Becoming Human

Plio-Pleistocene artifacts have been found in Algeria, according to a paper in the journal Science this week. Heretofore, late Pliocene-early Pleistocene stone tools were known from East Africa exclusively.  In a paper headed “1.9-million- and 2.4-million-year-old artifacts and stone tool–cutmarked bones from Ain Boucherit, Algeria”, Sahnouni et, al. disclose their findings.

Widespread cranial injuries characterized both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans and thus are not unique to American football, a study in the journal Nature concludes.

Cueva de los Aviones is a cave system in  Spain in which have been found  decorated sea shells. These have been dated to 115,000 years ago and are attributed to he Neanderthal occupiers of the site, it was announced in the journal Science Advances of 22 February 2018.

Dating was  accomplished by Uranium series technology.

A paper appearing in the journal Nature this week announces the discovery of figurative cave art dated to  approximately 40,000 years ago. In addition there was also found a hand stencil (the outline of a human hand) dated to 51,000 years ago. These are the earliest finds of figurative rock art, according to the authors of the paper, M. Albert et al.

Last January we reported the discovery of a maxilla found in Israel which placed the arrival of Homo sapiens in Israel, out of Africa, 50,000 years earlier than understood from earlier evidence.  Our report read, “Previously scientists postulated the earliest  Homo sapiens emerged from Africa into the Levant was 120,

A scientific paper and accompanying commentary in the July 11 issue of the journal Nature report the discovery in southern China of stone tools dated to 2.1 million years ago. For many years the oldest evidence of human ancestors outside of Africa were found at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia and dated around 1.8 million years ago (mya).

In the journal Science this week, staff writer John Cohen, in a repoort entitled "Neanderthal brain organoids come to life",  summarizes work being done on replicating Neanderthal brains, on an  extremely small scale, at two research labs. Quoting from the article,

Three weeks ago in the journal Nature, researchers Mauriucio Gonzales-Fiorero and Andy Gardner proposed”… a metabolic approach that enables causal assessment of social hypotheses for brain-size evolution.”: The abstract of the authors’ paper states:

With increasing frequency in recent years, our primer on stone tool technology, Early Craftsmanship, was viewable on fewer platforms. A no longer suppoortted plug in was required. We have rewritten this feature in html5 and once again it plays on all platforms, all browsers. Check it out.

In the journal Science this week is an announcement of a new fossil find from Israel. What makes this find so interesting is that it is attributed to an early version of Homo sapiens and dated at least 50,000 years earlier than the first members of our species left Africa