts, that species soon evolved into Australopithecus afarensis, with a slightly larger brain and a full commitment to a bipedal way of life. Then came early Homo, with its even bigger brain and budding tool use.
Did primitive Ardipithecus undergo some accelerated change in the 200,000 years between it and Australopithecus—and emerge as the ancestor of all later hominids? Or was Ardipithecus a relict species, carrying its quaint mosaic of primitive and advanced traits with it into extinction?
Study co-leader White sees nothing about the skeleton "that would exclude it from ancestral status." But he said more fossils would be needed to fully resolve the issue.
Stony Brook's Jungers added, "These finds are incredibly important, and given the state of preservation of the bones, what they did was nothing short of heroic.
But this is just the beginning of the story."

Source:National Geographic 15/10/09

Archaeologists discover oldest-known fiber materials used by early humans Flax fibers could have been used for warmth and mobility; for rope, shoes ,

(The microscopic samples were found in the Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia)

A team of archaeologists and paleobiologists has discovered flax fibres that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibres known to have been used by humans. The fibers, discovered during systematic excavations in a cave in the Republic of Georgia, are described in this week's issue of Science.

The flax, which would have been collected from the wild and not farmed, could have been used to make linen and thread, the researchers say. The cloth and thread would then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another.

The excavation was jointly led by Ofer Bar-Yosef, George Grant MacCurdy and Janet G. B. MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, with Tengiz Meshveliani from the Georgian State Museum and Anna Belfer-Cohen from the Hebrew University. The microscopic research of the soil samples in which numerous flax fibers were discovered was done by Eliso Kvavadze of the Institute of Paleobiology, part of the National Museum of Georgia.

"This was a critical invention for early humans. They might have used this fibre to create parts of clothing, ropes, or baskets—for items that were mainly used for domestic activities," says Bar-Yosef. "We know that this is wild flax that grew in the vicinity of the cave and was exploited intensively or extensively by modern humans."

The items created with these fibres increased early humans chances of survival and mobility in the harsh conditions of this hilly region. The flax fibres could have been used to sew hides together for clothing and shoes, to create the warmth necessary to endure cold weather. They might have also been used to make packs for carrying essentials, which would have increased and eased mobility, offering a great advantage to a hunter-gatherer society.

Some of the fibres were twisted, indicating they were used to make ropes or strings. Others had been dyed. Early humans used the plants in the area to color the fabric or threads made from the flax.

Today, these fibres are not visible to the eye, because the garments and items sewed together with the flax have long ago disintegrated. Bar-Yosef, Kvavadze and colleagues discovered the fibres by examining samples of clay retrieved from different layers of the cave under a microscope.

The discovery of such ancient fibres was a surprise to the scientists. Previously, the oldest known were imprints of fibers in small clay objects found in Dolni Vestonice, a famous site in the Czech Republic some 28,000 years old.

The scientists' original goal was to analyze tree pollen samples found inside the cave, part of a study of environmental and temperature fluctuations over the course of thousands of years that would have affected the lives of these early humans. However, while looking for this pollen, Kvavadze, who led the analysis of the pollen, also discovered non-pollen polymorphs – these flax fibres.

Bar-Yosef and his team used radiocarbon dating to date the layers of the cave as they dug the site, revealing the age of the clay samples in which the fibers were found. Flax fibres were also found in the layers that dated to about 21,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Bar-Yosef's team began the excavations of this cave in 1996, and has returned to the site each year to complete this work.

"We were looking to find when the cave was occupied, what was the nature of the occupation by those early hunter-gatherers, where did they go hunting and gathering food, what kind of stone tools they used, what types of bone and antler tools they made and how they used them, whether they made beads and pendants for body decoration, and so on," says Bar-Yosef. "This was a wonderful surprise, to discover these ancient flax fibres at the end of this excavation project."

Eurekalert 12/09/09

Researchers gain genome-wide insights into patterns of the world's human population structures

Deep mining of data offers information on human evolution and relationships among populations.

Through sophisticated statistical analyses and advanced computer simulations, researchers are learning more about the genomic patterns of human population structure around the world.

Revealing such patterns provides insights into the history of human evolution, the predominant evolutionary forces that shaped local populations, and the relationships among populations.

"Studying genomic patterns of human population structure also has practical applications in disease-gene mapping," noted Dr. Joshua M. Akey, University of Washington (UW) assistant professor of genome sciences. Akey is senior author of new genomic research findings about the fine-scale structure of diverse human populations. The results will be published May 15 in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The lead authors were Shameek Biswas and Dr. Laura B. Scheinfeldt, both of the UW Department of Genome Sciences.

A statistical method called principle component analysis allows researchers to look through a thick, voluminous fog of genetic data and see significant variations. The UW researchers applied this method to a data set of almost 650,000 SNPs (pronounced "snips").

A single nucleotide polymorphism is a genetic variation in which the DNA code differs by only one "letter" in the same DNA sequence from two individuals of the same species. The data set of 650,000 SNPs came from 944 unrelated persons representing 52 broadly classified populations living in several regions on seven continental groups: Africa, America, Central and South East Asia, East Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Oceania. This global sampling came from The Human Genome Diversity Project - Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms

Most previous genomic studies of this nature have focused on broad-scale patterns of structure among geographically diverse populations, the UW researchers noted. These studies concluded that 85 to 95 percent of human genetic variation can be attributed to differences among individuals, and 5 to 15 percent is due to differences between populations.

In contrast to these broad-scale patterns, more recently researchers have tried to look at fine-scale population structure. Usually these studies focus on only the two or three top- ranking axes of genetic variation emerging from the statistical analysis. For example, studies of European individuals have shown a strong correlation between the top two axes of genetic variation and the actual geographical location of the sampling.

In their newly published findings, UW researchers demonstrated that substantial information on population structure is hidden more deeply in the genomic data. They were able to identify 18 significant, informative axes of variation. Some of these distinguished particular populations.

The UW researchers also conservatively estimated the set of all of the SNPs, or specific, tiny DNA code differences, matching each of the most informative axes of variation. These variations represent numerous fixed positions on the human genome where different biomarkers can sit and thereby form a "genomic signature" of population structure. They also allow for more detailed inferences, the UW researchers noted, about the evolutionary forces that shape the fine-scaled patterns of human population structure.

"The genome-wide distribution of these markers," Akey believes, "can largely be accounted for by genetic drift." Genetic drift is gradual accumulation of random changes in the gene pool of small populations. Akey added that some of these variations, however, do cluster in regions of the human genome considered to be targets of recent adaptive evolution.

The researchers also observed patterns of human genetic variation that correlated with geography in essentially every continental group. While such geographical patterns have been described in European samples, the researchers think that the extent to which such geographic correlations might be found in other continents may not be fully appreciated.

In mentioning the limitations of his study approach, Akey cautioned that there are still questions about the best way to design human population genetics research in terms of sampling individuals and populations, but that progress is likely.

"Now that we have increasingly dense catalogs of genetic variation," Akey wrote, "the details of human population structure are becoming more tractable. The testing of increasingly refined hypotheses about human population structure should yield new insights into the history and relationships among human genomes."

Eurekalert 2009.

High population density triggers cultural explosions

Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science. High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for climatic reasons at the time when modern human behaviour temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.

Adam Powell, AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, says: "Our paper proposes a new model for why modern human behaviour started at different times in different regions of the world, why it disappeared in some places before coming back, and why in all cases it occurred more than 100,000 years after modern humans first appeared.

"By modern human behaviour, we mean a radical jump in technological and cultural complexity, which makes our species unique. This includes symbolic behavior, such as abstract and realistic art, and body decoration using threaded shell beads, ochre or tattoo kits; musical instruments; bone, antler and ivory artefacts; stone blades; and more sophisticated hunting and trapping technology, like bows, boomerangs and nets.

Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL Institute of Archaeology, says: "Modern humans have been around for at least 160,000 to 200,000 years but there is no archaeological evidence of any technology beyond basic stone tools until around 90,000 years ago. In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behaviour explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is more complex. Many of the features of modern human behaviour – including the first abstract art – are found some 90,000 years ago but then seem to disappear around 65,000 years ago, before re-emerging some 40,000 years ago.

"Scientists have offered many suggestions as to why these cultural explosions occurred where and when they did, including new mutations leading to better brains, advances in language, and expansions into new environments that required new technologies to survive. The problem is that none of these explanations can fully account for the appearance of modern human behaviour at different times in different places, or its temporary disappearance in sub-Saharan Africa."

Dr Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment, says: "When we think of how we came to be the sophisticated creatures we are, we often imagine some sudden critical change, a bit like when the black monolith appears in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In reality, there is no evidence of a big change in our biological makeup when we started behaving in an intelligent way. Our model can explain this even if our mental capacities are the same today as they were when we first originated as a species some 200,000 years ago.

"Ironically, our finding that successful innovation depends less on how smart you are than how connected you are seems as relevant today as it was 90,000 years ago.

Eurekalert 17/06/09

New 'molecular clock' aids dating of human migration history

Researchers at the University of Leeds have devised a more accurate method of dating ancient human migration – even when no corroborating archaeological evidence exists.

Estimating the chronology of population migrations throughout mankind's early history has always been problematic. The most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt.

The new method refines the mtDNA calculation by taking into account the process of natural selection - which researchers realised was skewing their results - and has been tested successfully against known colonisation dates confirmed by archaeological evidence, such as in Polynesia in the Pacific (approximately 3,000 years ago), and the Canary Islands (approximately 2,500 years ago).

Says PhD student Pedro Soares who devised the new method: "Natural selection's very gradual removal of harmful gene mutations in the mtDNA produces a time-dependent effect on how many mutations you see in the family tree. What we've done is work out a formula that corrects this effect so that we now have a reliable way of dating genetic lineages.

"This means that we can put a timescale on any part of the particular family tree, right back to humanity's last common maternal ancestor, known as 'Mitochondrial Eve', who lived some 200,000 years ago. In fact we can date any migration for which we have available data," he says.

Moreover, working with a published database of more than 2,000 fully sequenced mtDNA samples, Soares' calculation, for the first time, uses data from the whole of the mtDNA molecule. This means that the results are not only more accurate, but also more precise, giving narrower date ranges.

The new method has already yielded some surprising findings. Says archaogeneticist Professor Martin Richards, who supervised Soares: "We can settle the debate regarding mankind's expansion through the Americas. Researchers have been estimating dates from mtDNA that are too old for the archaeological evidence, but our calculations confirm the date to be some 15,000 years ago, around the time of the first unequivocal archaeological remains.

"Furthermore, we can say with some confidence that the estimate of humanity's 'out of Africa' migration was around 60-70,000 years ago – some 10-20,000 years earlier than previously thought."

The team has devised a simple calculator into which researchers can feed their data and this is being made freely available on the University of Leeds website.

Eurekalert 17/06/09

Archaeological discovery in Jordan valley: Enormous 'foot-shaped' enclosures

'The 'foot' structures that we found in the Jordan valley are the first sites that the People of Israel built upon entering Canaan and they testify to the biblical concept of ownership of the land with the foot'.

"The 'foot' structures that we found in the Jordan valley are the first sites that the People of Israel built upon entering Canaan and they testify to the biblical concept of ownership of the land with the foot," said archaeologist Prof. Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa, who headed the excavating team that exposed five compounds in the shape of an enormous "foot", that it were likely to have been used at that time to mark ownership of territory.
On the eve of the Passover holiday, researchers from the University of Haifa reveal an exceptional and exciting archaeological discovery that dates back to the time of the People of Israel's settlement in the country: For the first time, enclosed sites identified with the biblical sites termed in Hebrew "gilgal", which were used for assemblies, preparation for battle, and rituals, have been revealed in the Jordan valley. The researchers, headed by Prof. Adam Zertal, exposed five such structures, each in the shape of an enormous "foot", which they suppose functioned during that period to mark ownership on the territory. "I am an archaeologist and only deal with the scientific findings, so I do not go into the additional meanings of the discovery, if there are any," Prof. Zertal said.
The Hebrew word "gilgal" (a camp or stone-structure), is mentioned thirty-nine times in the Bible. The stone enclosures were located in the Jordan valley and the hill country west of it. To this day, no archaeological site has been proposed to be identified with the gilgal. Between the years 1990 and 2008, during the Manasseh Hill-Country Survey that covers Samaria and the Jordan Valley, five such enclosures were found and excavated, all designed in the shape of a human foot. All of these sites were established at the outset of the Iron Age I (the 13th-12th centuries BCE). Based on their size and shape, it is clear that they were used for human assembly and not for animals.
Two of the sites (in Bedhat esh-Sha'ab and Yafit 3) were excavated in the years 2002-2005, under the directorship of Dr. Ben-Yosef and the guidance of Adam Zertal. The findings, mostly of clay vessels and animal bones, date their foundation to the end of the 13th century BCE, and one of them endured up to the 9th or 8th century BCE without architectonic adjustment.
In at least two cases, paved circuits, some two meters wide, were found around the structures. These were probably used to encircle the sites in a ceremony. "Ceremonial encirclement of an area in procession is an important element in the ancient Near East," Prof. Zertal says, adding that the origins of the Hebrew term "hag" (festival) in Semitic languages is from the verb "hug", which means "encircle". Thus, this discovery can also shed new light on the religious processions and the meaning of the Hebrew word for festival, "hag".
Prof. Zertal emphasized that the "foot" held much significance as a symbol of ownership of territory, control over an enemy, connection between people and land, and presence of the Deity. Some of these concepts are mentioned in ancient Egyptian literature. The Bible also has a wealth of references to the importance of the "foot" as a symbol: of ownership over Canaan, the bond between the People of Israel and their land, the link between the People and God's promise to inherit the land, defeating the enemy 'underfoot', and the Temple imaged as a foot.
"The discovery of these 'foot' structures opens an entirely new system of linguistic and historical perceptions," Prof. Zertal emphasizes. He explains that the meaning of the biblical Hebrew word for "foot" - "regel" – is also a "festival", "holiday", and ascending to see the face of God. As such, the source of the Hebrew term "aliya la-regel", literally translated as "ascending to the foot" (and now known in English as a pilgrimage), is attributed to the "foot" sites in the Jordan valley. "Now, following these discoveries, the meanings of the terms become clear. Identifying the 'foot' enclosures as ancient Israeli ceremonial sites leads us to a series of new possibilities to explain the beginnings of Israel, of the People of Israel's festivals and holidays," he stated.
According to Prof. Zertal, the "foot" constructions were used for ceremonial assemblies during Iron Age I (and probably after). When the religious center was moved to Jerusalem and settled there, the command of "aliya la-regel" (pilgrimage) became associated with Jerusalem. The source of the term, however, is in the sites that have now been discovered in the Jordan valley and the Altar on Mt. Ebal. "The biblical text testifies to the antiquity of these compounds in Israel's ceremonials, and the 'foot' structures were built by an organized community that had a central leadership," Prof. Zertal stated. He stressed that there is a direct connection between the biblical ideology, which identifies ownership over the new land with the foot and hence with the shape of the constructions.

Source:Eurekalert 6th April 2009.