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 Sahelanthropus
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...
The foramen magnum does not point to locomotor adaptation
Aidan Ruth and colleagues in the Journal of Human Evolution have an interesting paper with the seemingly counter-intuitive result that foramen magnum orienta...
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. ...
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...
Sahelanthropus brain
Kate Wong has been reporting from the Paleoanthropology Society meetings in Honolulu. Today she describes a presentation about the endocast shape of the Toum...
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...
NOVA: Becoming Human
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...
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?” ...
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…
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...
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...
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...
A guide to fantasy science
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...
Three million years of unwanted guests
Well, I guess they've got a plot for the pilot of that caveman show:
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...
Book review of "The First Human"
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...
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 ...
The dawn chumans
Try to wrap your mind around this one:
"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...
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.
New Year's predictions, 2006 edition
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...
Frontiers of human origins
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...
Looking at the last 25 years of paleontology
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
What restrained the chimpanzees?
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...