Link: Different approaches to archaeology from African practitioners
The Guardian has an article from archaeologist Sada Mire, reflecting on the different approaches to the past in African cultures and societies: “Here’s why w...
All posts tagged with Africa
How much of the Neandertal genome came from contemporaries in Africa?
Back in June of last year, Melissa Hubisz, Amy Williams, and Adam Siepel coworkers put out a preprint with a new method for looking at introgression using th...
Neandertal ancestors of African populations
Earlier this year, Lu Chen and coworkers from Joshua Akey’s research group published an assessment of the amount of Neandertal ancestry in the genomes of pre...
Killing it: From handaxes to hafted spears, no difference in hunting or meat-eating
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?
Handaxes trailing up the coastline
In The Conversation this week, archaeologist Amanuel Beyin and his colleagues Ahmed Hamid Nassr and Parth Chauhan describe their work surveying the Red Sea c...
Link: Writing about science in an African language
Sibusiso Biyela has a great essay in The Open Notebook recounting the challenges faced in communicating science about a South African dinosaur discovery in o...
Scientific meetings should happen where research happens
In Nature Evolution and Ecology, Zeresenay Alemseged, Jackson Njau, Brianna Pobiner and Emmanuel Ndiema have a comment that reports on the 2017 conference of...
How much did Y chromosome haplogroups shape our current picture of early modern humans?
Earlier this month I published a piece on Medium about our changing picture of modern human origins in Africa: “Three big insights into our African origins”....
Link: Three big insights into our African origins
Recently, I delivered a lecture to the American Society for Human Genetics, focusing on the African record of human origins. It was a great privilege to spea...
Link: A new field season of the Deep Roots project at Victoria Falls
Larry Barham of the University of Liverpool and international collaborators have a field project in Zambia examining the “Deep Roots of Human Behavior”, inve...
Link: Following fieldwork in Malawi
Emory University has done a nice story about Jessica Thompson’s archaeological fieldwork in Malawi: “Bonding over bones, stones and beads”.
Link: Symbolism, beads and modern human behavior
Christopher Henshilwood has written a short article for The Conversation describing the archaeological importance of the finds from Blombos and elsewhere in ...
Notable: Plant use in Neolithic Nubia
Notable paper: Madella M, García-Granero JJ, Out WA, Ryan P, Usai D (2014) Microbotanical Evidence of Domestic Cereals in Africa 7000 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 9(1...
Notable: A tooth from West Turkana
Notable paper: Maddux, Scott C. et al. 2015. A 750,000 year old hominin molar from the site of Nadung’a, West Turkana, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution (in ...
Mailbag: Latin words into Bantu
Re: “The genetic complexity of recent migration into southern Africa”
The genetic complexity of recent migration into southern Africa
Erika Check Hayden in this week’s Nature reports on a current preprint by Joseph Pickrell and coworkers from David Reich’s lab: “African genes tracked back”
Oldowan hunting behaviors at Kanjera South
Joseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya Ferraro:carnivory:2013. Kanjera South is an archae...
Behavior of the first North African humans
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. Sahnouni:2013. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with th...
Quote: Craig Stanford on gorilla habitat threats
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
Recent evolution of coding variants
How did I get myself quoted in a story as the skeptic about recent human evolution? (“Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase”). After all, I’ve been a ...
The North African Neandertal descendants
A new paper by Federico Snchez-Quinto and colleagues reports on comparisons of North African population samples with the Neandertal DNA project data Sanchez-...
Quote: Lederberg on Haldane
J. B. S. Haldane has typically been assigned credit for the first suggestion that human hemoglobinopathies are adaptations to malaria. In 1999, Joshua Lederb...
Into Africa
I have a lot to say about the new study of African genomes by Joseph Lachance and colleagues Lachance:2012, which I think is tremendously exciting, along wit...
Neandertal introgression, 1000 Genomes style
For our project to understand pigmentation genetics in archaic humans, we had to find a good comparative sample of sequence data from recent humans. The orig...
The risk gradient
Ann Gibbons reports Gibbons:diabetes:2011 from the International Congress of Human Genetics, on papers that examine GWAS risk alleles for type 2 diabetes: “D...
African Homo erectus
This station includes several casts of early fossil Homo erectus, from the Early Pleistocene of Africa. These include:
The Malapa Soft Tissue Project FAQ
These are a few of the questions that I think are essential to understand our aims with the project and how we expect it will unfold. The future depends on w...
Announcing the Malapa Soft Tissue Project
I am pleased to announce a new open science initiative, focused on a discovery that is unique in paleoanthropology. Together we are going to find out if the ...
Digging deeper into the earliest Acheulean
I’ve been ranting on Twitter all day about the new paper on the “earliest Acheulean” by Christopher Lepre and colleagues Lepre:Acheulean:2011, published in N...
Ugandapithecus skull found
A brief report earlier this month from Agence France-Presse describes a new discovery of Ugandapithecus, worked on by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford: “20...
Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker Coulson:2011 (doi isn’t working yet, so here’s a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings ...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Population structure within Africa: has "modern human origins" become a non sequitur?
When I wrote about the Denisova genome late last year, I claimed that “A large-scale reorganization of the science of human origins is upon us.”
North by Northeast
An essay by Michael Balter in ScienceBalter:launch:2011 asks the question, “Was North Africa the launch pad for modern human migrations?”.
The paleolakes of Egypt
A paper in the December issue of Geology, by Ted Maxwell and colleagues Maxwell:Tushka:2010, describes evidence for a “Lake Erie-sized” paleolake in southwes...
Cutmarked bones from Dikika critiqued
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
Scanning the ape fecome
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
Falciparum malaria came from gorillas
Malaria in humans is caused by one of five different species of Plasmodium parasites. The deadliest of these is P. falciparum, especially within Africa where...
The shrinking youth
Yesterday the Journal of Human Evolution released a new paper by Rhonda Graves and colleagues, titled, “Just how strapping was KNMWT 15000?” The paper challe...
Mailbag: The Neandertal fraction
Re: Neandertal DNA
Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the canine-premolar complex
Writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange (Sarmiento 2010; White et al., 2010) a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had three areas of comment. The mol...
Fishy story from Koobi Fora
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the pelvis
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
African population structure and Neandertal population mixture
Green and colleagues, in their paper describing the Neandertal genome sequence, concluded that some genetic mixture between Neandertals and the contemporary ...
Morocco early Aterian
Julien Riel-Salvatore writes about new findings from Morocco relevant to the timing of the Aterian industry, a Middle Stone Age variant from North Africa.
Red beds
I’ve been browsing the Smithsonian’s</i> website supporting their Human Origins hall. There’s a nice feature about the archaeological work at Olorgesai...
African-American mtDNA and regional populations of Africa
I’m attending a symposium on genetics and genealogy of the African Diaspora this morning. Fatimah Jackson is here giving a very interesting talk about her ge...
Anthropophage
Charles Q. Choi: “Ancient Human Ancestors Faced Fearsome Horned Crocodile”
Is there a common coding variant of FOXP2 in southern Africa?
Today I was looking through the online data files for the South African genome. Those online files are available from the Data Libraries entry of the Galaxy ...
Mailbag: Hidden lactase persistence alleles?
I just noticed this new article that I thought you might be interested in, suggesting that lactase persistence known genetics can't currently wholly explain ...
A Sterkfontein visit
After this week’s description of the new public accessibility of the Dmanisi site, a reader sends a link to a tour of Sterkfontein by The Guardian’s David Sm...
Seeds of MSA diet breadth
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, al...
Why didn't they let Kenyanthropus save them?
In the fossil record, a species is a hypothesis. We can’t test that hypothesis in the way we do with living animals. Even in the dark, after all the paleonto...
The trouble about Kenyanthropus and Ardi
There are three skulls from putative “hominins” that date to 3.5 million years or earlier. Every one of these skulls is known now from extensive reconstructi...
The teeth that didn't bark
Earlier in the week, I wrote about the new interpretation of fossil teeth from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia (“Woranso-Mille: A ladder not a bush”). There was one ...
Woronso-Mille: A ladder not a bush
In a new paper, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues describe new hominin fossils from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. A good thing: It gives somebody like me a r...
NOVA: Becoming Human
OK, I’m going to live-blog this show. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while – I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in...
Lomekwi muckraking
Michael Balter asks a question I’ve hit here a few times: “What ever happened to Kenyanthropus platyops?”
Middle Stone Age bed and breakfast
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
Sterkfontein news
My Google alerts have been going off the last couple of days about Sterkfontein. I know nothing about any new discoveries, but the Times (South Africa) has r...
Ardipithecus FAQ
Today is Ardipithecus day. Eleven papers in tomorrow’s issue of Science describe the research on one exceptional skeleton (numbered ARA-VP-6/500, nicknamed “...
Handaxe beat
Julien Riel-Salvatore wrote recently about several handaxe stories, including the giant ones from paleo-Lake Makgadikgadi.
The shells of Trinil
I want to share a paper that might not get a lot of attention but that I think makes an interesting contribution to understanding the ecology of early Homo a...
Quote: Osborn on the Fayum beds
Another passage from Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Hunting the ancestral elephant in the Fayûm desert”:
Quote: Osborn on the reception of bug-hunters
More from Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Hunting the ancestral elephant in the Fayûm desert”:
Quote: Osborn on biogeography
Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Hunting the ancestral elephant in the Fayûm desert”:
Sahelanthropus: "The femur of Toumaï?"
Some weeks ago, I wrote about an article by Alain Beauvilain and Jean-Pierre Watté, in my post, “Sahelanthropus: Did camelherders bury Toumaï facing Mecca?” ...
Learning, population size, and "modern human behavior"
I’m a big booster of the idea that human demographic expansion helped drive our recent evolution. So you might expect me to like the new paper by Adam Powell...
Sahelanthropus: Did camelherders bury Toumaï facing Mecca?
Now if you really want to beat the science press, it helps to have readers who take really obscure journals.
Paleoclimate in southern Africa
The Tswaing Crater is around 40 km from Pretoria, South Africa. It was created by an asteroid impact some 200,000 years ago, which released roughly the energ...
African origins and phenotypic variance
I just read the new paper by Philipp Gunz and colleagues, titled, “Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of...
I'm tired of cutesy foot-related titles
I don’t have a lot to say about the new footprints from Ileret, described by Matthew Bennett and colleagues. Seems like a nicely done study, particularly giv...
There's Stone Age, and then there's….
Another chapter for Man the Hunted: 200,000-odd year old human hairs in hyena feces.
Early iron in Africa
The dawn of ironworking in Africa is a hot anthropological topic. My own interests in demographic growth and dispersals depends very closely on the chronolog...
Modern humans older than thought?
I can understand that National Geographic wants to promote news from researchers who take National Geographic money. It’s only natural, and as a publicity or...
Dating of Howieson's Poort and Still Bay industries
Zenobia Jacobs and colleagues have a paper in this week’s Science that provides age estimates for two of the MSA industries of Southern Africa: the Howieson’...
The ancient struggle for existence between humans and giant clams
Giant clams are in the news today, helping to drive the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. Can we believe it? The paper (Richter et ...
Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralism
Sharon Begley covers a recent paper by Joanna Mountain on Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralists:
New mandible from Thomas Quarry, Morocco
This is a press release from CNRS:
Were ancient Africans divided into small, isolated bands?
Last week when I wrote about the study of African mtDNA variation by Behar and colleagues, I focused on the issue of population size. To me, that must be th...
Did Gen Suwa just save paleoanthropology?
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.
Body size in Holocene southern Africa
I was just taking notes on this paper by Sealy and Pfeiffer (2000), and found some good quotes about body size in the Bushmen, both historically and in arch...
BROADLY CONSISTENT WATCH I
I'm starting a new tradition here, the "Broadly Consistent Watch." If you see that headline, you can be sure I'll be noting an abuse of the term "broadly co...