Becoming Human

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

We received correspondence from Professor Roberto Macchiarelli (University of Poitiers) possibly shedding new light on Sahelanthropus tchadensis. a six million year old cranium and said to be the earliest known hominin. At the same time as the finding of the fragmented cranium in 2003, there were adjacent bone fragments including a femur.

Three weeks ago, in a brief NEWS article, we referred to an account in the journal  Nature concerning the discovery in Morocco of fossil remains attributed to Homo sapiens and dated to 315,000 years ago. We promised more news when available.

Announced yesterday in the journal Nature, fossils found in Morocco have been determined to be Homo sapiens and dated to 315,000 years ago. Until now, scientists understood the earliest evidence of our species came from East Africa and was no older then 200,000 years.

The earliest date for human occupation of the Western Hemisphere has a long history of controversy. The finding of distinctive Clovis points in New Mexico in 1931, together with other evidence and the endorsement of Louis Leakey, and dated to around 12-13,000 years ago, was widely accepted.

At last week’s AAPA meeting in New Orleans, a fresh analysis of the 2010 discovery named Au. sediba caused paleoanthropologist William H. Kimbel to conclude this fossil was not ancestral to the genus Homo. Kimbel is Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. AAPA is the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

A paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas in Austin hypothesizes Lucy died 3.2 million years ago  from injuries sustained after falling from a tree. In a paper published in the journal Nature this week, John Kappelman PhD and his team say CT scans of the original fossils indicate fractures consistent with a fall from a great height.

The existence of human ancestors on the island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago has been pushed back to approximately 700,000 years ago, it was announced in two papers appearing in Nature’s June 9th edition. The formal name of this species uncovered in 2004 is Homo floresiensis.

Broken stalagmites forming two circles within a deep cave in France are reported in the journal Nature this week and dated to 176,000 years ago. Stalagmites are limestone objects on the floors of caves, formed as limestone bearing water drips from the cave ceiling.