Attention to the Unseen

Excavating the new trackway site, with footprints from hominins, birds and other animals visible in foreground. Neil Roach By Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Smithsonian Institution; Kevin Hatala, Chatham University, and Purity Kiura, National Museums of Kenya Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants in the lives of many different extinct organisms, back to the earliest…

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This finger bone discovered in Siberia in 2008 led to the original Denisovan discovery. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Linda Ongaro, Trinity College Dublin It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late 2000s. Thanks to advances in DNA analysis, this was all that was required for scientists to be able to identify an entirely new group of hominins, meaning upright primates on the same evolutionary branch as humans. Now known…

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Megan Scudellari and Mark Belan write: A surprising discovery about human evolution began with a research study about, surprisingly, birds. Five years ago, evolutionary biologist Laura van Holstein at the University of Cambridge read a study on the role of competition in songbird evolution. The work, from an international team of evolutionary biologists, found that competition between interacting species of songbirds—over food, mates, and territory—drove the evolution of new traits, such as beak shape, across long timescales and large distances…

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The Washington Post reports: For decades, scientists who studied early modern humans believed that our ancestors initially inhabited only small areas of Africa, the savannas of the eastern and southern part of the continent, and then moved north into Asia, Europe and beyond. In this view, early humans bypassed West and Central Africa, especially tropical forests. These areas, the argument went, were populated much later. But now, a growing group of researchers has cast doubt on this narrative. Working in…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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