What’s the deal with the Sahelanthropus femur?
The species most often named as the earliest evidence for human evolution is Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The species is known from a skull and several mandibu...
All posts tagged with Miocene
Features of the Grecian ape raise questions about early hominins
Today, Jochen Fuss and colleagues have published a new description of the morphology of a mandible of Graecopithecus freybergi, from Pyrgos Vassilissis Amali...
Photo: Daemonelix
This is a Daemonelix, burrow of the ancient beaver relative Palaeocastor. There is a nice exposure of Miocene deposits at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument...
Have Sahelanthropus and Orrorin been written out of existence?
Barbara King devoted a recent NPR blog post to highlighting some professional acrimony in Current Anthropology: “Did Humans Evolve On The Savanna? The Debate...
Anthropology 105, lecture 5: Hemoglobin
In this lecture, I do a bit of a departure by discussing a body part that is microscopic: the hemoglobin molecule that carries oxygen inside of our red blood...
The diet of Gigantopithecus
Gigantopithecus has often been described as a bamboo eater, based on analogy with another kind of large herbivore in China, the giant panda. Giant pandas hav...
Meet Gigantopithecus
Gigantopithecus blacki was, as its name implies, a gigantic ape from the Pleistocene of China. Its remains consist only of teeth and jaws, but these are of a...
Ugandapithecus skull found
A brief report earlier this month from Agence France-Presse describes a new discovery of Ugandapithecus, worked on by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford: “20...
The homoplastic apes
Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison have published a review paper in NatureWood:Harrison:2011, arguing that the extent of anatomical convergence among Miocene ap...
Yellowstone
I was talking about the Yellowstone series of eruptions with students the other day. Along those lines, this news item from Michael Reilly is interesting:
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the pelvis
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
Miocene ape review, in brief
Science has a short essay by Terry Harrison this week about Miocene ape evolution: “Apes among the tangled branches of human origins.”
The floodgates of 5.33 Ma
I’ve had a paper sitting on my desktop for a couple of weeks: “Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis”, by Garcia-Castel...
Glut suit riot
On topic: A Primate of Modern Aspect reviews the anatomy of the Ardipithecus proximal femur.
Chimps R'n't Us
Michael Balter reports on the “First 4 Million Years of Human Evolution” meeting: “Primatologists Go Ape Over Ardi”.
Ardi woes
Fifteen years they had this thing, and they didn’t look at Oreopithecus?
Beneath the dawn chumans
Thomas Mailund covers some recent modeling of the human-chimpanzee divergence: “Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees”. Here’s the b...
Late Miocene fossil apes from Africa
Time for some attention to the Miocene apes. I’ve neglected them for the last few years, and there have been some interesting finds. I don’t mean the stuff t...
Sahelanthropus: "The femur of Toumaï?"
Some weeks ago, I wrote about an article by Alain Beauvilain and Jean-Pierre Watté, in my post, “Sahelanthropus: Did camelherders bury Toumaï facing Mecca?” ...
The mystery ape from Longgupo
In last week’s Nature, Russell Ciochon has a remarkable essay:
Hesperopithecus
Worth reading: Laelaps on “Hesperopithecus”, “The ‘Million-Dollar Pig’s Tooth Mystery’”.
Sahelanthropus: Did camelherders bury Toumaï facing Mecca?
Now if you really want to beat the science press, it helps to have readers who take really obscure journals.
Toumai in the hotseat
Hey, I never said it was a vulgar ape…
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...
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...
More on Chororapithecus
Ann Gibbons reports on the 10-million-year-old gorilla-like Chororapithecus, elaborating on the biogeographic interpretation I mentioned yesterday:
Did Gen Suwa just save paleoanthropology?
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.
Miocene hominids and a crisis of confidence
Out of this week's Science Times special on evolution, I clicked into John Noble Wilford's article first, titled "The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush Wi...
Frogs rafted, too
One of the strange things about primate evolution is the arrival of anthropoid monkeys in South America sometime during the Oligocene. South America was an ...
Paleontology in the classical world, reviewed
Afarensis reviews the book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor:
Three million years of unwanted guests
Well, I guess they've got a plot for the pilot of that caveman show:
When duplicate genes diverge
One of the most important mechanisms of genetic evolution is gene duplication. There are a few well-known gene families, such as the globin gene family, who...
New Year's predictions, 2007 edition
It's a hazardous business, making predictions -- all the moreso because New Year's predictions have a deadline. If they don't happen this year, well, that's...
Snakes on the brain
Well, it hit Slashdot, so here goes:
A challenge to Sahelanthropus
And it comes from me! My paper with Milford Wolpoff, Brigitte Senut, Martin Pickford, and Jim Ahern is now available online from PaleoAnthropology! The PDF ...
"Spacecraft all over the Pliocene"
Rex Dalton has a great two-page article in Nature about the bush vs. ladder dispute. It keys off of the Middle Awash Australopithecus anamensis article by Wh...
A ladder, not a bush?
Tim White and colleagues (2006) report on new fossils from Aramis and a new site, Asa Issie, with estimated dates between 4.1 and 4.2 million years ago.
Sahara at least 7 million years old
A concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene.
Orrorin opera
There's a new paper by Tim White in the "In Press" portion of Comptes Rendus Palevol, titled "Early hominid femora: The inside story". It has a short introd...
When chimpanzees stand
The current (February 2006) issue of AJPA carries an article by Craig Stanford describing the context of bipedal posture for chimpanzees in the Bwindi Impen...
A convergent fossil panda's thumb
Stephen Jay Gould famously made the false thumb of the giant panda one of his hallmark examples of the structural vagaries of adaptation. His original essay...
Carel van Schaik interview in Times
Nice interview touching on Carel van Schaik's new book, Among Orangutans : Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture. Much on van Schaik's observations of oran...
Rise in atmospheric oxygen and patterns of mammalian evolution
In Science this week (9/30/05), there was an article by Paul Falkowski and colleagues, including Michael Novacek of the American Museum, which documented th...
Proconsul book reviewed in Science
A couple of weeks ago, Robert Proctor reviewed Alan Walker and Pat Shipman's new book, The Ape in the Tree: An Intellectual and Natural History of Proconsul...
Tuber or not tuber? Rats are the question
From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:
Heterochrony and island dwarfism
I'm reading through the volume Integrative Paths to the Past (Corruccini and Ciochon, eds.) because of a piece of work I've been doing, and I came across th...
The knuckle-walking anteater
Caley Orr (Personal page, Arizona State University) has an advance paper in AJPA examining convergent features in the wrists of knuckle-walking hominoids an...
On silk purses and pig's ears
This new paper by Jay Kelley (University of Illinois, Chicago) is about as close to a detective story that paleontologists get (via Palanthsci message board...
Money, status, and social cognition
Via Instapundit, a link to a review of the new book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Looks like a very interesting bo...
NSF and data access
Mark Weiss from NSF appeared at the AAPA business meeting to discuss recent changes in the funding guidelines from the Physical Anthropology program. The mo...
Thoughts on the Sahelanthropus reconstruction
I am at the AAPA meeting in Milwaukee this week, and so posting is by necessity very light. However, the news of the new Sahelanthropus remains and CT recon...
Proximal radius variation in hominoids
Patel (2005) examines the morphology of the proximal radius in different species of apes. He sets the work into the context of earlier work on hominid posit...
PhyloCode and human evolution
The April issue of Discover has a feature article on PhyloCode, focusing on the roles of Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in trying to revise the code ...
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...
Enamel thickness in Afropithecus
Tanya M. Smith and colleagues (2003) measured the enamel of two Afropithecus molars, examining both their thickness and the periodicity of enamel formation....
The life and times of Gigantopithecus
Russ Ciochon has a very nice article about Gigantopithecus up on his department webpage. The article appeared in Natural History magazine in 1991. It featu...
Sterkfontein Member 2 paleoenvironment
Pickering and colleagues (2004) examine the fauna from Sterkfontein Member 2, coming to the following conclusion:
Chemistry and early hominid diets
The chemical analysis of bones to interpret diet rests on the observation that different foods vary in the composition of different chemical elements or iso...
Lowly origin of bipedalism :: the squatting model
In his 2003 book, Lowly Origin, Jonathan Kingdon presents a model for the origins of hominid bipedality, along with many other possible insights concerning ...
Earliest hominids :: thoughts and roundup
Today I lectured on the earliest hominid samples for my graduate course on australopithecines. This is the first time I have been able to give a full lectur...
Speciation
Speciation is the cessation of interbreeding between one animal population and all other populations with which it formerly exchanged genes. When interbreed...
Ardipithecus remains from Gona
News story at MSNBC
Proconsul :: overview
Perhaps the largest sample of Miocene ape fossils, dated over the longest time period, is Proconsul. Extending from over 22 million years ago to around 10 m...
Oreopithecus :: overview
Oreopithecus bambolii is known from a series of well-preserved fossils, including some relatively complete skeletons, from the north of Italy dated to betwee...
Lufengpithecus :: overview
Lufengpithecus lufengensis is a fossil ape from China, dating to the latest Miocene and Pliocene. A single mandible from the site of Longgupo argues that Luf...
Gigantopithecus :: overview
Gigantopithecus blacki was, as its name implies, a gigantic ape from the Pleistocene of China. Its remains consist only of teeth and jaws, but these are of a...
The Great Rift Valley
The climate of the Early Pliocene differed from that of the Miocene primarily by the appearance of a cooling and drying trend across Africa, where early hom...
Sivapithecus
Sivapithecus includes a great diversity of Miocene ape species from South Asia. Fossils are known from between 10 and 7 million years ago, with many fossils ...
Ouranopithecus
Ouranopithecus macedoniensis (called by some Graecopithecus) is from the Late Miocene of Greece, around 8 million years old. Based on its facial and dental a...
Fossil apes
The hominoids--the group including humans and living and fossil apes--originated sometime during the Oligocene period, between 34 and 24 million years ago. ...
Dryopithecus::overview
Today, the only non-human primate native to Europe is the Barbary macaque, which has extended its North African range to a small area including Gibraltar, o...
Sahelanthropus: a brief introduction
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. Later posts detail my own research on Sahelanthropus. My research with collaborators ultimately took a critical perspective ...
Brain evolution: what do the genes say?
Reference: Dorus, S. et al.. 2004. Accelerated evolution of nervous system genes in the origin of Homo sapiens. Cell 119:1027-1040.
Australopithecus anamensis: overview
Note: I wrote this post in 2004. Much additional evidence about Au. anamensis has come to light since that time. Later posts present more up-to-date informat...