Fossils show man walked 3 million years ago — Science News, February 16, 1974 Anthropologist D. Carl Johanson … has discovered a skull fragment, shin and thigh bones of a 3-million-year-old man in Ethiopia…. The bones belonged to an ape man (hominid) of the genus Australopithecus.… “We have absolute, concrete evidence that our ancestors walked on two legs over 3 million years ago,” the 30-year-old scientist told a news conference. Update Exactly when upright walking emerged in the evolutionary history of humans remains hotly debated. Fossil analyses suggest that several hominid species ambled ..read more

Soft fruits may have been the main dish on some ancient primate menus. An analysis of hundreds of fossilized primate teeth from the Fayum Depression, a desert basin in Egypt, shows just a handful were fractured, researchers report December 13 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. So few chipped teeth suggests the animals more often feasted on easy-to-chew foods like fruits rather than hard objects like seeds or nuts that might inflict tooth damage. The more than 400 analyzed teeth belonged to five primate genera — including Propliopithecus, Apidium and Aegyptopithecus — and are a ..read more

Hunter-gatherers in southernmost South America integrated horses with Spanish pedigrees into their societies around 400 years ago, long before Europeans occupied that region, a new study suggests. Analyses of horse remains uncovered at Chorrillo Grande 1, a site in Argentina’s Patagonian region, indicate that locals raised and ate transatlantic equines by the early 1600s, say archaeozoologist William Taylor of the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues. Spaniards reached south-central South America around 1536 but moved north after a few years, leaving behind horses and other livestock ..read more

Pots with fancifully molded eyes, noses and mouths were one of the tip-offs. Adrian Chase already had a growing sense that Maya society wasn’t quite what it’s been traditionally portrayed as: powerful rulers reigning while powerless commoners obeyed — or perhaps lived far enough from seats of power to operate largely on their own. Work by Chase and others had started to create a picture of a more politically complex society. An archaeologist at the University of Chicago, Chase leads excavations of residential sites in and near the ancient Maya city center of Caracol in what’s now Belize. This ..read more

A roughly 2,000-year-old woman with a potentially violent streak has emerged from skeletal rubble found on an island off southwestern England’s coast. A jumble of tooth and bone fragments in a Late Iron Age grave belonged to a young woman who was interred with items that include a sword, shield and bronze mirror, researchers report in the December Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The team used a sex-linked protein extracted from tooth enamel to classify the remains as female. The island grave dates to roughly 100 B.C. to 50 B.C., based on radiocarbon dating of a partial bone and the ..read more

For centuries, the Turkana pastoralists of northern Kenya have followed the water. Families once moved about 15 times a year in search of watering holes for their cows, donkeys, camels, goats and sheep. But the Turkana people’s seasonal way of life has become precarious in recent decades. With drought and ongoing fighting across the region, many women and children stay put while men roam the landscape — often at their own peril. Violence has forced many families to flee for their lives at a moment’s notice. Separated from their livestock, these families eke out a living along the edges of citi ..read more

Human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico sparked controversy two years ago when scientists found the prints to be surprisingly old, dating to about 22,000 years ago. Now, two other ways of dating the fossilized tracks converge at similar ages as the first estimate, potentially resolving the dispute, researchers report in the Oct. 6 Science. The finding adds to mounting evidence that humans arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than previously thought (SN: 7/11/18). “The answer to how old the footprints really are is critical,” says archaeologist Loren Davis of ..read more

Modified logs dating to about 476,000 years ago might be the oldest evidence of wooden structures, a new study finds. Wooden artifacts decompose easily and are relatively scant in the archaeological record compared with stone or bone. The new finding, reported September 20 in Nature, suggests that the structural use of wood may stretch far back into the history of human ancestors, hinting at advanced cognitive skills and a less nomadic lifestyle for some hominids than previously thought. “It’s a challenge to preconceptions about what are considered sophisticated, complex behaviors,” says Larry ..read more

Human ancestors nearly died out between around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago in an evolutionarily pivotal population bust, a contested new study concludes. This potential winnowing of human ancestors into a barely sustainable number of survivors coincided with a period of extreme cold and extended droughts in Africa and Eurasia, previous geologic evidence indicates. If the new DNA-derived scenario holds up, relatively few survivors of the Stone Age big chill may have evolved into a species ancestral to Homo sapiens, Neandertals and Denisovans, say population geneticist Wangjie Hu of the Icahn S ..read more

Earlier this year, the leading psychological association in the United States apologized to the country’s Indigenous people and communities for directly and indirectly supporting centuries of abusive assimilation efforts. Those efforts included pushing Indigenous people off their lands and separating children from their families for placement in boarding schools. The harms of these practices to Indigenous communities are ongoing, the American Psychological Association acknowledged in a report released in February. For instance, culturally inappropriate mental health diagnoses and treatments ha ..read more