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Category: Anthropology

Why are there so many humans?

Why are there so many humans?

By Karen L. Kramer, Sapiens, June 9, 2020 Something curious happened in human population history over the last 1 million years. First, our numbers fell to as low as 18,500, and our ancestors were more endangered than chimpanzees and gorillas. Then we bounced back to extraordinary levels, far surpassing the other great apes. Today the total population of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans is estimated to be only around 500,000, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Many species are critically…

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Fossil find suggests Homo erectus emerged 200,000 years earlier than thought

Fossil find suggests Homo erectus emerged 200,000 years earlier than thought

The ~2 Ma Homo erectus cranium, DNH 134, from the Drimolen Fossil Hominin site. Matthew V. Caruana Stephanie Baker, University of Johannesburg; Angeline Leece; Jesse Martin, La Trobe University; Matthew Caruana, University of Johannesburg; Prof. Andy I.R. Herries, La Trobe University, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University The human evolutionary path is complicated. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when we modern humans became “us”. This quandary is best articulated by the famous naturalist Charles Darwin in his book The…

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Why are we losing the wayfinding skills of our ancestors?

Why are we losing the wayfinding skills of our ancestors?

Michael Bond writes: On Dartmoor, in southwest England, search and rescue volunteers are regularly called out to look for people who have lost their way in the boundless wilderness. A significant proportion are Alzheimer’s patients who have wandered away from one of the many care homes on the fringes of the moor. The volunteers have noticed that Alzheimer’s patients move in a particular way across the open spaces: usually in a straight line. So resolutely do they stick to their…

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65,000-year-old plant remains show the earliest Australians spent plenty of time cooking

65,000-year-old plant remains show the earliest Australians spent plenty of time cooking

Researchers May Nango, Djaykuk Djandjomerr and S. Anna Florin collecting plants in Kakadu National Park. Reproduced with permission of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation. Elspeth Hayes, Author provided By S. Anna Florin, The University of Queensland; Andrew Fairbairn, The University of Queensland, and Chris Clarkson, The University of Queensland Australia’s first people ate a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and other plant foods, many of which would have taken considerable time and knowledge to prepare, according to our analysis of charred…

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Scientists find evidence of ‘ghost population’ of ancient humans

Scientists find evidence of ‘ghost population’ of ancient humans

The Guardian reports: Scientists have found evidence for a mysterious “ghost population” of ancient humans that lived in Africa about half a million years ago and whose genes live on in people today. Traces of the unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations and found that up to a fifth of their DNA appeared to have come from the missing relatives. Geneticists suspect that the ancestors of modern west Africans interbred with the yet-to-be-discovered archaic humans…

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Were Neanderthals more than cousins to Homo sapiens?

Were Neanderthals more than cousins to Homo sapiens?

By Josie Glausiusz Around 200,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, a small band of tech-savvy humans dragged home and dismembered a bounty of wildlife. Using exquisitely pointed flint spearheads and blades, they hunted and butchered myriad prey, including gazelles, deer, and now-extinct aurochs, the ancestors of modern cattle. In the cool, humid climate of the coastal plain, these early Homo sapiens foraged for acorns in nearby forests of oak, olive, and pistachio. They ate the saline leaves…

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Stone tools reveal epic trek of nomadic Neanderthals

Stone tools reveal epic trek of nomadic Neanderthals

Neanderthal hunting grounds in southern Siberia — the Charysh River valley, with Chagyrskaya Cave in the centre of the photo. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided By Kseniya Kolobova, Russian Academy of Sciences; Maciej T. Krajcarz, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, University of Wollongong Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) fossils were first discovered in western Europe in the mid nineteenth century. That was just the first in a…

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How smart were our ancestors? Turns out the answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow

How smart were our ancestors? Turns out the answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow

Skulls hold clues to intelligence. (Clockwise from left: Australopithecus, orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee) Roger Seymour, Author provided By Roger S. Seymour, University of Adelaide How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological digs, evidence of the use of fire and so on, and changes in brain size measured from fossil skulls. However, working with colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, we…

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How Margaret Mead became a hate figure for conservatives

How Margaret Mead became a hate figure for conservatives

Sam Dresser writes: The explosively curious and acerbic Margaret Mead was born in 1901 and brought up by a tough academic family in Pennsylvania. After a childhood dotted with melancholy, her purpose in life – anthropology – emerged in her undergraduate years at Barnard College in New York City. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1920s, she fell under the sway of Franz Boas. The moustachioed polymath was born in Germany and defined American anthropology. It was…

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How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation

How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilisation

Wikimedia Commons/Cloudordinary, CC BY-SA By Nick Longrich, University of Bath Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago. For 95% of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting…

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Ape study suggests urge to dance is prehuman

Ape study suggests urge to dance is prehuman

The Guardian reports: Akira stands up and sways about. Pal is big on clapping. Ai is into tapping her foot, while Gon bangs and slaps the walls. Not the latest teen band sensation, but a spectacle far more impressive: the moves of a group of chimpanzees that scientists believe shed light on the prehistoric origins of human dancing. The researchers in Kyoto filmed the chimps performing the movements in a music booth attached to their enclosure where the apes could…

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A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years

A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years

A genetic “clock” lets scientists estimate how long extinct creatures lived. Wooly mammoths could expect around 60 years. Australian Museum By Benjamin Mayne, CSIRO Humans have a “natural” lifespan of around 38 years, according to a new method we have developed for estimating the lifespans of different species by analysing their DNA. Extrapolating from genetic studies of species with known lifespans, we found that the extinct woolly mammoth probably lived around 60 years and bowhead whales can expect to enjoy…

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The anatomical ability to speak evolved millions of years before the rise of Homo sapiens

The anatomical ability to speak evolved millions of years before the rise of Homo sapiens

Baboons make sounds, but how does it relate to human speech? Creative Wrights/Shutterstock.com By Thomas R. Sawallis, University of Alabama and Louis-Jean Boë, Université Grenoble Alpes Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either. Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they’re fully formed, made up of words, sentences and grammar carried from one person to another by speech sounds, like any of the perhaps 6,000 languages spoken…

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More than 140 Nazca Lines discovered in Peruvian desert

More than 140 Nazca Lines discovered in Peruvian desert

The New York Times reports: A huge carving of a monkey with its tail twirled in a spiral; vast, geometric images of a condor and a hummingbird; an immense spider — the 2,000-year-old Nazca Lines in Peru have awed and mystified modern viewers since they were first seen from the air last century. Now, 143 more images have been discovered, etched into a coastal desert plain about 250 miles southeast of Lima, the Peruvian capital. The Japanese researchers who found…

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Neanderthal legs and feet — suited to sprinting

Neanderthal legs and feet — suited to sprinting

By Anna Goldfield If you’re like me, you view long-distance running as a somewhat unrealistic aspiration and see those people who do it well as remarkable creatures. The truth, though, is that Homo sapiens are well-designed for loping along for long distances across open landscapes—especially when compared to Neanderthals. They had legs and feet that, recent research suggests, were better suited to sprinting, squatting, and hilly hiking than to running. Unlike the open African plains in which H. sapiens lived…

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Humans, the outlier primates, xenophobic one minute, tolerant the next

Humans, the outlier primates, xenophobic one minute, tolerant the next

By Christian Jarrett Whether they are proposing to build a wall or to exit an international coalition, populist politicians like to pitch themselves as keeping ‘outsiders’ at bay, and it clearly strikes a chord with their home crowd. To understand this phenomenon, evolutionary and social psychologists have offered a simple explanation. Humans, we’re told, have a deep-rooted inclination to mistrust ‘the other’ – people who do not belong to our community or ingroup. Classic work published in 1970 by the…

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