Becoming Human

In 1978, a team led by Mary Leakey uncovered several trackways of animal foot prints at a site in Tanzania called Laetoli. There were bird and other animal footprints but what caught everyone's attention were prints that appeared to be human. Some trackways containing the human foot prints were 60 feet in length, some were as short as 5 feet.

Two articles on middle and late Pleistocene incursions by Homo sapiens and earlier Hominins into what is now Saudi Arabia were published in the journal Nature on September 1.

A paper appearing in the journal  PNAS for August 17 of this year , authored by Pitch-Narti  et al  claims symbolic artwork by Neanderthals. The paper is in titled “The symbolic role of the underground world among Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals”.

A fascinating and well illustrated article appearing in the journal Nature this week examines the related questions of how long ago  our ancestors began to count material objects and weather, through linguistics, we can determine the origins of commonality in counting (quantification).