Enlarge (credit: Slimak et al. 2022) According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species […]
Enlarge (credit: Barash et al 2022) When the first members of our species ventured out of Africa, they walked into a world that earlier hominins, such as Homo erectus, had first explored a million years earlier. According to a recent study of a 1 . 5 million-year-old vertebra, those earlier hominins may have expanded beyond […]
Enlarge (credit: Vidal et al 2022) The oldest known Homo sapiens fossil is about 36,000 years older than previously thought, according to a recent study. Volcanologists matched a layer of ash above the fossil skull to an eruption of southern Ethiopia’s Shala volcano 233,000 years ago. Their findings seem to line up well with other […]
Enlarge / A human relative left these five tracks in a 3. 6 million-year-old layer of sediment at the Laetoli Fossil site in Tanzania. (credit: McNutt et al. 2021) The first evidence of human relatives walking on two feet comes from about 70 footprints left by at least two Australopithecus afarensis walking across soft volcanic […]
Enlarge / The Harbin skull (left) and the Dali skull (right). (credit: Ni et al. 2021) The reported discovery of a new hominin species from China created a lot of buzz last week. Its discoverers—paleoanthropologists Xijun Ni, Qiang Ji, Chris Stringer, and their colleagues—say that a skull discovered near Harbin, in northeast China, has a […]
Enlarge (credit: Italian Culture Ministry) Archaeologists in Italy recently unearthed the remains of at least nine Neanderthals in Guattari Cave, near the Tyrrhenian Sea about 100 km southeast of Rome. While excavating a previously unexplored section of the cave, archaeologists from the Archaeological Superintendency of Latina and the University of Tor Vergata recently unearthed broken skulls, […]
Enlarge (credit: Hajdinjak et al. 2020) DNA from the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe adds more detail to the story of our species’ expansion into Eurasia—and our complicated 5,000-year relationship with Neanderthals. The earliest traces of our species in Eurasia are a lower molar and a few fragments of bone from Bacho Kiro Cave in […]
Enlarge (credit: Blinkhorn et al. 2021) The entangled history of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in the Levant (the area around the eastern end of the Mediterranean) just got even more complicated. Paleoanthropologists recently identified a tooth from Shukbah Cave, 28km (17.5 miles) northwest of Jerusalem, as a Neanderthal molar. That makes Shukbah the southernmost trace […]
The versatility that helped humans take over the world emerged very early in our evolutionary history, according to sediments and stone tools from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Olduvai has provided some of the oldest known tools and fossils from our genus, Homo. A recent study lines that evidence up with environmental clues buried in the […]
Expand (charge: Stewart et al. 2020) Approximately 120,000 decades back, a couple of individuals walked along the shore of a shallow river at what is now northern Saudi Arabia. They left {} seven footprints in the sand, and now those paths would be the earliest known proof of the species’ existence in Arabia. A Pleistocene […]