Attention to the Unseen

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,…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

Shutterstock By Ray Tobler, Australian National University; Shane T Grey, Garvan Institute, and Yassine Souilmi, University of Adelaide Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, we have uncovered dozens of distinctive historical changes in the human genome to reveal a…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: Prehistoric humans in Europe might have been sitting round campfires built to toast snacks as early as 250,000 years ago – 50,000 years earlier than originally thought, researchers have suggested. Human species have a long association with fire, with some sites suggesting its controlled use dates back more than 700,000 years in Africa and the Middle East and at least 400,000 years in Europe. Now experts say they have found the earliest evidence in Europe for fires…

Read More Read More

Carl Zimmer reports: Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time. By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature. “There is no single birthplace,”…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More