Notable: Chimpanzee butchery to study ancient cannibalism
Notable paper: Saladié P, Cáceres I, Huguet R, Rodríguez-Hidalgo A, Santander B, et al. (2015) Experimental Butchering of a Chimpanzee Carcass for Archaeolog...
All posts tagged with Atapuerca
Notable: Sima de los Huesos taphonomy
Notable paper: Sala, Nohemi, Juan-Luis Arsuaga, Ignacio Martínez and Ana Gracia-Téllez (2015) Breakage patterns in Sima de los Huesos (Atapuerca, Spain) hom...
Infographic: Field guide to Pleistocene hookups
Here’s my inaugural infographic, illustrating what we know about mating relationships from ancient DNA:
The Denisova-Sima de los Huesos connection
I direct your attention to a new paper by Mattias Meyer and colleagues describing a mitochondrial DNA sequence from Sima de los Huesos, Spain (Meyer et al. 2...
Anthropology 105, lecture 8: Ears
This lecture uses the auditory system to illustrate Mendelian inheritance. First the earlobes – a classic example in teaching laboratories, where attached ea...
Stature estimates for Sima de los Huesos
Jos-Miguel Carretero and colleagues Carretero:stature:2012 report on the lengths of long bones from Sima de los Huesos, Spain. I’ve long been hoping this res...
The lion diet
National Geographic News a couple of weeks ago ran a story about lion-eating at Gran Dolina (“Prehistoric Europeans Hunted, Ate Lion?”):
Site: Atapuerca
Atapuerca - 53, originally uploaded by Sitomon. I like to feature Flickr Creative Commons photos that show archaeological sites. This one is from Atapue...
Mailbag: First Europeans
Regarding Lzignan-le-Cbe:
Sima species
Michael Balter has a nice Science writeup of the recent Gibraltar conference, “Human Evolution 150 Years After Darwin.”
Language, speech, and early humans
I’m doing a little literature review this week on Middle Pleisocene postcrania. On a somewhat tangential topic, the description of the Sima de los Huesos cer...
Hearing at Atapuerca
A story in Science News by writer Tia Ghose, about the hearing capacities of the Atapuerca/Sima de los Huesos people, has been making the rounds, including S...
1.2 million year old hominid from Spain
Eudald Carbonell and many colleagues report on a partial mandible from Sima del Elefante, one of the caves at Atapuerca, Spain:
D'Errico on Neandertal language
Edmund Blair Bolles is reporting from the Evolang conference in Barcelona. Unfortunately I had to cancel my presentation there, but it has been great to rea...
New Year's predictions, 2008 edition
It's that time of year again -- the time when those boring ``Year in Review'' magazines are on newsstands, and when pundits make fools of themselves predict...
The amazing talking Neandertals
This week, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology institute announced that they had tickled FoxP2 out of two Neanderta...
French Connection to China Syndrome, dentally
I've read through the new paper by Martinón-Torres et al., on Eurasian continuity in the Middle Pleistocene. They've put out an interesting hypothesi...
An old Spanish tooth
National Geographic News has a short article about the tooth from Sima del Elefante, Atapuerca. The team notes that the tooth's age, dated at around 1.2 ...
Neandertal sexual division of labor
I've been reading the new paper by Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner about Neandertal versus modern human organizational strategies. I'm taking a lot of notes abo...
Did Neandertal women hunt as much as Neandertal men?
This morning, my irritation level about this Neandertal women hunting story finally reached its boiling point. I unleashed a Neandertal-style cry of anguish...
Mozart and mammoth metagenomic manipulation
OK, I just think the Mozart skull DNA extraction is creepy. Not because identifying dead skulls is creepy in itself -- hey, I like forensic anthropology a l...
Early human habitation in Britain
Parfitt et al. (2005) report in Nature (subscription) on stone tool debitage from the Cromer Forest-bed Formation of southeastern England, dating to approxi...
Neandertal teeth: the other shoe
The paper by Guatelli-Steinberg et al. (2005), earlier referred to here, is now available online from PNAS.
Body mass in ancient humans and high latitude populations
Chris Ruff and colleagues (2005) provide additional statistics on body mass in high latitude populations, including Inupiat and Finns. The importance of the...