Enlarge / This chert bladelet still has a remnant of its bone haft attached. (credit: Wang et al. 2022) We know the oldest human cultures only from their most durable parts: mostly stone tools, sometimes bone. Show an experienced Pleistocene archaeologist a chert blade, and they can probably tell you which hominin species made it, […]
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 / Neanderthals and Denisovans probably enjoyed the view from Denisova cave, too. (credit: flickr user: loronet) At various points in the last 300,000 years, Denisova Cave has sheltered three different species of hominins. But with fossils from only eight individuals—four Denisovans, three Neanderthals, and the daughter of a Neanderthal/Denisovan pairing—it’s hard to tell a […]
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 […]
Enlarge (credit: Luna) Dogs tagged along with the first humans to venture into the Americas, according to a recent study that analyzed existing collections of canine and human DNA. The results suggest that people domesticated dogs sometime before 23,000 years ago in Siberia, where isolated groups of wolves and people were struggling to survive the […]
Enlarge (credit: Brumm et al. 2021) A pig painted on the wall of an Indonesian cave is the world’s oldest figurative art—that is, it’s the oldest known drawing of something, rather than an abstract design or a stencil. The 45,500-year-old ocher painting depicts a Sulawesi warty pig, which appears to be watching a standoff between […]
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 […]