Fossil profile: KNM-WT 8556 mandible
Kenyanthropus platyops makes an interesting case study of species in the fossil hominin record. The name formally applies to only two fossils, which are the ...
All posts tagged with Kenya
MSA from Karungu, Kenya and the patchy landscape of Late Pleistocene Africa
J. Tyler Faith and colleagues report in the current Journal of Human Evolution on their work understanding the context of the Middle Stone Age archaeological...
Notable: A tooth from West Turkana
Notable paper: Maddux, Scott C. et al. 2015. A 750,000 year old hominin molar from the site of Nadung’a, West Turkana, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution (in ...
Bernard Wood interviewed in Current Biology
A recent issue of Current Biology has a short interview with paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood: “Bernard Wood”. The interview covers his transition from a tra...
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...
The fish of Koobi Fora
A number of papers related to the hominin exploitation of aquatic resources are appearing soon in the Journal of Human Evolution. Two of these in the early o...
Oldowan hunting behaviors at Kanjera South
Joseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya Ferraro:carnivory:2013. Kanjera South is an archae...
Palming Homo erectus
New Scientist reports on Carol Ward’s presentation at the AAPA meetings, describing a new metacarpal of Homo erectus from West Turkana: “Stone tools helped s...
African Homo erectus
This station includes several casts of early fossil Homo erectus, from the Early Pleistocene of Africa. These include:
Digging deeper into the earliest Acheulean
I’ve been ranting on Twitter all day about the new paper on the “earliest Acheulean” by Christopher Lepre and colleagues Lepre:Acheulean:2011, published in N...
Nutcracker Man debunked
This week, Thure Cerling and colleagues report in PNAS (2011) carbon stable isotope data from 24 specimens of Australopithecus boisei. This is a huge sample ...
The shrinking youth
Yesterday the Journal of Human Evolution released a new paper by Rhonda Graves and colleagues, titled, “Just how strapping was KNMWT 15000?” The paper challe...
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...
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...
Red beds
I’ve been browsing the Smithsonian’s</i> website supporting their Human Origins hall. There’s a nice feature about the archaeological work at Olorgesai...
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...
Lomekwi muckraking
Michael Balter asks a question I’ve hit here a few times: “What ever happened to Kenyanthropus platyops?”
I'm tired of cutesy foot-related titles
I don’t have a lot to say about the new footprints from Ileret, described by Matthew Bennett and colleagues. Seems like a nicely done study, particularly giv...