Becoming Human

The finding of the oldest human genetic material is reported this week. A femoral shaft (thigh bone without ends to fit with hip and knee)was found in Siberia and dated to 45,000 years ago.

On the tenth anniversary of the announcement of a close human relative, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed The Hobbit, noted paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer revisits the find in an article in Nature this week.

Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous fossil "Lucy" and narrator of the Documentary Becoming Human on this website,can now be followed on Twitter.

Neanderthals were capable of abstract expression, according  to a paper published this week by European archeologists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Recent recalculation of dates associated with bone and artifacts found at 40 Neanderthal sites has determined the last Neanderthals became extinct between 39,000 and 41,000 years ago.

The authors of a paper in Nature this week  conclude a modification of a haplotype found in the Denisovan genome apparently has given modern Tibetans (and their ancestors) an adaptation to high altitude, thus avoiding the hypoxia thinner air causes in individuals lacking this genetic combination.

The Nature Podcast this week reports (from another journal; an interesting finding from Germany: an indication Neanderthals may have consumed more vegetables than previously thought.

Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia is the well known site of the first evidence of Homo erectus outside of Africa and once more has yielded a rich find according to a paper in the journal Science this week. Known informally as Skull 5 and assigned the number D4500, this complete skull required no reconstruction.

Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia is the well known site of the first evidence of Homo erectus outside of Africa and once more has yielded a rich find according to a paper in the journal Science this week. Known informally as Skull 5 and assigned the number D4500, this complete skull required no reconstruction.

The questions of when and why intelligent speech developed among humans continue to puzzle researchers. The increasing complexity of fashioning tools, from the simplest of stone implements to heat treatment and forging of metals, has been considered by some researchers as a proxy for intelligent speech but views differ as to where along the spectrum of increasing complexity did speech arise.