Attention to the Unseen

April Nowell writes: The sun rises on the Palaeolithic, 14,000 years ago, and the glacial ice that once blanketed Europe continues its slow retreat. In the daylight, a family begins making its way toward a cave at the foot of a mountain near the Ligurian Sea, in northern Italy. They’re wandering across a steppe covered in short, dry grasses and pine trees. Ahead, the cave’s entrance is surrounded by a kaleidoscope of wildflowers: prickly pink thistles, red-brown mugworts, and purple…

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Nature reports: A fossilized jawbone discovered in a cave in eastern China bears a curious mix of ancient and modern features, according to a detailed analysis that compares it with dozens of other human specimens. The finding, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, indicates that the 300,000-year-old bone could have belonged to an as-yet undescribed species of archaic human. Scientists excavating a cave called Hualongdong, located in Anhui province in eastern China, have unearthed remains of 16 individuals that…

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Live Science reports: Archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence yet of a wooden structure crafted by the hands of a human ancestor. Two tree trunks, notched like Lincoln Logs, were preserved at the bottom of the Kalambo River in Zambia. If the logs’ estimated 476,000-year-old age is correct, it means that woodworking might predate the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, and highlights the intelligence of our hominin ancestors. Archaeologists unearthed the logs at Kalambo Falls, on Lake Tanganyika…

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Michael Segalov writes: “We might not know much about Neanderthals,” [says Ludovic Slimak], “but through what they created, we can see something incredible. When you take Home Sapien tools made of flint, spanning tens of thousands of years, in different parts of the world, they’re always the same. Standardised. It can’t be cultural.” There was likely little contact between these different settlements. “There’s something innate within the behaviour of Homo Sapiens – within our behaviour – to act and think…

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Ars Technica reports: Multiple lines of evidence indicate that modern humans evolved within the last 200,000 years and spread out of Africa starting about 60,000 years ago. Before that, however, the details get a bit complicated. We’re still arguing about which ancestral population might have given rise to our lineage. Somewhere about 600,000 years ago, that lineage split off Neanderthals and Denisovans, and both of those lineages later interbred with modern humans after some of them left Africa. Figuring out…

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Live Science reports: An ape fossil found in Turkey may controversially suggest that the ancestors of African apes and humans first evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa, a research team says in a new study. The proposal breaks with the conventional view that hominines — the group that includes humans, the African apes (chimps, bonobos and gorillas) and their fossil ancestors — originated exclusively in Africa. However, the discovery of several hominine fossils in Europe and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey)…

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The New York Times reports: Of all the long-running disputes in archaeology, few roil scholars more than the question of when humans arrived in the Americas. For much of the past century, the reigning theory was that in or around 11,500 years ago big-game hunters from Asia trudged to North America across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait, hung a right through a corridor between glaciers and, in less than a millennium, reached the tip of South America. Over…

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Live Science reports: Since its discovery in 2008, the skeleton of a high-ranking individual buried inside a tomb in the Iberian Peninsula between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago was thought to be the remains of a man. However, a new analysis reveals that this person was actually a woman. Archaeologists in Spain dubbed the woman the “Ivory Lady” based on the bounty of grave goods found alongside her skeleton, including an ivory tusk surrounding her skull, flint, an ostrich eggshell,…

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Carl Zimmer reports: In 2015, scientists reported an astonishing discovery from deep inside a South African cave: more than 1,500 fossils of an ancient hominin species that had never been seen before. The creatures, named Homo naledi, were short, with long arms, curved fingers and a brain about one-third the size of a modern human’s. They lived around the time the first humans were roaming Africa. Now, after years of analyzing the surfaces and sediments of the elaborate underground cave,…

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Neanderthals were evolutionary cousins to our species, Homo sapiens. Chettaprin.P / Shutterstock By Bethan Linscott, University of Oxford The region of Estremadura in Portugal was home to a band of Neanderthals – an ancient evolutionary relative of modern humans – about 95,000 years ago. They made use of the patchwork of limestone caves, crags and river valleys, leaving traces of their activities in the form of stone tools, butchered animal bones and the remnants of fireplaces. Now their teeth are…

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