From Louis Leakey in 1965: Current findings on human evolution have brought us to the position where much of what we believed to have theoretically happened proves to be incorrect. Much that is in the textbooks, much that is still being taught in universities about human evolution is no longer true, but it continues to be taught because the implications of recent discoveries are insufficiently understood. It was principally Weidenreich, Le Gros Clark, and a few of the people of that generation, just previous to mine, who put forward and strongly defended the idea that man had gone through a ve ..read more

From Louis Leakey in 1965: Current findings on human evolution have brought us to the position where much of what we believed to have theoretically happened proves to be incorrect. Much that is in the textbooks, much that is still being taught in universities about human evolution is no longer true, but it continues to be taught because the implications of recent discoveries are insufficiently understood. It was principally Weidenreich, Le Gros Clark, and a few of the people of that generation, just previous to mine, who put forward and strongly defended the idea that man had gone through a ve ..read more

I’ve been writing about ancient mixture between species for a long time now. Since the reporting of the first Neandertal genome in 2010, a lively field of ancient genomics has been bringing new DNA analyses of other extinct species. They’ve turned up ancient gene flow between species again and again, in extinct lineages like mammoths and straight-tusked elements, in living and extinct canids, in baboons, and pretty much wherever a geographically widespread mammal has some species diversity. An interesting paper last year by Michael Westbury and coworkers presented interpretation of the genomes ..read more

Humans today have much bigger brains than our close living relatives among the great apes. It used to be that scientists assumed that brain evolution followed a simple pattern, with gradual increase in brain size from our early relatives like Australopithecus africanus some 2.5 million years ago. Over the last twenty years, we’ve gotten a fuller picture of the variability of ancient species in brain size. Understanding the evolution of this variability requires us to look at a broader range of mammals to see how the hominin pattern may compare to other families. A new paper in the open access ..read more

Two papers came out yesterday showing relatively recent Neandertal ancestry within the genomes of early Upper Paleolithic Europeans. The paper about Bacho Kiro, Bulgaria, got more attention. The Neandertal connection was more recent (within 6 generations) and the journal more prominent. But I am more focused on the analysis of the genome from the Zlatý kůň skeleton. The history of thinking about this partial skeleton, and the way this paper changes that thinking, has much to reveal about this moment in the science. The Zlatý kůň skeleton was discovered in 1950 when a nearby limestone quarry b ..read more

We cannot interpret the entire fossil record by limiting our view to the most extreme specimens, yet sometimes extremes are instructive. Sangiran 31 has some of the thickest cranial bone of any fossil member of our genus. Its nuchal torus, or occipital torus, which sticks out above the origin of the trapezius muscles and the insertion of the splenius capitis muscles on the back of the skull, is thicker and more projecting than any other fossil human relative. The fossil only includes the posterior portion of the cranial vault, so we do not know what the face or jaw of this individual would hav ..read more

The Mugharat es Skhūl is today quite a small cave or rock shelter in the side of the Nahal Me’arot, a wadi running from Mount Carmel, Israel. The archaeological deposits at Skhūl were in terraces outside the cave’s present entrance, where a calcified breccia cemented artifacts, animal bones, and human remains together. Theodore McCown directed the excavation of the Mousterian archaeological deposits in 1931 and 1932, working with Dorothy Garrod who took on the direct oversight of excavation of the much more extensive archaeological deposits at nearby Tabun Cave. Skhūl turned out to be a much r ..read more

The jaws of ancient human relatives that we call “Australopithecus” show the problems of thinking about evolution as a straight line of gradual change. If we knew nothing about the fossil record of human relatives, we might imagine that the jaws and teeth of human ancestors and relatives would simply be “in between” today’s people and close living relatives like bonobos and chimpanzees. Chimpanzee and bonobo molar teeth are roughly similar in size to ours, and with a bit thinner enamel. Their canine teeth and incisors are much larger than ours. Their left and right rows and premolars and molar ..read more

An opening to the Grotta Guattari was uncovered by workmen in 1939. In this hidden cave, they found a chamber with bones, which included the skull of a Neandertal. The archaeologist Alberto Carlo Blanc studied the site and concluded that the Neandertal skull had been the subject of a ritual, placed within a circle of stones with other animal parts left as offerings. He judged that the blackened and brown patches of color on the skull were evidence of burning, and its broken cranial base reflected ritualized cannibalism. Blanc’s argument was based on the similarity between the breakage on this ..read more

The upper limbs of humans are different from those of living great apes in many ways, but one way in which they are fairly similar is the orientation of the humeral head. Your shoulders are at the side of your body, and they angle just slightly forward. If an arm is bearing your body weight, usually because you’re climbing something, it is in front of your body or overhead. Your arm also bears weight when you carry things, usually at the side of your body or in front. The humeral head is the arm component of the shoulder joint, and it is shaped roughly like a half-sphere. That spherical surfac ..read more