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...
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...
Today, Jochen Fuss and colleagues have published a new description of the morphology of a mandible of Graecopithecus freybergi, from Pyrgos Vassilissis Amali...
Aidan Ruth and colleagues in the Journal of Human Evolution have an interesting paper with the seemingly counter-intuitive result that foramen magnum orienta...
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. ...
Barbara King devoted a recent NPR blog post to highlighting some professional acrimony in Current Anthropology: “Did Humans Evolve On The Savanna? The Debate...
Kate Wong has been reporting from the Paleoanthropology Society meetings in Honolulu. Today she describes a presentation about the endocast shape of the Toum...
Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison have published a review paper in NatureWood:Harrison:2011, arguing that the extent of anatomical convergence among Miocene ap...
OK, I’m going to live-blog this show. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while – I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in...
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?” ...
Now if you really want to beat the science press, it helps to have readers who take really obscure journals.
Hey, I never said it was a vulgar ape…
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 ...
There's nothing especially surprising about the functional interpretations in Richmond and Jungers' paper about the Orrorin BAR 1002'00 femur. They conclude...
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...
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.
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...
I'm about two-thirds of the way through Mike Morwood's new book, The Discovery of the Hobbit, and I'll be posting a review when I'm through. Generally, I ha...
Well, I guess they've got a plot for the pilot of that caveman show:
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...
Despite all the trouble I had traveling (or maybe because of it), I got to have a really enjoyable time finishing Ann Gibbons' new book, The First Human. Fo...
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 ...
Try to wrap your mind around this one:
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 concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene.
The weblog didn't start from zero a year ago; the sections related to my courses and the Flores files long predate that. But it has been a year since I star...
This month's Discover came in the mail today. In celebration of their 25th anniversary, their issue is devoted to "Frontiers of Science", with articles cove...
Discover magazine has been doing a series of retrospectives by scientists on the last 25 years of progress in science, in honor of the magazine's 25th anniv...
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...
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...
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 ...
In his 2003 book, Lowly Origin, Jonathan Kingdon presents a model for the origins of hominid bipedality, along with many other possible insights concerning ...
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...
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...
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. Later posts detail my own research on Sahelanthropus. My research with collaborators ultimately took a critical perspective ...
Working on a paper about early hominid lineage diversity, Milford [Wolpoff] has pointed out a sticking point in consideration of niche breadth in early homin...