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.
The jaws of ancient human relatives that we call “Australopithecus” show the problems of thinking about evolution as a straight line of gradual change.
Some fossil hominin sites from the Middle and Late Pleistocene have an unusual overrepresentation of skulls compared to the rest of the skeleton. Anthropolog...
Ethiopia is undergoing an unexpected government transition, and Yohannes Gedamu in The Conversation gives some context: “Premier quitting and state of emerge...
Notable paper: William Hutchison et al. (2016) A pulse of mid-Pleistocene rift volcanism in Ethiopia at the dawn of modern humans. Nature Communications 7, 1...
I was reading Scott Simpson and colleagues’ article from March 2014, “The female Homo pelvis from Gona: Response to Ruff (2010)”, in which they go through re...
New Scientist reports on a presentation at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting, in which Marc Meyer and Scott Williams describe one of the vertebral elemen...
I’m frankly amazed I didn’t link to this Nautilus article when it came out last year: “Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard”. In it, Amy Maxmen trave...
Another beautiful view from last week’s travel in Ethiopia:
Moonset in Turmi, Ethiopia:
I spent the last week trekking through southern Ethiopia.
Now watching the NOVA ScienceNOW about “What makes us human”.
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...
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Gretchen sends this link: MSNBC has a list of “Eight Great American Discoveries in Science”.
Writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange (Sarmiento 2010; White et al., 2010) a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had three areas of comment. The mol...
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
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...
There are three skulls from putative “hominins” that date to 3.5 million years or earlier. Every one of these skulls is known now from extensive reconstructi...
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 ...
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...
I haven’t been able to see all of the “Discovering Ardi” show tonight, but we did get most of the second hour. I just thought I’d jot down some general comme...
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 “...
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:
Reuters has a little story about CT scans of Lucy, done at the University of Texas by John Kappelman and colleagues:
Has Lucy become a white elephant for museums?
Scott Simpson and colleagues describe their find of a 1.5-million-year old, relatively complete pelvis of early Homo from Gona Ethiopia. The paper is in Scie...
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,...
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.