Beyond bones & stones
Without a doubt, the Near East has been a linguistic, cultural and religious crossroad for many thousands of years. This area has had many different rulers, including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christian European Crusaders, Arabs, and Ottomans. Many of these groups instilled everlasting cultural changes on the local population, including changes to... Continue Reading →
About 12,000 years ago in the Near East, the emergency of farming, animal domestication and subsequent changes to prehistoric human lifestyles emerged. This is known as the Neolithic revolution. This culture spread through Europe, along the Danube and the Mediterranean coasts by 5,000 to 4,500 years ago. Little was known about how the carriers of... Continue Reading →
Hugo Zeberg, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Karolinska Institutet, published an interesting study with colleagues Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo on Neandertal admixture and its impact on modern day fertility. Diverging from a common human lineage over 600,000 years ago, Neandertals and modern humans began an exchange of genetic material... Continue Reading →
Russian archaeologists in 1976 excavating the Ust’-Kyakhta-3 site on the banks of the Selenga River A. P. Okladnikov During the 1970's, a site called Ust-Kyakhta found between the Mongolian borders and the southern banks of the Lake Baikal, was excavated. The Russian team unearthed many stone and bone tools as well as ceramics, and reindeer... Continue Reading →
Last week, in Nature, University of Iowa anthropologist Russell Ciochon and colleagues published new dates on fossils and sediment layers from a site called Ngandong that originally yielded a dozen or so Homo erectus skulls in the 1930's. Using uranium-series dating on some newly excavated mammalian remains from the same sediment layer as the Homo erectus skulls,... Continue Reading →
In the 1970's, the Apidima Cave site in Greece was excavated by archaeologists. Lodged within a chunk of rock was the Apidima 1 specimen. It was found adjacent to a distorted 170,000 year old Neanderthal skull called Apidima 2. In the image below you can see how close in proximity the two specimens were discovered.... Continue Reading →
This fascinating visual presentation from the American Museum of Natural History outlines what we know about human evolution by combining a timeline, a map, animation, photographs, and artistic representations of various hominins.
When it comes to the evolution of the human brain, size isn't everything. In fact, shape is a huge determinant. A new study from Hawks in PNAS suggests that morphology may proceeded size in the evolution of hominin brains. Hawks and team performed a comparative anatomy study of Homo and Australopithecus brains based on endocasts. Endocasts... Continue Reading →
No one knows exactly the population of Native Americans when contact with Europeans occured. There are some estimates claiming there were 18 million in North America and upwards to 40 million in the combined continents. It’s estimated that the population in the Americas dropped by almost 90% within a few hundred years after the arrival of... Continue Reading →
