Becoming Human

A scientific paper and accompanying commentary in the July 11 issue of the journal Nature report the discovery in southern China of stone tools dated to 2.1 million years ago. For many years the oldest evidence of human ancestors outside of Africa were found at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia and dated around 1.8 million years ago (mya).

In the journal Science this week, staff writer John Cohen, in a repoort entitled "Neanderthal brain organoids come to life",  summarizes work being done on replicating Neanderthal brains, on an  extremely small scale, at two research labs. Quoting from the article,

Three weeks ago in the journal Nature, researchers Mauriucio Gonzales-Fiorero and Andy Gardner proposed”… a metabolic approach that enables causal assessment of social hypotheses for brain-size evolution.”: The abstract of the authors’ paper states:

With increasing frequency in recent years, our primer on stone tool technology, Early Craftsmanship, was viewable on fewer platforms. A no longer suppoortted plug in was required. We have rewritten this feature in html5 and once again it plays on all platforms, all browsers. Check it out.

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.