Earlier today, I shared the news that two of the Leakeys published their Ilert Homo fossil findings in the latest Nature. The paper is out now, under the title, “Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya.” Here is the abstract, I’m bolding what I think are the most important [...]
August 8, 2007
Martinón-Torres, et al. fail to show an Asian Hominin Dispersal
I read that big study of hominin teeth that I mentioned earlier this week and it has turned out to be a let down. My disappointment lies in their systematics.
Martinón-Torres, et al. carried out both a cladistic and phenetic analysis on a lot of homin teeth, which sounds great at first. It sounds like they really wanted to carry out [...]
August 8, 2007
Two new early Homo fossils from Ileret, Kenya
Have you been catching the paleoanthropology headliner today?
I sure have.
What I’ve gathered so far is that two of the Leakeys, along with other authors, are anouncing and describing two hominid fossils their team found, KNM-ER 42700 and KNM-ER 42703 from Ileret east of Lake Tukrana, Kenya. The image to your right is the KNM-ER 42700 [...]
August 8, 2007
The Decline of Human Genetic Diversity (in Europe)
Diversity is a hot topic in anthropology, and is something that is studied culturally, archaeologically, linguistically, and biologically. I’ll be only addressing the latter of the four sub-disciplines of anthropology in this morning’s post, because examining the changes in genetic diversity of humans ultimately affects the other three fields.
The results of a mtDNA study spanning [...]
