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  • Chris Henshilwood profile

    Tue, 2012-02-28 18:16 -- John Hawks

    Nature News has an article written by Jeff Tollefson, which profiles archaeologist Chris Henshilwood and his work at Blombos, South Africa: "Human evolution: Cultural roots".

    Most fascinating line, regarding his early exploration at Blombos:

    The Middle Stone Age was not part of his thesis, so Henshilwood covered the site up and moved on.

    That's sadly symptomatic of archaeological funding.

    Henshilwood has made a great career out of the MSA since then, as the article details. Now lots of money is flowing into interdisciplinary research trying to tie African MSA to paleoclimate. The article details some of those developments also.

    Tags: 
    profiles
    MSA
    South Africa
    Blombos
    Still Bay
    paleoclimate
    metascience
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.