Attention to the Unseen

The Observer reports: It took three separate waves of modern humans to colonise Europe between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago. That is the key conclusion of scientists who have been studying caves in the Rhone valley where they have discovered evidence that Homo sapiens had to make a trio of determined attempts to head westwards and northwards from western Asia before they could establish themselves in the continent. “The first two of these waves failed but the third succeeded around…

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Nature reports: In 2010, researchers published the first genome sequence from an ancient human, using tufts of hair from a man who lived around 4,000 years ago in Greenland. In the 13 years since, scientists have generated genome data from more than 10,000 ancient people — and there’s no sign of a slowdown. “I feel truly gobsmacked that we have gotten to this point,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. His team maintains…

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Reuters reports: Europe was no balmy paradise during the Ice Age, with the vast glaciers that blanketed large parts of the continent rendering wide swathes inhospitable for humans. But our species – a new immigrant to Europe – endured, though with great hardship. Researchers on Wednesday unveiled an analysis of genome data from 356 hunter-gatherers who lived in the region between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago, a span that included the Ice Age’s coldest interval between 25,000 and 19,000 years…

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Jeremy DeSilva writes: Long before our ancestors evolved large brains and language, even before they tamed fire or made stone tools, they started doing something no mammal had done before: walking on two legs. Skeletal adaptations for traveling upright are evident in fossils of the very oldest hominins—members of the human family—which date to between seven million and five million years ago. Moving on two legs rather than four set the stage for subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage. It…

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Neanderthal skull. Petr Student/Shutterstock By Stephen Wroe, University of New England; Gabriele Sansalone, Institute of Marine Sciences, and Pasquale Raia, University of Naples Federico II Many believe our particularly large brain is what makes us human – but is there more to it? The brain’s shape, as well as the shapes of its component parts (lobes) may also be important. Results of a study we published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution show that the way the different parts of…

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Newsweek reports: Nearly 40,000 years after disappearing from the planet, Neanderthals are having a moment. In recent years, tantalizing new evidence suggests that our primitive, heavy-browed cousins were chefs, jewelry-makers and painters. And what we are learning from the genetic clues they left behind—and the promise of what those clues will tell us about ourselves in the years ahead—won Swedish paleo-geneticist Svante Pääbo the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology this fall. The most recent discoveries, un-earthed in a…

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Jennifer Raff writes: The debate over how people first arrived in the Western Hemisphere continues to roil archaeology in the United States – and to capture public attention. Today, the scientific community is contending with significant amounts of new genetic and archaeological data, and it can be overwhelming and even contradictory. These data are coming from new archaeological excavations but also from the application of newly developed tools to re-analyse prior sites and artefacts. They’re coming from newly sequenced genomes…

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