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 Swartkrans
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...
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...
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...
Mandibles of early Homo and robust australopithecines
For anthropologists, Africa was a point of exceptional diversity between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago. In both East and South Africa, the fossil recor...
Mandibles of early Homo and robust australopithecines
For anthropologists, Africa was a point of exceptional diversity between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago. In both East and South Africa, the fossil recor...
Aging juvenile fossil hominins
The fossil record is not made up only of adults. We have abundant skeletal evidence from juvenile individuals of a broad range of ages. At this station you w...
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...
Did humans colonize the northern latitudes without fire?
Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa Roebroeks:Villa:2011 review the evidence for human control and use of fire in the archaeology of Europe during the Middle Pleis...
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...
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...
(Best) forgotten tales of paleoanthropology, 1
The New York Times has given over free access to its e-archives, normally behind the "Times Select" paywall. It is a great opportunity to institute a new se...
Snapshots of the science
The new Human Origins hall at the American Museum is the occasion for a big Newsweek story, with the tagline, "The New Science of Human Evolution". Author S...
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...
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...
The Ultimate Survivor!
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
Age of hominids from Sterkfontein
A recent spate of articles has carried on a debate about the age of the Sterkfontein hominids. Sterkfontein is a complicated site, including several distinc...
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...