Becoming Human

The "Cradle of Humankind" Northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa comprises a number of limestone cave localities named Kromdraai, Sterkfontein and Swartkrans.

In a paper authored by Zhang et al. and published in the journal Science on October 30, a research team reports the discovery of Denisovan mitochondrial DNA at 328o meters (10,760 feet)  altitude on the Tibetan Plateau.

Heat treatment is the process whereby our ancient ancestors, baked Stone to make the source material for stone tools better suited for the task at hand.

Astronomy and paleoanthropology are two branches of science that generally don’t intersect. But this fall, the Institute of Human Origins (IHO) at Arizona State University is launching a contest for U.S.

For students generally, and regardless of their particular field of interest, we urge folks to read  the contents of any recent edition of the journals Science or Nature. Even a passing glance makes clear the richness of current scientific investigation, the variety of fields in which investigation is active and the manifold backgrounds and interest of investigators.

Dr. Curtis Marean is foundation professor and assistant director at the Institute of Human Origins, School of human evolution and social change, at Arizona State University. He sends this report to becominghuman.org:

Until now the earliest encounters in Europe between members of our species, Homo sapiens, migrating out of Africa and Neanderthals was thought to have occurred around 45,000 years ago. See Earliest Neanderthal Encounters published on this website in 2015.

In 1921, a well preserved cranium was found at a mining site called Broken Hill  in what is now Zambia, then southern Rhodesia. The cranium was estimated to be half a million years old and was given a new species name, Homo rhodesiensis.

The side of Drimolem in South Africa has yielded a remarkable array of fossils, it was reported in the journal Science on April 3. The fossil crania found represent two genera, Paranthropus robustus (designated DNH 152) and Homo erectus (DNH 134); they have been dated to a tightly constrained 2.04 to 1.95 million years ago.

A paper published in the journal  Nature on January 22 deals with evidence far more recent than one usually finds on this website. DNA from four children, two of them buried 3000 years ago and two of them buried 8000 years ago, speak to human dispersal in sub Saharan Africa. These four individuals are most closely related to Bantu speaking people today.