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 (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 […]
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 […]