Almost twenty years ago, a team of scientists led by a French researcher published their description of a new fossil that they called Sahelanthropus. It was found in Chad, at a site in the southern Sahara known as Toros-Menalla. The big news was the skull, which we know always gets people excited. It was highly … More The Mysterious Missing Femur

A couple years back, my wife and I visited the beach, and I began to observe the quick erosion of footprints in the surf (because that’s what I do on the beach, that’s why).  Even the clearest prints were washed away in minutes as the surf kept pounding the sand.  It reminded me how ephemeral … More Tracking Hominins in the Great Rift Valley

…a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Ecc. 4:12) How smart is a Neandertal?  During the first half of the twentieth century, artists and experts emphasized an animalistic depiction, with pictures that practically equated them with gorillas.  Excavations at Shanidar, in Iraq, did a lot to change that public perception.  There, anthropologist Ralph Solecki and … More A cord of three strands

From now to March 22, visitors to the Perot Museum in Dallas have the opportunity to see something exceedingly rare in the United States: Two hominin skeletons from South Africa.  By a special arrangement with Wits University in Johannesburg, the remains of MH-1 (Australopithecus sediba) and LES1 (Homo naledi) are on display in a special … More Visiting the hominins in Dallas

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