Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
Charles Darwin, in Descent of Man (1871) pp. 51–52:
Sonia Harmand presented a talk at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting this week describing her team’s discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old co...
Notable paper: Solodenko N, Zupancich A, Cesaro SN, Marder O, Lemorini C, et al. (2015) Fat Residue and Use-Wear Found on Acheulian Biface and Scraper Associ...
Kristina Killgrove describes a great exercise in which she has her students prepare a whole dinner using only stone tools: “Hominin Iron Chef”.
I’m frankly amazed I didn’t link to this Nautilus article when it came out last year: “Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard”. In it, Amy Maxmen trave...
Notable paper: Eren MI, Roos CI, Story BA, von Cramon-Taubadel N, Lycett SJ. 2014. The role of raw material differences in stone tool shape variation: an exp...
New Scientist reports on Carol Ward’s presentation at the AAPA meetings, describing a new metacarpal of Homo erectus from West Turkana: “Stone tools helped s...
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. Sahnouni:2013. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with th...
I’m trying to figure out why Science this week has a “perspective” piece on the identification of cutmarks on archaeological bone. It’s a nice brief but lack...
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Re: australopithecine tools:
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...
A new paper is pushing back the time of initial occupation of Flores by hominins to at least 1.0 million years ago. Adam Brumm and colleagues (2010) are repo...
Scott and Gibert report in today’s Nature on the “oldest handaxes” in Europe:
Michael Balter writes about the work of Liverpool archaeologist Natalie Uomini, who is studying the evolution of handedness by experiment and attempting to f...
Ann Gibbons was at the AAPA meetings early last month, and she reports in the current Science on some of the research. Her article about the use of early Old...