Attention to the Unseen

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…

Read More Read More

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,…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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,…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

Science News reports: Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian Homo species such as Neandertals has come under increasing fire over the last decade. Research this year supported an alternative scenario in which H. sapiens evolved across vast geographic expanses, first within Africa and later outside it. The process would have worked as follows: Many Homo groups…

Read More Read More

Dawid A. Iurino for THOR, Author provided By Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Sally Christine Reynolds, Bournemouth University A collection of fossil footprints at Laetoli in Northern Tanzania, preserved in volcanic ash and dated to 3.66 million years ago, are still yielding surprises almost 45 years after their discovery. Based on a re-analysis of fossil footprints from one of Laetoli’s sites, the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature say they’ve discovered evidence of a previously…

Read More Read More

Robin McKie writes: Modern humans made several failed attempts to settle in Europe before eventually taking over the continent. This is the stark conclusion of scientists who have been studying the course of Homo sapiens’s exodus from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Researchers have recently pinpointed sites in Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic where our ancestors’ remains have been dated as being between 40,000 to 50,000 years old. However, bone analyses have produced genetic profiles that have…

Read More Read More

SciTechDaily reports: An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg paleoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans. The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our…

Read More Read More