Beyond bones & stones
A paper published this past Friday in the journal Science Advances, shared the reports from a team of paleoanthropologists who found the fourth Denisovan individual known to us. Viviane Slon, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and lead author of the study, reported the finding in the form... Continue Reading →
New ancient DNA discoveries from an ancient 124,000-year-old Neanderthal femur suggests modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals between 470,000 and 220,000 years ago. This is much earlier than previously thought. Cosimo Posth at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History led analysis of mitochondrial DNA from an ancient Neanderthal thigh bone discovered 80... Continue Reading →
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 →
When the 3 and 1/2 foot Homo floresiensis was discovered and the age of the new species correlated with the the same time Neanderthals were dying in Europe and humans colonized Asia a lot of arms and voices were thrown in the air. People questioned the validity a new species, so different, so small... A... Continue Reading →
A genetic and cultural analysis, published in Nature, of 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea suggests there was just one wave of humans out of Africa, 72,000 years ago. These these early migrants gave rise to all contemporary non-Africans, including indigenous Australians and Papuans. This group descended directly from the first people to... Continue Reading →
The team behind Ötzi the Iceman reconstructed his vocal cords using a series of CT scans. They announced the project back in February. After recontrustrion of the length of the larynx, they then ran that data through mathematical models and special software to simulate how the vocal tract works. The result—presented yesterday at a conference is a rough... Continue Reading →
Four decades after the discovery of Lucy, her remains are quite possibly the most famous discovery in paleoanthropology and one of the more important. The impact of finding a nearly entire skeleton from a 3.2 million year old hominid revealed a lot about human evolution. We've learned a lot from Lucy, from biophysics to the... Continue Reading →
Thanks to twin studies, schizophrenia is one of the few mental illnesses that we know have a genetic inheritance pattern. Schizophrenia often presents as a inability to separate reality from non-reality, where patients often experience hallucinations and stimuli that do not exist, such as hearing voices. Just how this deleterious disease came about to be... Continue Reading →
In two papers published in the South African Journal of Science, researchers say they've found the oldest definitive evidence of malignancy in a hominid. Prior to this discovery, the oldest known hominin tumor was found in the rib of a Neanderthal dating back to around 120,000 years ago.
Neanderthal remains from Troisième Caverne in Goyet, Belgium have cut marks that imply they were butchered and processed for consumption similar to remains of reindeer and horse from the same site. With most of the bone fragments are from the tibia and femur bones, the researchers hypothesized those were consumed for their higher in meat... Continue Reading →
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