Becoming Human

Two renowned fossil hunters, once rivals, met before an appreciative audience in New York last week and discussed the significance of their finds and the importance of increased public understanding of evolution.

The New York Times'Science section for March 15, 2011 offers readers a variety of articles on the human condition and how we became human.  Starting with cells, these articles explore human evolution and our relationships with other living things, including our pets.

A small, three million year old bone found ten years ago and recently analyzed is helping to resolve an important question and illustrates how exacting science is done.

Two new transcripts of our award winning Documentary are available at BecomingHuman.

Until  now the earliest evidence of stone tools was found at Gona in Ethiopia in 1994.  The artifacts have been securely dated to 2.6 million years and  were clearly manufactured, as opposed to shapes formed naturally by erosion or being tumbled in streams.  They corresponded in size, shape and apparent usage to the most rudimentary stone tool technology, called Oldo

Field schools offer university level students an intensive, hands on way to sharpen their paleontological and archaeological knowledge.  Field schools are operated by academic institutions at working sites.  Students accepted at field school pay tuition, as a rule, and receive credit in equivalent classroom hours after a number of weeks' instruction in geology, mapping, searching for and catalo

Field work beginning in 2002 in the Afar Depression (Ethiopia) culminated in an announcement three weeks ago of a new addition to the species Australopithecus afarensis.

For most of the twentieth century what we knew about human evolution derived from the finding and analysis of fossilized bone.  Reconstruction of bone fragments, comparison with previous finds and contemporary ape and human anatomy kept pushing our understanding of human origins deeper in time.  A dramatic example of this point was the 1974 discovery of AL-288-1, the partial Au.

A sixty percent complete, “first draft” of the Neanderthal genome has been prepared by scientists with the Max Planck Institute in Germany and there is evidence there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans about 80,000 years ago in the Levant.  This announcement appeared in the journal Science on May 8 and has had a mixed reception.

Two nearly complete skeletal fossils, one a juvenile male and the other an adult female, were found a year ago in South Africa and announced last month  in two articles in the journal Science.  Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist with University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg was mapping cave site near that city when his son Matthew, a short distance away with his dog, called out h