Becoming Human

Field work beginning in 2002 in the Afar Depression (Ethiopia) culminated in an announcement three weeks ago of a new addition to the species Australopithecus afarensis.

For most of the twentieth century what we knew about human evolution derived from the finding and analysis of fossilized bone.  Reconstruction of bone fragments, comparison with previous finds and contemporary ape and human anatomy kept pushing our understanding of human origins deeper in time.  A dramatic example of this point was the 1974 discovery of AL-288-1, the partial Au.

A sixty percent complete, “first draft” of the Neanderthal genome has been prepared by scientists with the Max Planck Institute in Germany and there is evidence there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans about 80,000 years ago in the Levant.  This announcement appeared in the journal Science on May 8 and has had a mixed reception.

Two nearly complete skeletal fossils, one a juvenile male and the other an adult female, were found a year ago in South Africa and announced last month  in two articles in the journal Science.  Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist with University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg was mapping cave site near that city when his son Matthew, a short distance away with his dog, called out h

Some visitors to this website have difficulty with spoken English, either because they are hearing impaired or English is not their first language.  We have created transcripts so these visitors can more fully experience the Documentary narrated by Don Johanson.

The timeline on this website, The Human Lineage Through Time, added last September, is being expanded.  Starting this week and continuing through mid March, we will have an essay for each of the hominin species shown on the timeline.

Two months ago scientists announced that heat treatment -  controlled baking of stone in order to improve it as a raw material for shaping into tools - had far earlier origins than had been thought previously.  See the article "Heat Treatment Makes Better Stone Tools", below.  We now have video discussing heat treatment, or fire hardening.

The announcement from China of the discovery of tantalisingly few fossils raise the possibility Homo sapiens arrived in eastern Asia far earlier than first supposed.  These finds also revive the controversy surrounding two contending hypotheses of human evolution, the multi regional versus  African origin.

The discovery in Ethiopia during the course of 1992 to 1994 of fossils more than four million years old was finally revealed to the scientific world on October 2 of this year in a special edition of the journal Science.  Many thousands of pieces of fossilized bone were recovered,m reconstructed and shown to be the most complete, oldest specimen on the human lineage and named Ardipi

Two new books examine the evidence for evolution, each author approaching this timely and controversial subject from a slightly different perspective but each finding the evidence solid and irrefutable. Reviewer Laurence D.