Quote: Louis Leakey on Homo habilis as non-intermediate
Louis Leakey, writing in Nature in 1966 as part of a defense of the Homo habilis definition:
All posts tagged with Homo habilis
Link: My essay on hand evolution and the origin of humans
Last year I published an essay in Nautilus, titled “Are humans the greatest things created by the human hand?”. The article has been making the rounds on soc...
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 ...
‘My sense is that handy man should belong to its own genus, neither australopith nor human’
In February, I revisited the 1964 definition of Homo habilis by Louis Leakey, Philip Tobias and John Napier: “Leakey, Tobias and Napier on the definition of ...
What do we know about early hominin relationships?
Ten years ago I published a paper on the failure of cladistics to resolve questions of early hominin relationships. My study used computer simulation to prod...
Leakey, Tobias and Napier on the definition of our genus
Leakey, Tobias and Napier (1964) defined the species, Homo habilis. A simple species diagnosis was not enough: Leakey and colleagues had to argue for an expa...
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...
Koobi Fora perspectives
I’m in Kansas and my internet is spottier here than it was in Africa. So I have a bunch of thoughts about the new Koobi Fora fossils published by Maeve Leake...
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Meet Homo habilis
This station has several of the key cranial specimens of Homo habilis, together with Sts 5, the representative of Australopithecus africanus. The H. habilis ...
Meet Homo habilis
This station has several of the key cranial specimens of Homo habilis, together with Sts 5, the representative of Australopithecus africanus. The H. habilis ...
Aging juvenile fossil hominins
The fossil record is not made up only of adults. We have abundant skeletal evidence from juvenile individuals of a broad range of ages. At this station you w...
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...
What, if anything, is Australopithecus sediba?
Today we finally get to learn about the exceptional discovery of four partial hominin skeletons from Malapa Cave, South Africa. Two of the fossil skeletons a...
Malapa surfacing
Richard Gray of The Telegraph has a story about the upcoming Malapa hominin announcement: “Missing link between man and apes found”
NOVA: Becoming Human
OK, I’m going to live-blog this show. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while – I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in...
Mailbag: Bromage's KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction, systematic position of Homo habilis
(this letter refers to my 2007 comments on Tim Bromage’s KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction)
The mystery ape from Longgupo
In last week’s Nature, Russell Ciochon has a remarkable essay:
But will it include recipes?
I’ve ordered a copy of Richard Wrangham’s new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I was weighing it, and a reader tipped me over the edge. I’ll g...
OH 7 and OH 8: One individual or two?
In the current AJPA, Randall Susman reviews the stratigraphic and morphological evidence concerning Olduvai Hominids 7, 8 and 35. Some history:
The Orrorin identity
There's nothing especially surprising about the functional interpretations in Richmond and Jungers' paper about the Orrorin BAR 1002'00 femur. They conclude...
An interview with Michelle Drapeau
I've been trying to spread the interviews across the field in various directions. I (virtually) talked with Mica Glantz about Neandertals, Adam Van Arsdale ...
New Year's predictions, 2008 edition
It's that time of year again -- the time when those boring ``Year in Review'' magazines are on newsstands, and when pundits make fools of themselves predict...
The amazing talking Neandertals
This week, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology institute announced that they had tickled FoxP2 out of two Neanderta...
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:
Big arms, small sacrum
In case you're following the debate about Homo habilis limb proportions, there's a new contribution by Martin Haeusler and Henry McHenry in the JHE holding ...
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...
Lizard dimorphism, ecology, and hominids
You know I like the lizard analogies for human evolution -- I wrote about limb length and predation last time around -- and now we have another paper from J...
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...
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 ...
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...
Tooth wear in early Homo
Discovery News has an article summarizing some of Peter Ungar's recent work on tooth anatomy and wear in early Homo.
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...
Tobias memoir published
Speaking of Phillip Tobias, The Sunday Independent is carrying a long interview of Tobias discussing his autobiography. Google says the site is subscription...
Paging Randy Newman…
If "short people got no reason to live", then why exactly do they live longer than tall people?
Ape to Man
OK, we have it on, and I've already had a couple of laughs, so I guess I'll take some notes as it goes.
AL 438-1
Michelle Drapeau and colleagues (2005) report on the AL 438-1 specimen from Hadar. The specimen consists of "part of the mandible, a frontal bone fragment, ...
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...
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."
Dental growth in early Homo
Dean and colleagues (2001) present a study of perikymata counts of anterior teeth (incisors and canines) in early humans and australopithecines, compared to...
Age of hominids from Sterkfontein
A recent spate of articles has carried on a debate about the age of the Sterkfontein hominids. Sterkfontein is a complicated site, including several distinc...
Tooth anatomy and diet in australopithecines and early humans
Peter Ungar (2004) investigated the dietary adaptations of A. afarensis and early Homo by looking at the three-dimensional topography of their teeth. the sh...
Brain expansion in A. boisei
Elton and colleagues (2001) examined the record of brain size in early Homo with the following question in mind: we know that brain size increased in this l...
How have metabolic constraints affected human evolution?
In the 2002 Annual Reviews in Anthropology, Leslie Aiello and Jonathan Wells provide a synopsis of the ways that morphological evolution in the human lineag...
Species concepts
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...
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...