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Category: Anthropology

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

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Ann Gibbons writes: Neanderthals are still among us, Janet Kelso realized 8 years ago. She had helped make the momentous discovery that Neanderthals repeatedly mated with the ancestors of modern humans—a finding that implies people outside of Africa still carry Neanderthal DNA today. Ever since then, Kelso has wondered exactly what modern humans got from those prehistoric liaisons—beyond babies. How do traces of the Neanderthal within shape the appearance, health, or personalities of living people? For years, evolutionary biologists couldn’t…

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Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

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Tim Flannery writes: According to Thor Hanson’s Buzz, the relationship between bees and the human lineage goes back three million years, to a time when our ancestors shared the African savannah with a small, brownish, robin-sized bird—the first honeyguide. Honeyguides are very good at locating beehives, but they are unable to break into them to feed on the bee larvae and beeswax they eat. So they recruit humans to help, attracting them with a call and leading them to the…

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What teeth can tell about the lives and environments of ancient humans and Neanderthals

What teeth can tell about the lives and environments of ancient humans and Neanderthals

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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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Is cyclical time the cure to technology’s ills?

Is cyclical time the cure to technology’s ills?

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Stephen E. Nash writes: The world changed dramatically on June 29, 2007. That’s the day when the iPhone first became available to the public. In the 11 years since, more than 8.5 billion smartphones of all makes and models have been sold worldwide. Smartphone technology has allowed billions of people to enter and participate in a new, cybernetic, and ever more complex and rapid relationship with the world. Humans have been tumbling headlong into this new digital frontier for a…

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The myth of the traumatized Neanderthal

The myth of the traumatized Neanderthal

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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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In cave in Borneo jungle, scientists find oldest figurative painting in the world

In cave in Borneo jungle, scientists find oldest figurative painting in the world

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The New York Times reports: On the wall of a cave deep in the jungles of Borneo, there is an image of a thick-bodied, spindly-legged animal, drawn in reddish ocher. It may be a crude image. But it also is more than 40,000 years old, scientists reported on Wednesday, making this the oldest figurative art in the world. Until now, the oldest known human-made figures were ivory sculptures found in Germany. Scientists have estimated that those figurines — of horses,…

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When human relatives first visited a green Arabian peninsula

When human relatives first visited a green Arabian peninsula

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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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South Africa’s Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human

South Africa’s Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human

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The drawing found on silcrete stone in Blombos Cave. Craig Foster By Christopher Henshilwood, University of Bergen and Karen Loise van Niekerk, University of Bergen Scientists working in Blombos Cave in South Africa’s southern Cape region have made a discovery that changes our understanding of when our human ancestors started expressing themselves through drawings. They’ve found a 73 000-year-old cross-hatched drawing on a silcrete (stone) flake. It was made with an ochre crayon. The Conversation Africa asked Professor Christopher Henshilwood,…

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Seeking human generosity’s origins in an ape’s gift to another ape

Seeking human generosity’s origins in an ape’s gift to another ape

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Carl Zimmer writes: How generous is an ape? It’s a hard question for scientists to tackle, but the answer could tell us a lot about ourselves. People in every culture can be generous, whether they’re loaning a cellphone to an office mate or sharing an antelope haunch with a hungry family. While it’s easy to dwell on our capacity for war and violence, scientists see our generosity as a remarkable feature of our species. “One of the things that stands…

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Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money

Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money

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Bruce Bower writes: Wherever you go, money talks. And it has for a long time. Sadly, though, money has been mum about its origins. For such a central element of our lives, money’s ancient roots and the reasons for its invention are unclear. As cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin multiply into a flock of digital apparitions, researchers are still battling over how and where money came to be. And some draw fascinating parallels between the latest, buzzworthy cryptocurrencies, which require only…

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The new story of humanity’s origins in Africa

The new story of humanity’s origins in Africa

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Ed Yong writes: There is a decades-old origin story for our species, in which we descended from a group of hominids who lived somewhere in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Some scientists have placed that origin in East Africa; others championed a southern birthplace. In either case, the narrative always begins in one spot. Those ancestral hominids, probably Homo heidelbergensis, slowly accumulated the characteristic features of our species—the rounded skull, small face, prominent chin, advanced tools, and sophisticated culture. From…

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Music: Jon Hassell — ‘Dream Theory’

Music: Jon Hassell — ‘Dream Theory’

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  Jon Hassell: “Dream Theory in Malaya is titled after a paper by a visionary anthropologist, Kilton Stewart, who in 1935 visited a remarkable highland tribe of Malayan aborigines, the Senoi, whose happiness and well-being were linked to their morning custom of family dream-telling—where a child’s fearful dream of falling was praised as a gift to learn to fly the next night and where a dream-song or dance was taught to a neighboring tribe to create a common bond beyond…

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Tiny brains of extinct human relative had complex features

Tiny brains of extinct human relative had complex features

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The New York Times reports: What makes humans so smart? For a long time the answer was simple: our big brains. But new research into the tiny noggins of a recently discovered human relative called Homo naledi may challenge that notion. The findings, published Monday, suggest that when it comes to developing complex brains, size isn’t all that matters. In 2013 scientists excavating a cave in South Africa found remains of Homo naledi, an extinct hominin now thought to have…

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Warning signs: how early humans first began to paint animals

Warning signs: how early humans first began to paint animals

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Painting from El Castillo cave (Cantabria, Spain). Early Upper Palaeolithic or older. Photo Becky Harrison and courtesy Gobierno de Cantabria., Author provided By Derek Hodgson, University of York and Paul Pettitt, Durham University Visual culture – and the associated forms of symbolic communication, are regarded by palaeo-anthropologists as perhaps the defining characteristic of the behaviour of Homo sapiens. One of the great mysteries of archaeology is why figurative art, in the form of the stunningly naturalistic animal depictions, appeared relatively…

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China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

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By Bill Laurance, James Cook University The plan to build a massive hydropower dam in Sumatra as part of China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative threatens the habitat of the rarest ape in the world, which has only 800 remaining members. This is merely the beginning of an avalanche of environmental crises and broader social and economic risks that will be provoked by the BRI scheme. Read more: How we discovered a new species of orangutan in northern Sumatra The…

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