Fossil profile: AL 400-1 mandible and the curving line of human evolution
The jaws of ancient human relatives that we call “Australopithecus” show the problems of thinking about evolution as a straight line of gradual change.
All posts tagged with Australopithecus afarensis
Fossil profile: KNM-WT 8556 mandible
Kenyanthropus platyops makes an interesting case study of species in the fossil hominin record. The name formally applies to only two fossils, which are the ...
New footprints from Laetoli and improving the science of fossil context
I’m jazzed this morning because eLife has published a paper by Fidelis Masao and colleagues describing new footprint trails from the famous site of Laetoli, ...
Some dissatisfaction with review articles
John Ioannidis often speaks out on abuses of confidence and statistics in science. He recently did an interview with Retraction Watch in which he commented u...
Why I’m skeptical about Lucy in the Skyfall
I have no trouble believing that Lucy might have fallen to her death. Why not? The Lucy skeleton has several features compatible with a lifetime of climbing,...
Photo: Hadar reconstruction from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is a science-focused high school. They have put on Flickr a large series of Creative Commons (CC...
Quote: Johanson on the thread of ancestry of Homo
Again from Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind today, Don Johanson describes his thoughts upon the question of whether to place the Hadar jaw remains (later at...
Quote: Johanson and Edey on why Lucy was not the holotype of Au. afarensis
From Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, p. 288, a very good concise description of why Johanson and White did not choose...
Notable: Scapula morphology in humans and African apes
Notable paper: Green, David J., Ted A. Spiewak, Brielle Seitelman and Philipp Gunz. 2016. Scapular shape of extant hominoids and the African ape/modern human...
Link: Fourth molars in an early hominin
I was doing some searching through the abstracts for the upcoming AAPA meetings, and I found that the system gave me abstracts for past meetings as well, so ...
Google Doodle commemorating Lucy’s 41st anniversary
Google today (November 24) is running a Google Doodle commemorating the 41st anniversary of the discovery of the famous “Lucy” skeleton of Australopithecus a...
Link: The girl with baboon in her spine
New Scientist reports on a presentation at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting, in which Marc Meyer and Scott Williams describe one of the vertebral elemen...
Popularity of hominin species names
I was curious about the use of Homo ergaster over time. It seems to me that fewer and fewer paleoanthropologists have been using it over the last few years. ...
Lucy returns to public display in California
The Orange County Register covers the final exhibition of the famous “Lucy” skeleton in the United States, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California: “Fa...
Photo: Laetoli footprints
Every museum that does early hominins has to find a way to present the Laetoli footprints, and I’ve seen some very imaginative ones. The new exhibition at th...
Liveblog of ScienceNOW on Neandertals, Dikika
Now watching the NOVA ScienceNOW about “What makes us human”.
The pelvis of Australopithecus
The hominid pelvis is much shorter than ape pelves, with muscle attachments reoriented for effective walking.
The pelvis of Australopithecus
The hominid pelvis is much shorter than ape pelves, with muscle attachments reoriented for effective walking.
Cutmarks under the microscope
I’m trying to figure out why Science this week has a “perspective” piece on the identification of cutmarks on archaeological bone. It’s a nice brief but lack...
Quote: Johanson and White on comparing samples
Don Johanson and Tim White, writing in their 1979 paper on the phylogeny of early hominins (and introducing Australopithecus afarensis as an ancestor of late...
Quote: Jack Stern, Jr., on the origin of bipedalism
From the conclusion of Jack Stern, Jr’s retrospective article, “Climbing to the top: A personal memoir of Australopithecus afarensis”:
Putting together australopithecine diets
Peter Ungar and Matt Sponheimer earlier this fall Ungar:Sponheimer:2011 reviewed the evidence for diet in early hominins, from both microwear studies (Ungar’...
Aging juvenile fossil hominins
The fossil record is not made up only of adults. We have abundant skeletal evidence from juvenile individuals of a broad range of ages. At this station you w...
Aging juvenile fossil hominins
The fossil record is not made up only of adults. We have abundant skeletal evidence from juvenile individuals of a broad range of ages. At this station you w...
The feet of Australopithecus afarensis
The australopithecines were several species of human relatives that lived in Africa between 5 million and 1.5 million years ago. One of the best-represented ...
The feet of Australopithecus afarensis
The australopithecines were several species of human relatives that lived in Africa between 5 million and 1.5 million years ago. One of the best-represented ...
The Laetoli footprints
The most striking piece of evidence for bipedality in our earliest hominin relatives is a series of footprint trails at Laetoli, a fossil-bearing site in Tan...
The Laetoli footprints
The most striking piece of evidence for bipedality in our earliest hominin relatives is a series of footprint trails at Laetoli, a fossil-bearing site in Tan...
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...
Sink Australopithecus!
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Mailbag: The capuchin australopithecines
Re: australopithecine tools:
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.
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 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...
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 “...
Legacy hominids
Brian Switek reviews the “Lucy’s Legacy” exhibit, now in New York:
Ankles of the australopithecines
Recent University of Michigan Ph.D. Jeremy DeSilva gets some nice press about his work demonstrating that fossil hominins didn’t climb like chimpanzees:
Lucy Seattle review
The NY Times has a review of the Pacific Science Center’s Lucy experience, which came to an end this week. They’re blaming the financial loss on Obama:
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...
Don Johanson interview
Alan Boyle, who writes the “Cosmic Log” feature for MSNBC, has a long interview with Don Johanson. It’s a nice read, which touches on many paleoanthropologic...
Lucy scans
Reuters has a little story about CT scans of Lucy, done at the University of Texas by John Kappelman and colleagues:
Mandibular ramus shape in A. afarensis
Afarensis returns to a 2007 paper by Yoel Rak and colleagues on the mandibular ramus of Australopithecus afarensis. The post wends its way through the Neande...
Mysteries of A. afarensis
In honor of Lucy’s move to Seattle, Alan Boyle has a piece at “Cosmic Log” about Lucy and A. afarensis</a:>. It has a lot of questions and few answers,...
Evo-devo and HACNS1
Science has a very important paper in the current issue about the evolution of a gene enhancer in hominids, expressed in forelimb development and concentrate...
Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines
I've followed the literature on early hominid diets from the beginning of the weblog. In 2005 I discussed Peter Ungar's analyses of dental occlusal morpholo...
The Orrorin identity
There's nothing especially surprising about the functional interpretations in Richmond and Jungers' paper about the Orrorin BAR 1002'00 femur. They conclude...
Paleoecology at Hadar
The coming attractions bin at Journal of Human Evolution includes a paper by Kaye Reed, reviewing the evidence of paleoenvironment in the Hadar formation:
An interview with Michelle Drapeau
I've been trying to spread the interviews across the field in various directions. I (virtually) talked with Mica Glantz about Neandertals, Adam Van Arsdale ...
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...
Is a lack of fossils the problem with early Homo?
Just noticing, in this John Noble Wilford article:
Big arms, small sacrum
In case you're following the debate about Homo habilis limb proportions, there's a new contribution by Martin Haeusler and Henry McHenry in the JHE holding ...
The Bili chimpanzees
A nice piece in The Guardian about the chimpanzee population near Bili, DRC. The lede is the suspicion of an apparent leopard kill -- that's chimpanzees kil...
Miocene hominids and a crisis of confidence
Out of this week's Science Times special on evolution, I clicked into John Noble Wilford's article first, titled "The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush Wi...
Vaccinator in chief
I was checking on the Thomas Jefferson mastodon story for the last post, and I came across an episode I hadn't been aware of. After Edward Jenner's developm...
Paleontology in the classical world, reviewed
Afarensis reviews the book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor:
A guide to fantasy science
I'm about two-thirds of the way through Mike Morwood's new book, The Discovery of the Hobbit, and I'll be posting a review when I'm through. Generally, I ha...
Fongoli savanna cave chimps
Studying chimpanzee behavioral diversity is so important because they do such different things in different parts of their range. The Fongoli field study by...
Floresiensis presentations
I'm at the AAPA meetings in Philadelphia this week, which were preceded yesterday and today by the meetings of the Paleoanthropology Society.
Snapshots of the science
The new Human Origins hall at the American Museum is the occasion for a big Newsweek story, with the tagline, "The New Science of Human Evolution". Author S...
"I'd be very surprised if the hobbits didn't fall down there."
So says Mike Morwood about the discovery (reported in The Australian) of a newfound chamber behind and beneath Liang Bua cave:
Robust australopithecine diet ablated
Sponheimer and colleagues (2006, link) zapped some Swartkrans teeth with lasers to measure their 13C content. I wrote quite a bit here last year about austr...
Our quondam homs
Did I miss a meeting?
Did australopithecines croak?
With apologies to the late Frank Livingstone, I couldn't help but wonder this as I read this passage from Bernard Wood's comment on the Dikika skeleton:
Ten assertions about evolution
I thought for a long time about how to respond to Razib's challenge:
Book review of "The First Human"
Despite all the trouble I had traveling (or maybe because of it), I got to have a really enjoyable time finishing Ann Gibbons' new book, The First Human. Fo...
"The catechism about genetic drift"
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
"Spacecraft all over the Pliocene"
Rex Dalton has a great two-page article in Nature about the bush vs. ladder dispute. It keys off of the Middle Awash Australopithecus anamensis article by Wh...
New news in New World settlement
Afarensis has a post on Brazilian evidence relating to the origins of Native Americans (via Gene Expression). It's a good summary of recent work by Neves an...
A ladder, not a bush?
Tim White and colleagues (2006) report on new fossils from Aramis and a new site, Asa Issie, with estimated dates between 4.1 and 4.2 million years ago.
News trickling about Liang Bua
I am seeing news reports this morning about this week's upcoming paper in Nature about the Homo floresiensis bones.
Flores update, October 2005
This week's Nature is carrying a paper by Morwood, Brown, and colleagues (2005) presenting additional skeletal material from Liang Bua as well as a commenta...
Tuber or not tuber? Rats are the question
From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:
Ape to Man
OK, we have it on, and I've already had a couple of laughs, so I guess I'll take some notes as it goes.
Sexual dimorphism in A. afarensis, again
Earlier this year, Michael Plavcan et al. (2005) had a critique in Journal of Human Evolution of the 2004 paper by Philip Reno et al. in PNAS concerning sex...
The robotic Lucy model
The BBC is running this article about a new study that evaluates the bipedality of A. afarensis using robotic design software:
The telomeres of the australopiths
Speaking of old papers, I was just re-reading this one from Duncan Baird and colleagues (2000).
Keeping the faith, afarensis-style
From Free Republic: an article from Science News by Bruce Bower covers the recent flap about sexual dimorphism in early hominids. This is a pretty good intr...
The knuckle-walking anteater
Caley Orr (Personal page, Arizona State University) has an advance paper in AJPA examining convergent features in the wrists of knuckle-walking hominoids an...
AL 438-1
Michelle Drapeau and colleagues (2005) report on the AL 438-1 specimen from Hadar. The specimen consists of "part of the mandible, a frontal bone fragment, ...
NSF and data access
Mark Weiss from NSF appeared at the AAPA business meeting to discuss recent changes in the funding guidelines from the Physical Anthropology program. The mo...
Thoughts on the Sahelanthropus reconstruction
I am at the AAPA meeting in Milwaukee this week, and so posting is by necessity very light. However, the news of the new Sahelanthropus remains and CT recon...
The Ultimate Survivor!
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
Age of hominids from Sterkfontein
A recent spate of articles has carried on a debate about the age of the Sterkfontein hominids. Sterkfontein is a complicated site, including several distinc...
Tooth anatomy and diet in australopithecines and early humans
Peter Ungar (2004) investigated the dietary adaptations of A. afarensis and early Homo by looking at the three-dimensional topography of their teeth. the sh...
Chemistry and early hominid diets
The chemical analysis of bones to interpret diet rests on the observation that different foods vary in the composition of different chemical elements or iso...
You heard it here first :: hobbits are australopithecines!
This is Richard Roberts in an Australian radio interview (the interview is formatted in one-sentence paragraphs, this is a single contiguous excerpt):
Sexual dimorphism in A. afarensis, again
The Journal of Human Evolution early access section has a paper by J. Michael Plavcan and colleagues that critically examines the case for low sexual dimorp...
Brain expansion in A. boisei
Elton and colleagues (2001) examined the record of brain size in early Homo with the following question in mind: we know that brain size increased in this l...
Earliest hominids :: thoughts and roundup
Today I lectured on the earliest hominid samples for my graduate course on australopithecines. This is the first time I have been able to give a full lectur...
How have metabolic constraints affected human evolution?
In the 2002 Annual Reviews in Anthropology, Leslie Aiello and Jonathan Wells provide a synopsis of the ways that morphological evolution in the human lineag...
Species concepts
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...
Ardipithecus remains from Gona
News story at MSNBC
Forelimbs and climbing in early hominids
Compared to their small body mass, the forelimbs of early hominids are both longer and more muscular than those of recent humans. The arms are shorter than ...
Liang Bua: an australopithecine from Flores?
Note: I wrote this post the day that the papers describing Homo floresiensis and its context in Liang Bua cave came out in Nature in 2004. From the perspecti...
Australopithecus anamensis: overview
Note: I wrote this post in 2004. Much additional evidence about Au. anamensis has come to light since that time. Later posts present more up-to-date informat...
Australopithecus afarensis overview
This post is from 2004, and more updated information on Au. afarensis can be found in later material.