Attention to the Unseen

Melvin Konner writes: When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.” Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the…

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Scientific American reports: Deep in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia sits a very choice piece of real estate. It’s nothing so newfangled as a ski lodge or one of the traditional wood houses that dot the local countryside. Rather it’s a primeval limestone cave, called Denisova, that overlooks a rushing river and the surrounding forest. Multiple human species, or hominins, have sought shelter in this cave over the past 300,000 years, such is its allure. Artifacts, bits of bone…

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Science News reports: Dogs that lived alongside Middle Eastern villagers roughly 11,500 years ago may have helped to transform how those humans hunted, researchers say. Fragmentary canine bones unearthed at Shubayqa 6, an ancient site in northeastern Jordan, date to a time when remains of hares and other small prey at the outpost sharply increased, say zooarchaeologist Lisa Yeomans of the University of Copenhagen and her colleagues. Many animal bones from Shubayqa 6 also display damage caused by having been…

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Fossilised tooth crowns hold lots of information about past climates and life events. Tanya M Smith, Author provided By Tanya M. Smith, Griffith University Increasing variation in the climate has been implicated as a possible factor in the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens) 300,000 years ago, as well as the more recent demise of our enigmatic evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. But knowing the impact of that change on a year-by-year basis has always been a challenge. Most prehistoric climate…

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Ed Yong writes: The very first Neanderthal to be described in the scientific literature, back in 1856, had an old elbow injury—a fracture that had since healed, but had deformed the bone in the process. Such injuries turned out to be incredibly common. Almost every reasonably complete Neanderthal skeleton that was found during the subsequent century had at least one sign of physical trauma. Some researchers attributed these lesions to fights, others to attacks by predators. But whatever the precise…

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Nicholas St. Fleur reports: Buried in the Arabian desert’s sand are clues to the peninsula’s wetter, greener past. Fossils from long-extinct elephants, antelope and jaguars paint a prehistoric scene not of a barren wasteland, but of a flourishing savanna sprinkled with watering holes. Now, scientists have found what they think is evidence of the activities of early human relatives, who lived in this ancient landscape some 300,000 to 500,000 years ago. If the findings are confirmed, the stone flakes and…

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