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...
All posts tagged with Middle Stone Age
Killing it: From handaxes to hafted spears, no difference in hunting or meat-eating
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?
Border Cave rhizomes from the early Middle Stone Age
I’m pretty excited about today’s paper revealing new evidence of cooked rhizomes from Border Cave in South Africa. The paper is in Science, by Lyn Wadley and...
Link: Symbolism, beads and modern human behavior
Christopher Henshilwood has written a short article for The Conversation describing the archaeological importance of the finds from Blombos and elsewhere in ...
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...
Link: National Geographic ancient art article
National Geographic dedicated part of its January 2015 issue to the origin of art. The longread article by Chip Walter is now available online: “First Artist...
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.”
North by Northeast
An essay by Michael Balter in ScienceBalter:launch:2011 asks the question, “Was North Africa the launch pad for modern human migrations?”.
Morocco early Aterian
Julien Riel-Salvatore writes about new findings from Morocco relevant to the timing of the Aterian industry, a Middle Stone Age variant from North Africa.
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...