Link: Swartkrans site formation
Travis Pickering and colleagues have a paper presenting new teeth from Swartkrans, which they attribute to Paranthropus robustus: “New early Pleistocene homi...
All posts tagged with Paranthropus robustus
Delayed maturation and Australopithecus robustus
I got a Twitter question today about whether any fossil hominins may have had delayed secondary development. The question arises in the context of developmen...
What do we know about early hominin relationships?
Ten years ago I published a paper on the failure of cladistics to resolve questions of early hominin relationships. My study used computer simulation to prod...
Growing teeth
Zachary Cofran has been dissertation blogging about his work on dental development in robust australopithecines: “Data, development and diets”. An interestin...
Meet Australopithecus boisei
The robust australopithecines existed between 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago. At this station are skeletal remains from two kinds of robust australopithecine....
Laboratory: Feet
The stations in this lab will introduce one of the best-known species of fossil hominins, evidence of bipedal locomotion early in our evolution, some basic a...
Meet Australopithecus robustus
The region just north of Johannesburg, South Africa, is a formation of ancient limestone in which groundwater has formed numerous caves and sinkholes. Some o...
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 ...
Mailbag: Diet and isotopes
Re: “Tartar control and Neandertal plant use”.
Shrinking erectus
Ann Gibbons reports on the AAPA meetings with a story about all the Homo erectus pelvis and stature papers (“Human ancestor caught in the midst of a makeover...
Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines
I've followed the literature on early hominid diets from the beginning of the weblog. In 2005 I discussed Peter Ungar's analyses of dental occlusal morpholo...
Robust australopithecine diet ablated
Sponheimer and colleagues (2006, link) zapped some Swartkrans teeth with lasers to measure their 13C content. I wrote quite a bit here last year about austr...
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...
Neandertal teeth: the other shoe
The paper by Guatelli-Steinberg et al. (2005), earlier referred to here, is now available online from PNAS.
More microwear from South African australopithecines
Scott and colleagues (2005) examined dental microwear in some Swartkrans (A. robustus) and Sterkfontein (A. africanus) specimens. The interesting part of th...
Sterkfontein variability
In a 2002 paper on cranial remains from Sterkfontein, Lockwood and Tobias write the following in a section called "Are there multiple hominin species from S...
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 ...
The Ultimate Survivor!
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
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....
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...