Florisbad: How old is the ‘early Homo sapiens’ skull?
This week, Lee Berger and I posted a new preprint in which we investigate the context of the Florisbad fossil hominin specimens. Our preprint is on the open ...
All posts tagged with South Africa
Stopping the misuse of DNA samples from African research participants
In my course on anthropological genetics last semester, I spent a week on the ethical challenges with appropriate consent by research participants for the re...
Border Cave rhizomes from the early Middle Stone Age
I’m pretty excited about today’s paper revealing new evidence of cooked rhizomes from Border Cave in South Africa. The paper is in Science, by Lyn Wadley and...
Working toward more ethical anatomical collections at the University of Cape Town
Victoria Gibbon of the University of Cape Town has written a piece for The Conversation recounting how UCT is addressing some historical wrongs in the develo...
Link: South African Daily Maverick reports on Little Foot
Elsabe Brits has written a long article covering the recent releases of preprints and papers about the StW 573 “Little Foot” skeleton: “SA’s most complete hu...
Link: Identifying the species used to make bone arrowheads
The Conversation is running a neat story by Justin Bradfield that details the use of the ZooMS protein-barcoding technique on bone arrowheads from Late Stone...
Link: Archaeomagnetism in Iron Age contexts in southern Africa
Michael Greshko in National Geographic has written a neat story about the hunt for southern hemisphere records of Earth’s magnetic field: “What Ancient Afric...
Ancient footprints emerge from the coast of South Africa
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the hominin footprints discovered in South Africa and published last week were discovered by some dedicat...
A view of the Little Foot skeleton
Paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke and the University of the Witwatersrand made a big splash last week with the public unveiling of one of the most important hom...
South African San adopt code of research ethics
By Linda Nordling in Science: “San people of Africa draft code of ethics for researchers”:
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...
Link: A short Sterkfontein history on its 80th anniversary
The discovery of hominin fossils at Sterkfontein, South Africa, was eighty years ago this year. Recognizing the occasion, Jason Heaton, Travis Pickering and ...
Link: Earliest cancer in the fossil hominin record
A nice piece in The Conversation by Edward Odes and Patrick Randolph-Quinney describing their research into the tumors afflicting ancient specimens from Swar...
Photo: SK 15
This is SK 15, a lower jaw from Swartkrans, South Africa. Most scientists today attribute it to Homo erectus, but when Robert Broom and John Robinson found i...
Link: Discover magazine on South African hominin sites
Discover magazine did its March, 2016 cover story on the recent hominin discoveries of South Africa, including Rising Star and Malapa, and other important fi...
Skeletal remains from Milner Hall, a new excavation area in Sterkfontein Caves
This month, the Journal of Human Evolution has published a short paper from Dominic Stratford and colleagues describing two hominin fossils from Milner Hall,...
Link: Open access and APC double-dipping
From Leti Kleyn, in the South African edition of The Conversation, a call for better institutional open access archives: “Why it’s getting harder to access f...
Is Little Foot really 3.67 million years old?
Darryl Granger and colleagues report in Nature this week on the date of the StW 573 specimen, commonly known as “Little Foot”, from Sterkfontein, South Afric...
Raymond Dart and the Russian cast connection
I pointed earlier this week to an article by Lydia Pyne about perceptions of Neandertals over the years, and hinted at a second recent article. That article ...
Interview with Lee Berger
As many readers know, I recently offered a massive open online course (MOOC), titled “Human Evolution Past and Future”. The course included video interviews ...
Malapa protective structure opens
The Gauteng Tourism Authority has a nice article about the opening of the protective structure over the paleoanthropological site of Malapa: “Malapa Structur...
Setting a course for the Rising Star
I will be flying to South Africa on Friday to take (an exceedingly small) part in a unique excavation just getting started in the Cradle of Humankind World H...
The genetic complexity of recent migration into southern Africa
Erika Check Hayden in this week’s Nature reports on a current preprint by Joseph Pickrell and coworkers from David Reich’s lab: “African genes tracked back”
Photo: Sterkfontein
This morning I went on an awesome visit to Sterkfontein, guided through the subterranean parts of the excavations by site manager Dominic Stratford. What an ...
Photos: Drimolen in morning
This morning began early with a drive out to the Cradle of Humankind. Colin Menter and Andy Herries were really kind to allow us to visit their excavation at...
Photo: Swartkrans looking out
I’m in South Africa this month doing some work, so I haven’t had time to post quite as often as usual. In the meantime, I will share a few photos as I go. Mo...
Open 3-d archive of Kromdraai
A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution by Matthew Skinner and colleagues Skinner:Kromdraai:2013 announces the new availability of an open archive of m...
Early Stone Age hafted spear points from South Africa
This week in Science, Jayne Wilkins and colleagues report on part of the lithic assemblage from Kathu Pan, South Africa, which includes 210 points Wilkins:ha...
A Taung tour
The South African Palaeocave Survey has a new post reporting on a visit to the Taung site: “Taung Heritage Site: 17 June 2012”
Chris Henshilwood profile
Nature News has an article written by Jeff Tollefson, which profiles archaeologist Chris Henshilwood and his work at Blombos, South Africa: “Human evolution:...
Taung
The face, mandible and endocast from Taung, South Africa, was the first australopithecine fossil to be discovered. We now know that the fossil dates to the p...
Blombos pigment workshop
I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I’ve forgotten about paleoanthropology lately. Let’s just say that the Neandertal and Denisova genomes hav...
A look at Little Foot
Along with the papers on the Malapa hominins, Science this week published a news story by Michael Balter that is a profile of Ron Clarke and his work on the ...
Variation in talus morphology shows the sample
This is the kind of thing I never get tired of: Figure S7 from the supplement of the Malapa foot paper by Bernhard Zipfel and colleagues Zipfel:Malapa:2011.
Synchotron illustration
In the supplement of Kristian Carlson and colleagues’ paper on the MH1 endocast Carlson:Malapa:2011, there’s a nice comparison of the medical CT versus synch...
The Malapa Soft Tissue Project FAQ
These are a few of the questions that I think are essential to understand our aims with the project and how we expect it will unfold. The future depends on w...
Announcing the Malapa Soft Tissue Project
I am pleased to announce a new open science initiative, focused on a discovery that is unique in paleoanthropology. Together we are going to find out if the ...
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...
A visit to Malapa
I’m visiting at the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand this week. Lee Berger has been a really wonderful host and among other t...
MSA ochre "factory"
Jennifer Viegas covers the recent discoveries at Sibudu Cave, South Africa: “Stone Age color, glue ‘factory’ found”.
Malapa MH 1 fossil given nickname
They held a contest for schoolchildren to give a nickname to the new MH 1 skeleton, and now they’ve made a choice:
Mailbag: Fire starters
Regarding the use of fire, Ive always been intrigued by how early Homo was able to continue its trek northward (ex. Dmanisi) without it. It would seem that a...
Malapa and the "problem" skull KNM-ER 1813
The announcement of the Malapa skeletons has many of us going back to descriptions of early Homo. After the paper by Berger and colleagues came out last mont...
Malapa synchotronic
More on the scanning of the MH1 skull in this press release: “First studies of fossil of new human ancestor take place at the European Synchrotron”
Malapa news
A story about Malapa in the Times of South Africa gives just a few more details about the discovery of the infant remains near the two reported skeletons: “B...
Malapa pictures
National Geographic, as you might expect, has some nice pictures of the MH1 skull in a news story: “Pictures: New human ancestor fossils found”. There’s one ...
Malapa embargo story
Ivan Oransky writes “Embargo Watch”, which reports on issues related to journal embargoes and science reporting. His story about the Malapa embargo “break” l...
What, if anything, is Australopithecus sediba?
Today we finally get to learn about the exceptional discovery of four partial hominin skeletons from Malapa Cave, South Africa. Two of the fossil skeletons a...
Malapa surfacing
Richard Gray of The Telegraph has a story about the upcoming Malapa hominin announcement: “Missing link between man and apes found”
Is there a common coding variant of FOXP2 in southern Africa?
Today I was looking through the online data files for the South African genome. Those online files are available from the Data Libraries entry of the Galaxy ...
A Sterkfontein visit
After this week’s description of the new public accessibility of the Dmanisi site, a reader sends a link to a tour of Sterkfontein by The Guardian’s David Sm...
Return of the "amazing" Boskops
Oh, good grief!
A virtual walk into the past
Via a reader:
Middle Stone Age bed and breakfast
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
Sterkfontein news
My Google alerts have been going off the last couple of days about Sterkfontein. I know nothing about any new discoveries, but the Times (South Africa) has r...
Paleoclimate in southern Africa
The Tswaing Crater is around 40 km from Pretoria, South Africa. It was created by an asteroid impact some 200,000 years ago, which released roughly the energ...
There's Stone Age, and then there's….
Another chapter for Man the Hunted: 200,000-odd year old human hairs in hyena feces.
Dating of Howieson's Poort and Still Bay industries
Zenobia Jacobs and colleagues have a paper in this week’s Science that provides age estimates for two of the MSA industries of Southern Africa: the Howieson’...
Body size in Holocene southern Africa
I was just taking notes on this paper by Sealy and Pfeiffer (2000), and found some good quotes about body size in the Bushmen, both historically and in arch...