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
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!
In 2010, an international team of scientists announced a remarkable discovery from Denisova Cave in Siberia. A tiny fragment of a finger bone revealed DNA that was distinct from modern humans and from ancient Neandertal DNA. Further research revealed a handful of other fossils, mostly just teeth. The genome of these “Denisovans” matched sequences found mostly … More Denisovans step out of the shadows …very slightly
Southeast Asia has long been a location of great interest in the study of fossil hominins. The remains of the famous “Java man” were discovered at a site called Trinil in Java, Indonesia in 1891. Additional fossils were discovered at the nearby site of Sangiran, where the unusual geology preserved the remains of many ancient … More Asian Diversity and the Seafaring Hominin
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
