In 2012, a team of French researchers began systematic excavation of a known Neandertal site in the coastal community of Le Rozel.  The site had been studied previously and known primarily as an occupation, a place where the remains of a hearth, stone tools, and animal bones had been excavated.  Someone spent time here making … More On the trail of Neandertals!

In 1965, Harvard paleontologist Bryan Patterson discovered a hominin fossil elbow (specifically, a distal humerus fragment) in the Kanapoi region of Kenya, just west of the southern end of Lake Turkana.  Very little follow-up work was done until twenty-five years later, when Maeve Leakey organized digs in the area once again and uncovered fossils that … More A face for Australopithecus anamensis

The recent discovery of the Denisovan Xiahe mandible brings to mind the question of how the Denisovans compare to other hominin fossils.  In this image, we have replicas of six different hominin jaws to scale, and we can begin exploring the similarity and diversity of these ancient fossils. The Xiahe mandible appears bottom center with … More JAWS!

A new preprint on the Little Foot skull was posted today.  Interestingly, the article is written by Ron Clarke and Kathleen Kuman alone.  I’m used to seeing a long list of authors on most modern papers, so this one is a bit of a throwback.  The article fills in a few more details on the … More The Skull: Early lessons from Little Foot

The first papers describing the infamous Little Foot fossil have started appearing as preprints on bioRxiv. Pieces of Little Foot were originally discovered in 1994—just four bones of the left foot. A further search through the Silberberg Grotto in the Sterkfontein Cave eventually revealed parts of the rest of the skeleton in 1998.  Further excavation … More It’s a girl! Early lessons from Little Foot