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.
The Presence of the Frontal Opercula in Homo naledi
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 →
Growing ‘Mini-Brains’ With Neanderthal DNA
Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany wants to grow brain organoids from human stem cells that are edited to contain "Neanderthalized" versions of several genes. These blobs of brain are incapable of thoughts or feelings, but replicate basic structures of the brain, such... Continue Reading →
A Modern Human Genetic Adaptation for Diving
The Bajau people of Indonesia are known as "Sea Nomads," because we've known that for thousands of years they live in houseboats, sustaining their diets after spending hours each day hunting fish or other sea creatures underwater. Bajau divers can spend up to 13 minutes free diving to 70 m depths underwater all with only... Continue Reading →
Denisovans & Modern Humans Introgressed At Least Twice
Sharon Browning and colleagues published a paper in Cell last week that shows there are uniquely different Denisovan genomes in the DNA of East Asian individuals, indicating that interbreeding with Homo sapiens happened in two independent episodes. See we already knew Aboriginal genomes from Australia and Papua New Guinea contain fragments of Denisovan DNA. Introgression of... Continue Reading →
The Role of Climate Change on Early Human Society & Creativity in Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin
Based on the following three recently published Science studies, in order to survive the climate chances 320,000 ago, early humans in East Africa created complex tools, traded and maybe even developed symbolic language. Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest... Continue Reading →
Is Mrs Ples A Male Or Female Australopithecus africanus?
New research published in South African Journal of Science offers a continuation of the debate that 'Mrs Ples,' the 2.5 million year old Australopithecus africanus skull found in the Sterkfontein Caves in 1947, by paleontologist Dr. Robert Broom and his assistant, John Robinson, is actually a male. Soon after the two made their landmark discovery, Broom... Continue Reading →
As mentioned yesterday, Jebel Irhoud documents an early African Homo sapiens. The specimen represents mixture of archaic and modern features, such as an elongated braincase compared to the face and teeth, respectively. In a new paper published in Science Advances, researchers Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin and Philipp Gunz used CT scans to create virtual endocasts... Continue Reading →
The Misliya Specimen Pushes Homo sapiens Out of Africa by more than 50,000 Years
A paper published Science reports an interesting date of a human fossil from the Misliya Cave, a cave tucked in the western slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel. Using three different independent dating methods, Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University and his colleagues, dated this fossil upper jaw to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago.... Continue Reading →
Homo naledi May Have Made Tools, Buried Dead, Lived Alongside Humans
A couple weeks ago, I introduced that H. naledi may be much younger than we thought it was. Razib's recent post points out three new eLife open access papers from Berger and Hawks that continues this discussion. These papers specifically document new remains from the Rising Star cave system and the dating of these remains. In 2013, the remains of 12... Continue Reading →
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