Becoming Human

A few years ago in South Africa spelunkers were exploring a cave near Johannesburg. Working their way through a series of smaller and larger spaces, they found themselves in a small chamber with a scattering of bones on the surface.  Thus began an intriguing search to discover the nature and significance of these bones.

Nicholas Wade has been staff writer for the Science page of the New York Times and in 2014 published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. Some of the author’s conclusions have raised controversy, prompting two scientists to publish a thorough and detailed rebuttal of what they see as errors in Wade’s attempt to suggest racial differences..

Successful interbreeding by Homo sapiens emerging from Africa with Neanderthals and Denisovans may have led to the acquisition of genes favorable to human adaptation, reports Nature Magazine.

Science writer Ewen Callaway, writing in the journal Nature this week, examines recent evidence of the earliest encounters in Europe  between long resident Neanderthals and waves of modern humans migrating from Africa.

Butele is a paleontological locality in the Afar region of Ethiopia, near the better known sites of Gona and Hadar (where Australopithecus afarensis -  Lucy was found in 1974).

A month ago we posted - Oldest Stone Tools? - the announcement of possibly the oldest stone tools ever. The discovery was reported at a scientific meeting in San Francisco and has been followed up with a paper published this week in the journal Nature.

The likelihood the oldest stone tools to date, at 3.3 MYA (million years ago), have been discovered was revealed at a meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society last week in San Francisco.

An American team working in the Afar region of Ethiopia has found the earliest evidence of our genus Homo, it was announced last week in the journal Science.

The discovery of a fragment of a human cranium located in a cave in the Galilee, was announced in the journal Nature this week. The fragment is a skullcap or calvaria and dated to 55,000 years ago.

Long overlooked fresh water shells lying in a museum drawer for more than a century have yielded the earliest evidence of symbolic behavior, according to an article in Nature this week..

The article is entitled “Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving“, by Josephine C. A. Joordens et al. The abstract of the article states: