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Category: Anthropology

Seven-million-year-old femur suggests ancient human relative walked upright

Seven-million-year-old femur suggests ancient human relative walked upright

Nature reports: A battered fossil leg bone discovered more than 20 years ago in Chad is finally making its scientific debut. Researchers say that the remains, described today in Nature, show that a species called Sahelanthropus tchadensis was an ancient human relative that walked on two feet. At seven million years old, S. tchadensis is a candidate for the earliest known member of the hominin lineage — the evolutionary branch that leads from the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees…

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Revelations from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution

Revelations from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution

Fossilised jaws from the 17 million-year-old Kenyan ape Afropithecus turkanensis. Tanya M. Smith/National Museums of Kenya, Author provided By Tanya M. Smith, Griffith University and Daniel Green, Columbia University The timing and intensity of the seasons shapes life all around us, including tool use by birds, the evolutionary diversification of giraffes, and the behaviour of our close primate relatives. Some scientists suggest early humans and their ancestors also evolved due to rapid changes in their environment, but the physical evidence…

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The Five-Million-Year Odyssey reveals how migration shaped humankind

The Five-Million-Year Odyssey reveals how migration shaped humankind

Bruce Bower writes: Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey wended from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For more than 50 years, he has studied how humans settled islands from Southeast Asia to Polynesia. So it’s fitting that his new book, a plain-English summary of what’s known and what’s not about the evolution of humans and our ancestors, emphasizes movement. In The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Bellwood examines a parade of species in…

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The problems of seeing evolution as a ‘March of Progress’

The problems of seeing evolution as a ‘March of Progress’

Alexander Werth writes: Herschel Walker, the former football star–turned–U.S. Senate candidate from Georgia, made headlines when he recently asked at a church-based campaign stop, if evolution is true, “Why are there still apes?” This chestnut continues to be echoed by creationists, despite being definitively debunked. Anthropologists have repeatedly explained that modern humans did not evolve from apes; rather, both evolved from a shared ancestor that fossil and DNA evidence indicates lived 7 to 13 million years ago. But Walker’s question…

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Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Science News reports: A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a crucial step in human evolution. It’s what we’re missing that makes the difference. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in our larynx, or voice box, that vibrate to produce sound. But unlike all other studied primates, humans don’t have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal…

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What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

By Sarah Ives, SAPIENS Vivian,* a Washington, D.C.–based art curator, realized she had COVID-19 in December 2020. “I bought a tree, and I brought it home,” she recalls. “And I thought, This tree has no smell. What did they sell me? Is this a bad tree?” For Vivian, the moment involved more than frustration about a “bad tree.” Her loss of smell left her unable to conjure memories and even affected her sense of self. “That Christmas was really hard,”…

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Earliest Pacific seafarers were matrilocal society, study suggests

Earliest Pacific seafarers were matrilocal society, study suggests

The Guardian reports: The world’s earliest seafarers who set out to colonise remote Pacific islands nearly 3,000 years ago were a matrilocal society with communities organised around the female lineage, analysis of ancient DNA suggests. The research, based on genetic sequencing of 164 ancient individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, suggested that some of the earliest inhabitants of islands in Oceania had population structures in which women almost always remained in their communities after marriage, while men left their…

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We are creatures of tropical jungles as much as the savannah

We are creatures of tropical jungles as much as the savannah

Patrick Roberts writes: In a sweltering tropical rainforest on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I started to appreciate why archaeologists and anthropologists had long ignored ‘jungles’ in their search for humanity’s origins. The mosquitoes, leeches, harsh terrain and difficult footing were bad enough, but now a summer monsoon downpour was rapidly approaching. As we slogged on under a canopy of green, the forest grew quiet. The usual chattering life had been smart enough to seek shelter,…

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Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

By Gideon Lasco, SAPIENS According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee. Mead proceeded to explain, as the story goes, that wounded…

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65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

65,000-year-old ‘stone Swiss Army knives’ show early humans had long-distance social networks

Paloma de la Peña, Author provided By Amy Mosig Way, Australian Museum Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the world – from the icesheets to the deserts, rainforests to savannahs. As individuals we are rather puny, but when we are socially connected, we are the most dominant species on the planet. New evidence from stone tools in southern Africa shows these social connections were stronger and wider than we had thought among our ancestors…

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Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

BBC Future reports: Your ancestors had bigger brains than you. Several thousand years ago, humans reached a milestone in their history – the first known complex civilisations began to emerge. The people walking around and meeting in the world’s earliest cities would have been familiar in many ways to modern urbanites today. But since then, human brains have actually shrunk slightly. The lost volume, on average, would be roughly equivalent to that of four ping pong balls, says Jeremy DeSilva,…

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The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

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Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration

Nature reports: A colossal simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate provides evidence that temperature and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration — and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago. The finding is one of many to come out of the largest model so far to investigate how changes in Earth’s movement have influenced climate and human evolution, published in Nature today. “This is another brick in the…

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New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories

New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories

The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia. Ludovic Slimak, CC BY-ND By Ludovic Slimak, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès; Clément Zanolli, Université de Bordeaux; Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York), and Laure Metz, University of Connecticut Perched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It’s a strategic point…

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Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africa

Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africa

The Guardian reports: Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa. But unlike its modern electronic equivalent, this ancient web of social bonds used a far more prosaic medium. It relied on the sharing and trading of beads made of ostrich eggshells – one of humanity’s oldest forms of personal adornment. The research by scientists in Germany involved the study of more than…

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How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

Clovis spearheads. wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Nicholas R. Longrich, University of Bath For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes, beads and bows appeared. This technological revolution wasn’t the work of one people….

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