Category Archives: Human origins

Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, […]

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Interesting piece in LiveScience, What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011. The author highlights the likelihood of a lot of admixture across very diverged lineages, as well as the nascent “Out of Arabia” hypothesis. This quote from Michael Hammer gets at where we’re “going next”: “We’ve probably just scratched the surface of what […]

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The Pith: I review a recent paper which argues for a southern African origin of modern humanity. I argue that the statistical inference shouldn’t be trusted as the final word. This paper reinforces previously known facts, but does not add much th…

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Razib Khan