Attention to the Unseen

Mindy Weisberger writes: Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are the sole surviving representatives of the human family tree, but we’re the last sentence in an evolutionary story that began approximately 6 million years ago and spawned at least 18 species known collectively as hominins. There were at least nine Homo species — including H. sapiens — distributed around Africa, Europe and Asia by about 300,000 years ago, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. One by one, all except H. sapiens disappeared. Neanderthals and a Homo group known as the Denisovans lived…

Read More Read More

Steven Mithen writes: We can only truly understand other people by knowing something about their language. Without that, we remain largely excluded from their lives – unable to fully grasp their concepts, emotions or how they perceive the world. This applies to people of the past as well as those of the present. The languages of some prehistoric humans (such as Bronze Age farmers) can be reconstructed, to a limited extent, by comparing languages that are spoken today. But what…

Read More Read More

Nature reports: Some 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals in western Eurasia acquired strange new neighbours: a wave of Homo sapiens migrants making their way out of Africa, en route to future global dominance. Now, a study of hundreds of ancient and modern genomes has pinpointed when the two species began pairing off — and has found that the genetic intermingling lasted for only a short time, at least on an evolutionary scale. The high-resolution analysis also allowed the authors to track…

Read More Read More

Discover magazine reports: Researchers have spent years grappling with the uncertain details of archaic humans’ first entry into Europe, but stone tools created about 1.4 million years ago may offer important insight. The tools were discovered at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, and have now considered the oldest known artifacts in Europe made by ancient humans. A team of archaeologists recently dated the tools and published their findings in Nature, delivering progress on critical questions about…

Read More Read More

Remains of the castle in Korolevo, close to the site. Катерина Байдужа/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA By John Jansen, Czech Academy of Sciences During warm periods in Earth’s history, known as interglacials, glaciers the size of continents pulled back to reveal new landscapes. These were new worlds for early humans to explore and exploit, and 1.4 million years ago this was Europe: a Terra nullius unoccupied by humans. Long before it emerged as the epicentre of global colonialism, Europe was itself…

Read More Read More

Discover magazine reports: Using tools seems like second nature for humans today, but our prehistoric ancestors didn’t acquire this practical skill set overnight. The timeline of stone tool development by humans has been rearranged by new research, shaking up traditional views about the evolution of ancient human ingenuity. The study, published in Nature Communications, suggests that humans went through a period of gradual cultural change after they started moving throughout Eurasia 50,000 years to 40,000 years ago. This new perspective…

Read More Read More

Live Science reports: Modern humans crossed the Alps into chilly Northern Europe about 45,000 years ago, meaning they may have coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe for thousands of years longer than experts previously thought, according to new research. The discovery — of 13 bone fragments belonging to Homo sapiens who occupied a cave in Germany between about 44,000 and 47,500 years ago — catalogs the oldest known H. sapiens remains from Central and Northwest Europe, the researchers said. The finding…

Read More Read More

April Nowell writes: The sun rises on the Palaeolithic, 14,000 years ago, and the glacial ice that once blanketed Europe continues its slow retreat. In the daylight, a family begins making its way toward a cave at the foot of a mountain near the Ligurian Sea, in northern Italy. They’re wandering across a steppe covered in short, dry grasses and pine trees. Ahead, the cave’s entrance is surrounded by a kaleidoscope of wildflowers: prickly pink thistles, red-brown mugworts, and purple…

Read More Read More