Hominin remains from Mata Menge, Flores
I was really excited yesterday to read about the work of Gerrit van den Bergh and colleagues at Mata Menge, where they have uncovered hominin fossil remains ...
All posts tagged with Middle Pleistocene
An archaic human from the bed of the Taiwan Strait
From the bottom of the sea this week comes another new fossil hominin. The specimen is a partial mandible, described in Nature Communications, by Chun-Hsiang...
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 ...
Low-velocity spatter from the Neandertal palette
Paleolithic archaeology is the home of some of the best forensic work anywhere. I’ve often written about impressive analyses of stable isotopes, microscopic ...
When anthropological and geological facts collide
This passage is the first paragraph of the introduction to Franz Weidenreich’s monograph, The Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis</em> Weidenreich:ZKD:194...
Meet Homo heidelbergensis
The Mauer mandible comes from just southeast of Heidelberg, Germany, and was found in ancient sands deposited just more than 600,000 years ago. Upon its desc...
Lazaret frontal
Julien Riel-Salvatore points to news from Lazaret Cave, France: “170,000 year-old human skull fragment found at Lazaret”. There’s a new 170,000-year-old fron...
Mailbag: Where did Neanderancestors live?
Re: European Middle Plesitocene (via Twitter):
Population structure within Africa: has "modern human origins" become a non sequitur?
When I wrote about the Denisova genome late last year, I claimed that “A large-scale reorganization of the science of human origins is upon us.”
Did humans colonize the northern latitudes without fire?
Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa Roebroeks:Villa:2011 review the evidence for human control and use of fire in the archaeology of Europe during the Middle Pleis...
Mailbag: Chinese subspecies and Denisovans
Re: Denisova:
Neandertal stories on parade
Long-time science journalist Robin McKie has a long article in The Observer about the Neandertals this weekend: “Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us ...
The paleolakes of Egypt
A paper in the December issue of Geology, by Ted Maxwell and colleagues Maxwell:Tushka:2010, describes evidence for a “Lake Erie-sized” paleolake in southwes...
The lion diet
National Geographic News a couple of weeks ago ran a story about lion-eating at Gran Dolina (“Prehistoric Europeans Hunted, Ate Lion?”):
Louse story
Bruce Bower reports on Andrew Kitchen and colleagues’ work, establishing the divergence time of human head lice and body lice. The idea is that this divergen...
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...
Misinformation about brain evolution
Due to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore: “Colin Blakemore: How the human brain got bigger by accident and not thr...
Crete again
I wrote about Crete twice last month (“Crete: Pleistocene port of call?”, “More tools from Crete”). Now John Noble Wilford writes about Strasser and Panagopo...
Site: Atapuerca
Atapuerca - 53, originally uploaded by Sitomon. I like to feature Flickr Creative Commons photos that show archaeological sites. This one is from Atapue...
Crete: Pleistocene port of call?
Bruce Bower reports on excavations by Thomas Strasser on the Mediterranean island of Crete: “Ancient hominids may have been seafarers”.
The fishy spaces of the Middle Pleistocene
In Science this week, Nira Alperson-Afil and colleagues report on recent excavations at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel. I saw some of this research presented a...
Just ducky
A week or two ago, I was pointed by a press release to some recent research from Bolomor Cave, Spain, where the levels occupied by early/pre-Neandertals have...
Sima species
Michael Balter has a nice Science writeup of the recent Gibraltar conference, “Human Evolution 150 Years After Darwin.”
The spotty Acheulean
Scott and Gibert report in today’s Nature on the “oldest handaxes” in Europe:
Zhoukoudian cave site in danger of collapse
From China Daily:
A new study of genetic introgression and human ancestry
Fed up on hobbit news? Well, I’m going to do my best this week to scoop the science journalists, covering stories in paleoanthropology that ought to get some...
Tuberculosis is interesting, but a lot older than 10,000 years
Hebrew University has issued a press release about ongoing research on human and animal bones from the Jericho excavations. They’re looking for signs of tube...
Hearing at Atapuerca
A story in Science News by writer Tia Ghose, about the hearing capacities of the Atapuerca/Sima de los Huesos people, has been making the rounds, including S...
New mandible from Thomas Quarry, Morocco
This is a press release from CNRS:
New pre-Neandertal from Serbia
Reuters is reporting on a Middle Pleistocene find from Serbia:
New Homo erectus crania at meetings
UPDATE (2008/4/15): The presentation was withdrawn from the meetings. I'm told that the information in the abstract is accurate, and that the withdrawal doe...
The (non-)neutral Neandertals
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
D'Errico on Neandertal language
Edmund Blair Bolles is reporting from the Evolang conference in Barcelona. Unfortunately I had to cancel my presentation there, but it has been great to rea...
A Mongolian hominid
Yves Coppens and colleagues have found a frontal bone, and a bit more, in Mongolia. They do not report a date for the specimen beyond Late Pleistocene; it c...
No spongiform Neandertals, please
Julien Riel-Salvatore reviews some reasons why kuru did not wipe out the Neandertals.
The "dark matter" of modern human origins
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa. The special issue resulted ...
The hygienic dater
I've just been reading a useful paper by Andrew Millard, which reviews the chronometric dates of African and Near Eastern fossil hominids from the Middle an...
Serial founder effects, again
A flush of papers this week (two today in Nature, one tomorrow in Science) describe new analyses of SNPs across the genome. Two of the papers sample SNPs in...
A new Middle Pleistocene hominid from Turkey
John Kappelman was kind enough to send me a preprint of the report on the new Turkish Middle Pleistocene specimen. The specimen consists of frontal and pari...
An interview with Mica Glantz
Last month, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published mitochondrial DNA sequences from two Asian ...
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...
French Connection to China Syndrome, dentally
I've read through the new paper by Martinón-Torres et al., on Eurasian continuity in the Middle Pleistocene. They've put out an interesting hypothesi...
Island hopping
This article from The Age lays out an ambitious excavation schedule for Mike Morwood and colleagues:
Introgression and microcephalin FAQ
Considering the paper by Evans and colleagues, I've come up with a list of questions and answers:
Our quondam homs
Did I miss a meeting?
Is this the end for Homo floresiensis?
The paper by Teuku Jacob and colleagues is being published in PNAS today. Today's papers haven't appeared yet, but the press release is available online at ...
Mata Menge stone tools
Adam Brumm and colleagues (2006) describe the stone artifacts from the Mata Menge archaeological site on Flores. This site is one of several described by Mo...
"The catechism about genetic drift"
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
And then there was Levallois
Noble and Davidson (1996:200-201) have a great passage on the lack of relevance of the Levallois technique to interpreting ancient cognition. It has an atte...
An Australian mid-Holocene symbolic "revolution"
Brumm and Moore (2005) review the "symbolic revolution" in the light of the Australian archaeological record.
Acheulean endings
There is no hard endpoint to the Acheulean; its tool types -- in particular the handaxe -- last well into the MSA/Middle Paleolithic. Here are some notes on...
Sangoan pigment grinding
I was reading this 2003 paper by Philip Van Peer and colleagues, which is a quick introduction to the site 8-B-11, Sai Island, Sudan. I wanted to make a not...
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...
Early human habitation in Britain
Parfitt et al. (2005) report in Nature (subscription) on stone tool debitage from the Cromer Forest-bed Formation of southeastern England, dating to approxi...
Serial founder effects
This post is from 2005, and reflects my analysis at the time. The concepts here remain correct but the current state of evidence about human genetic variatio...
The first Neanderchimp?
McBrearty and Jablonski (2005) report on the first discovery of chimpanzee fossil remains. The described fossils are three teeth: left and right upper centr...
What is the Kent's Cavern maxilla?
Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, England, underwent systematic archaeological investigation beginning in the 1860's, proceeding intermittently up to the present...
Allostasis in human evolution
McEwen and Wingfield (2003) discuss the concept of allostasis. I was unfamiliar with this concept myself until an interesting presentation by one of our gr...
Genetics and multiregional evolution, meetings 2005
Several papers at the AAPA meetings presented evidence for deep Asian-specific lineages in the present human gene pool. For example, from Mike Hammer's abst...
Cerebellar expansion in recent human evolution
Weaver (2005) examined the size ratio of the cerebellum and neocortex in fossil hominid brains. The division between the cerebellum and the cortex is one of...
Bringing down "Goliath"
This post is from 2005. More recent research has shifted much of what scientists used to think about Middle Pleistocene hominins in Africa. This research is ...
Caring for the edentulous
One of the features of the National Geographic (April 2005) article on Dmanisi is the discussion of the necessity of other people to aid and care for the ol...
Continents of continuity
Harding and McVean (2005) present a review of current genetic evidence addressing the origin of modern humans. Unlike other recent reviews, they do not pres...
Omo Kibish redating
The news stories (nature.com) are focusing on the idea that the “earliest” modern humans are now 35,000 years earlier than they had been. This is the amount ...
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...
Neandertal mtDNA from El Sidrón, Spain
Lalueza-Fox and colleagues (2005) report on the recovery of endogenous mtDNA from a Neandertal specimen from El Sidrón cave, in northern Spain. The f...
Neandertals in NYC
I'm sitting at my gate at LaGuardia, returning from a conference at NYU, titled "Neanderthals revisited: New approaches and perspectives," cosponsored by th...