To fish or not to fish
This summer I pointed to an article about the FwJj20 locality at Koobi Fora, which provides the earliest known evidence of systematic fish exploitation in th...
All posts tagged with Homo
‘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 ...
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...
Mandibles of early Homo and robust australopithecines
For anthropologists, Africa was a point of exceptional diversity between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago. In both East and South Africa, the fossil recor...
Polytypism and complexity
Adam Van Arsdale considers whether a “bushy”, speciose phylogeny is actually evidence of evolutionary “complexity”: “Linearity and simplicity in the fossil r...
Carnivores and early Homo
Ann Gibbons reports on a recent conference investigating the interaction of climate change and Plio-Pleistocene human evolution “Where’s the beef? Early huma...
Mailbag: The hominins of our discontent
Re: “Taxonomy on tap”, where I reminded readers about my lack of a principled reason to continue using “hominid” instead of “hominin”.
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 ...
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...
Mailbag: Probing hominin origins
This past year and half I have read and studied pre-history including most of the books, dvd's, on evolution, human origins, and all related subjects. I hav...
The Malapa Soft Tissue Project FAQ
These are a few of the questions that I think are essential to understand our aims with the project and how we expect it will unfold. The future depends on w...
Through the early Homo archives
I’ve enabled the search function for the site, which you’ll find at top right on each page of the site. The search index is still rebuilding, and as I write ...
Australopithecus sediba in National Geographic
National Geographic has posted text from Josh Fischman’s August article about Australopithecus sediba: “Malapa fossils”.
Sink Australopithecus!
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Fishy story from Koobi Fora
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...