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.
All posts tagged with Dmanisi
Dmanisi and dispersal of Homo from Africa
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...
Dmanisi ‘single species’ claim draws critics
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 ...
The new skull from Dmanisi
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...
The hominin invasion of China
Earlier this month, Scientific Reports included an article by Hong Ao and colleagues reporting a date for the Shangshazui archaeological locality in the Nihe...
Visit to Georgia
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...
Mailbag: Fire starters
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...
Malapa and the "problem" skull KNM-ER 1813
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...
A Dmanisi visit
Nature this week is running a short review of a visit to Dmanisi by journalist Katharine Barnes (Pay link):
The changing height of Homo erectus
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...
My Leiden adventure
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...
Dmanisi in the news
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 ...
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...
An interview with Adam Van Arsdale
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...
Hands down, palms forward
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 ...
News flash: Dmanisi hominids were not short
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 -...
Is a lack of fossils the problem with early Homo?
Just noticing, in this John Noble Wilford article:
Dmanisi paleoecology
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...
The Liang Bua report
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...
Man bites dog
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...
KNM-ER 1470 is not a microcephalic
I keep seeing this story about Tim Bromage's "computer-simulated" reconstruction of KNM-ER 1470.
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...
New Year's predictions, 2007 edition
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...
A revised chronology for early Homo
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 ...
Martin versus Falk on microcephaly
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...
Tilting at absent Asian australopithecines
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...
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...
New Dmanisi skull – the news catches up
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.
New Dmanisi skull
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 ...
The KNM-ER 42700 calvaria
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...
Dmanisi in National Geographic
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...
Caring for the edentulous
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...
Selection and drift in early Homo
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...
The Ultimate Survivor!
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
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...