Quote: Yves Coppens on the invasion of paleontologists in East Africa
Virginia Morell’s excellent biography of the Leakey family, Ancestral Passions, includes a great discussion of the aftermath of the innovation of potassium-a...
All posts tagged with Olduvai Gorge
Quote: Louis Leakey on Homo habilis as non-intermediate
Louis Leakey, writing in Nature in 1966 as part of a defense of the Homo habilis definition:
Evidence of hunting at Olduvai Gorge
My University of Wisconsin colleague Henry Bunn got some press this weekend for his presentation at the European Society for Human Evolution meeting: “Humans...
African Homo erectus
This station includes several casts of early fossil Homo erectus, from the Early Pleistocene of Africa. These include:
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 ...
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 ...
Papyrus and A. boisei
I’ve had on my stack for quite a long time, a short paper by Nicholas van der Merwe and colleagues, assessing the stable carbon isotope ratios in several spe...
Anthropophage
Charles Q. Choi: “Ancient Human Ancestors Faced Fearsome Horned Crocodile”
The shells of Trinil
I want to share a paper that might not get a lot of attention but that I think makes an interesting contribution to understanding the ecology of early Homo a...
Mailbag: Bromage's KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction, systematic position of Homo habilis
(this letter refers to my 2007 comments on Tim Bromage’s KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction)
OH 7 and OH 8: One individual or two?
In the current AJPA, Randall Susman reviews the stratigraphic and morphological evidence concerning Olduvai Hominids 7, 8 and 35. Some history:
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...
An interview with Adam Van Arsdale
After my Q and A with paleoanthropologist Mica Glantz, I got a lot of great response -- people really liked reading about work in the field from somebody ot...
Man bites dog
Appropriate to yesterday's post about the hypothesis of a Eurasian-African clade distinction in early humans, is today's paper from Fred Spoor, Meave Leakey...
Olduvai overlap
Rex Dalton reports in this week's Nature on permit problems in Olduvai Gorge:
A revised chronology for early Homo
In case you haven't been paying attention, the chronology of early African Homo has been completely turned upside-down this year. Well, "upside-down" isn't ...
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...
"Ape to Man" to debut Sunday evening
The History Channel is showing its new human evolution program, "Ape to Man" this Sunday, August 7, at 9:00 EDT / 8:00 CDT. The show has a website, which gi...
AL 438-1
Michelle Drapeau and colleagues (2005) report on the AL 438-1 specimen from Hadar. The specimen consists of "part of the mandible, a frontal bone fragment, ...
Technological sophistication of the earliest toolmakers
One study reported at the meetings brought to mind a growing literature on the sophistication of Pliocene archaeological assemblages, grouped as "Oldowan" o...
Age of hominids from Sterkfontein
A recent spate of articles has carried on a debate about the age of the Sterkfontein hominids. Sterkfontein is a complicated site, including several distinc...