Popularity of hominin species names
I was curious about the use of Homo ergaster over time. It seems to me that fewer and fewer paleoanthropologists have been using it over the last few years. ...
All posts tagged with Orrorin
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...
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...
Thumbs up
Bruce Bower reports on some anatomical research from the meetings: “For ancient hominids, thumbs up on precision grip.”
Galili femoral anatomy
Elizabeth Culotta reports from the Vertebrate Paleontology meetings about an analysis of the hominid femur from Galili, Ethiopia.
Substitution rates and ancestral population sizes
The rate of neutral mutations varies across the genome. When studying a single gene, this variation in rates is not especially important -- it is generally ...
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...
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...
Our quondam homs
Did I miss a meeting?
"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...
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...
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...
Ardipithecus remains from Gona
News story at MSNBC
Forelimbs and climbing in early hominids
Compared to their small body mass, the forelimbs of early hominids are both longer and more muscular than those of recent humans. The arms are shorter than ...
Bipeds at Lukeino
The earliest skeletal traces of bipedalism come from the fossils from Lukeino, in the Tugen Hills of western Kenya. A single isolated molar was found here i...