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 (credit: Talamo et al. 2021) While our species was spreading across Eurasia and briefly sharing a continent with the last of the Neanderthals, someone took the time to carefully shape an oval pendant out of mammoth ivory, then decorated it with a looping dotted line. The pendant, unearthed at Stajnia Cave in Poland, was […]
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 / 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: 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: Mohammad Javad Shoaee) 78,000 years ago, a child died two to three years into their life in the coastal highlands of what is now Kenya. Archaeological evidence suggests that survivors wrapped the small body tightly before laying it, curled on one side with the tiny head resting on a pillow, in a carefully […]
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 […]