Châtelperronian bone fragments identified as Neandertal based on protein residues
Frido Welker and colleagues have applied a new method to identify tiny bone fragments as Neandertal remains, based on the protein residues that they contain.
Frido Welker and colleagues have applied a new method to identify tiny bone fragments as Neandertal remains, based on the protein residues that they contain.
Discover last April ran a feature article about the finds from Dmanisi. They have made this available online: “The First Humans to Know Winter”. Dmanisi is i...
Last week Science printed an exchange of technical comments on the topic of the Dmanisi skull 5. The skull was described in a paper last fall (Lordkipanidze ...
It smells like ashes. Holding it and examining it is really not like the other fossil crania I’ve studied. The other Dmanisi crania strike me as being very l...
Earlier this month, Scientific Reports included an article by Hong Ao and colleagues reporting a date for the Shangshazui archaeological locality in the Nihe...
I am visiting Tbilisi this week to examine the Dmanisi skeletal collection and to shoot some footage for my upcoming massive open online course (MOOC), “Huma...
Regarding the use of fire, Ive always been intrigued by how early Homo was able to continue its trek northward (ex. Dmanisi) without it. It would seem that a...
The announcement of the Malapa skeletons has many of us going back to descriptions of early Homo. After the paper by Berger and colleagues came out last mont...
Nature this week is running a short review of a visit to Dmanisi by journalist Katharine Barnes (Pay link):
Gretchen picked up a partial set of Time-Life volumes, from 1973, part of the series “The Emergence of Man”. She found them at a garage sale. There’s a lot o...
I’ve just returned from a week in Leiden, the old university city of the Netherlands. I was a guest of the archaeology faculty, in particular Wil Roebroeks a...
There are all kinds of stories in the British press today about Dmanisi. You’d think maybe this is because there’s something new in Nature – but no, they’re ...
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...
After my Q and A with paleoanthropologist Mica Glantz, I got a lot of great response -- people really liked reading about work in the field from somebody ot...
I've seen the "palms facing forward" quote in a few news reports about last week's Dmanisi postcrania paper. It's pretty nonsensical when you see it devoid ...
By now, the news of the Dmanisi hominids' small size has been out for years. There was a National Geographic feature on the story more than four years ago -...
Just noticing, in this John Noble Wilford article:
I'm mining the data supplements from the Dmanisi postcrania paper for interesting stuff. There is a section (Supplement 4) on the paleoecology, which evalua...
Elizabeth Culotta's article on the Liang Bua conference appears in this week's Science. It's a real treat: around 2500 words worth of description of the pro...
Appropriate to yesterday's post about the hypothesis of a Eurasian-African clade distinction in early humans, is today's paper from Fred Spoor, Meave Leakey...
I keep seeing this story about Tim Bromage's "computer-simulated" reconstruction of KNM-ER 1470.
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...
It's a hazardous business, making predictions -- all the moreso because New Year's predictions have a deadline. If they don't happen this year, well, that's...
In case you haven't been paying attention, the chronology of early African Homo has been completely turned upside-down this year. Well, "upside-down" isn't ...
Science is carrying an exchange of technical comments about microcephaly and the endocast of LB1. Bob Martin and colleagues weigh in with an argument for why...
In Nature a couple of weeks ago, Robin Dennell and Wil Roebroeks had a provocative paper exploring the possibility that early humans (i.e. Homo erectus) ori...
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...
The story of the new Dmanisi skull hit the American news today. Nothing new compared to my post of two weeks ago, based on reports in the Georgian press.
So far only short items in the Georgian media, evidently based on a press release. The longest story is in the English language Messenger, but there are no ...
One of the highlights of the scientific program of the meetings was Fred Spoor's paper on the new cranial vault from Ileret, KNM-ER 42700. It is difficult t...
The article in the April 2005 National Geographic about Dmanisi has some interesting details that have not been made public before. The feature of the artic...
One of the features of the National Geographic (April 2005) article on Dmanisi is the discussion of the necessity of other people to aid and care for the ol...
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
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...