Becoming Human

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.

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A paper in the journal Nature and commentary in Science shows humans are more energetic, burn more calories and have greater stores of fat than our primate cousins. Read commentary in Science

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Human anatomy and behavior appear to have changed significantly around two million years ago with the emergence of a new hominin species, Homo erectus.  Brains were larger, legs were longer, the ability to range greater distances expanded. What caused these changes?