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...
All posts tagged with early modern
Link: Three big insights into our African origins
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...
The Manot 1 skull and how we now look at Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans
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: The cranial injury of Qafzeh 11
Notable paper: Coqueugniot H, Dutour O, Arensburg B, Duday H, Vandermeersch B, Tillier, A-M. (2014) Earliest Cranio-Encephalic Trauma from the Levantine Midd...
A new early modern human genome from Siberia
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...
The radiocarbon dating paper without a radiocarbon date
Nature this week released two papers about European archaeological sites that come near the end of the Neandertals and beginning of the archaeological transi...
No Neandertal safe sex
Laurent Excoffier and colleagues’ work has investigated how range expansions may have affected human genetic diversity. I’ve commented on this work several t...
Mailbag: Where did Neandertals come from?
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: ...
Finding more Neandertal genes, chromosome 19 edition
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...
Merry Christmas
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...
Population models and testing human origins
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 ...
Multiregional evolution lives!
I’m going to point to Rex Dalton’s piece today with relatively little comment:
The Human Spark, episode 1
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 ...
Qafzeh teeth like Neandertals
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...
It came from Guangxi
Science journalist Richard Stone writes in the current Science about new Late Pleistocene skeletal remains from Guangxi: “Signs of Early Homo sapiens in Chin...
Middle Stone Age bed and breakfast
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
Learning, population size, and "modern human behavior"
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...
African origins and phenotypic variance
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...
Modern humans older than thought?
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...
The ancient struggle for existence between humans and giant clams
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 ...
BROADLY CONSISTENT WATCH I
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...