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.
All posts tagged with Ethiopia
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...
Link: An Ethiopian government transition
Ethiopia is undergoing an unexpected government transition, and Yohannes Gedamu in The Conversation gives some context: “Premier quitting and state of emerge...
Notable: Modern human origins and Ethiopian volcanoes
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...
No Australopithecus boisei from the Afar
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...
Link: The girl with baboon in her spine
New Scientist reports on a presentation at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting, in which Marc Meyer and Scott Williams describe one of the vertebral elemen...
Link: A visit to Ethiopian paleoanthropology
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...
Photo: Sunrise over the Omo River
Another beautiful view from last week’s travel in Ethiopia:
Photo: Ethiopian moonset
Moonset in Turmi, Ethiopia:
My travels in Ethiopia
I spent the last week trekking through southern Ethiopia.
Liveblog of ScienceNOW on Neandertals, Dikika
Now watching the NOVA ScienceNOW about “What makes us human”.
Quote: Johanson and White on comparing samples
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...
Cutmarked bones from Dikika critiqued
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Mooning hominins
Gretchen sends this link: MSNBC has a list of “Eight Great American Discoveries in Science”.
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the canine-premolar complex
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...
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the pelvis
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
Why didn't they let Kenyanthropus save them?
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...
The trouble about Kenyanthropus and Ardi
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...
The teeth that didn't bark
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 ...
Woronso-Mille: A ladder not a bush
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...
Discovering Ardi notes
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...
Ardipithecus FAQ
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 “...
Lucy Seattle review
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:
Lucy scans
Reuters has a little story about CT scans of Lucy, done at the University of Texas by John Kappelman and colleagues:
Lucy exhibit a loser for Seattle
Has Lucy become a white elephant for museums?
Mrs. Elvis, the Homo erectus pelvis
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...
Mysteries of A. afarensis
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,...
Did Gen Suwa just save paleoanthropology?
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.