Fossil profile: BOU-VP-16/1 and mortuary practice
Some fossil hominin sites from the Middle and Late Pleistocene have an unusual overrepresentation of skulls compared to the rest of the skeleton. Anthropolog...
Some fossil hominin sites from the Middle and Late Pleistocene have an unusual overrepresentation of skulls compared to the rest of the skeleton. Anthropolog...
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...
Israel Hershkovitz and colleagues report in Nature today on a partial cranial vault from Manot Cave, Israel. The key arguments in their paper are well-expres...
Notable paper: Coqueugniot H, Dutour O, Arensburg B, Duday H, Vandermeersch B, Tillier, A-M. (2014) Earliest Cranio-Encephalic Trauma from the Levantine Midd...
Ann Gibbons reports from a recent conference in Spain about new work that has sequenced a whole genome from a 45,000-year-old femur from Siberia: “Oldest Hom...
Nature this week released two papers about European archaeological sites that come near the end of the Neandertals and beginning of the archaeological transi...
Laurent Excoffier and colleagues’ work has investigated how range expansions may have affected human genetic diversity. I’ve commented on this work several t...
Dr. Hawks, I greatly enjoyed your course on the rise of humans I purchased through the Teaching Company. I could not find the answer to this question: ...
When I last wrote about the Neandertal genome, I showed that across the X chromosome, Europe and China have different Neandertal genes. There is overlap betw...
Razib’s post, “The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm”, is a personal remembrance of the modern human origins problem, from his perspective. It include...
Earlier in the week, I pointed to a news story about upcoming research that substantiates some amount of gene flow among Pleistocene groups, persisting into ...
I’m going to point to Rex Dalton’s piece today with relatively little comment:
I got to sit down and watch most of the first episode of “The Human Spark” on PBS tonight (my earlier post). Our local station shows these things later than ...
Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and Donald Reid report on the perikymata spacing of a sample of fourteen anterior teeth from Qafzeh. These are “early modern humans...
Science journalist Richard Stone writes in the current Science about new Late Pleistocene skeletal remains from Guangxi: “Signs of Early Homo sapiens in Chin...
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
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...
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 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...
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 ...
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...