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Disputes in the cavern
If Ignatius Loyola been a child of the late 20th century, it is quite likely that he would have chosen palaeoanthropology as a career rather than theology, seeing as he was so predisposed to casuistry....
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Eats barks leaves nuts and fruits
The Malapa valley South Africa, where Australopithecus sediba was found. (Credit: Lee R. Berger via Wikipedia) The first stone tools and bones that had been cut by them, found in rocks dated at...
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Hominin round-up
Our tenacious companions. Male human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis (credit: Wikipedia) Until recently humans and lice were inseparable and the same goes for all primates, and nearly all...
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Breakthrough in human tools: the scene shifts to Africa
A means of assessing the cognitive abilities of hominins is through the objects that they created, whether tools or artefacts with apparent symbolic significance. The latter include pigments, coloured...
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Hominin evolution becoming a thicket
Scientific American is renowned for its eminently readable reviews of both emerging and perennial topics. Its February 2013 issue takes on one that is guaranteed to run and run; the evolutionary course...
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Further support for Homo floresiensis (the ‘hobbit’)
Liang Bua cave on Flores, Indonesia where fossils of Homo floresiensis were discovered in 2003 (credit: Wikipedia) When they were first discovered in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores...
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Hybridisation in human evolution
A press release from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announces the completion of a genome from a third Neanderthal individual and its release to other...
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Australopithecus sediba: is she or is she not a human ancestor?
Australopithecus sediba 1 (MH1) left, Au. afarensis( AL 288-Lucy) centre and Au. sediba 2 (MH2) right. (credit: L. R. Berger, University of the Witwatersrand, via Wikipedia) The remarkable find of two...
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Could the Toba eruption have affected migrating humans?
Around 73 thousand years ago a supervolcano in Sumatra erupted on a scale unprecedented in the last 2 million years. It left a 100 by 30 km elliptical caldera now occupied by Lake Toba, and explosively...
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Early humans could probably kill at a distance
It is always refreshing when physical anthropologists perform experiments as well as pondering on bones. It turns out that examining the bio-mechanics of college baseball players can provide useful...
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Rope and dope in lake sediments
Sediments built up on lake beds are a fruitful source of proxy data for all kinds of time series – mainly climatic and ecological. Pollen, other organic remains, various stable isotopes, and a range...
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Last common paternal and maternal ancestors closer in time
One of the oddities of using human genetic material passed down the male (from Y chromosomes) and female lines (from mitochondria) to assess when fully modern humans originated is that they have...
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An iconic early human skull
The earliest known human fossils outside of Africa were found at a site near Dmanisi in Georgia, between 1991 and 2005, following the discovery there in 1984 of primitive stone tools together with...
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The origins of the first Americans
Whatever controversies still linger about when they arrived in the Americas, there can be little doubt that humans crossed what are now the Bering Straits from NE Asia using the landmass of Beringia...
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Mitochondrial DNA from 400 thousand year old humans
The Sima de los Huesos (‘pit of bones’) site in the cave complex of Atapuerca in northern Spain has yielded one of the greatest assemblages of hominin bones. Well-preserved remains of at least 28...
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Human evolution: bush or basketwork?
Analysis of DNA from ancient humans has revealed its power decisively in the last few years, and especially at the beginning of 2014 with publication of the sixth full genome of an individual who was...
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Traces of the most ancient Britons
Perhaps the most evocative traces of our ancestors are their footprints preserved in once soft muds or silts, none more so than the 3.6 Ma old hominin trackway at Laetoli in Tanzania, discovered by...
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Did Out of Africa begin earlier?
It is widely thought that anatomically modern humans (AMH) began to diffuse out of Africa during the climatic cooling that followed the last interglacial episode. Periods of build-up of ice sheets, or...
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Improved dating sheds light on Neanderthals’ demise
As Earth Pages reported in December 2011 a refined method of radiocarbon dating that removes contamination by younger carbon has pushed back the oldest accessible 14C dates. Indeed, materials...
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Arabia : staging post for human migrations?
The Arabian Peninsula from the SeaWIFS satellite (credit: Wikipedia) From time to time between 130 and 75 ka fully modern humans entered the Levant from Africa, which is backed up by actual fossils....
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