Category Archives: Paleoanthropology

Bow-and-arrow, technology of the first modern humans in Europe 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France: Consensus in archaeology has posited that mechanically propelled weapons, such as bow-and-arrow or spear-thrower-and-dart combinations, […]

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These Extinct Elephants Were Neanderthals’ ‘Biggest Calorie Bombs’ – A study of butchered bones from 125,000 years ago offers what researchers call “the first clear-cut evidence of elephant-hunting in human […]

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Harvard Magazine has a nice piece up on David Reich’s biography and research. The section where Reich addresses the strange issues regarding Neanderthals jumped out at me, as I’ve had […]

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Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, a new paper in Nature establishes that Homo erectus was present in Southeast Asia quite late in the Paleolithic. Last appearance of Homo erectus at Ngandong, Java, 117,000–108,000 years ago: This dated sedimentary and taphonomic framework for the Ngan-dong bone bed does not support an overlap between modern humans […]

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An interesting paper in PNAS, Rare dental trait provides morphological evidence of archaic introgression in Asian fossil record: The recently described Denisovan hemimandible from Xiahe, China [F. Chen et al., (2019) Nature 569, 409–412], possesses an unusual dental feature: a 3-rooted lower second molar. A survey of the clinical and bioarchaeological literature demonstrates that the […]

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I want to elaborate on my earlier post, Deep Denisovan Population Structure. Though I don’t put much stock in any particular result, including the most recent ones reported at a conference, I think that biogeography tells us a lot about what we should expect in the future. First, notice that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and European hunter-gatherers […]

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Unfortunately, we do not have a time machine, nor is there any likely possibility of any such thing in the near future. The laws of physics are what they are. That is why those of us who are interested in the human past must make recourse to discipline…

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On this week’s episode of The Insight (Stitcher and Google Play) we talk to Lee Berger, author of Almost Human and a  paleanthropological revolutionary. Or, less sensationally Lee tells us his view on the practice and results of science in his field (which is literally in the field). Like most scientists, Lee is passionate about […]

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Dienekes Pontikos resurfaces with a post, Out of Africa: a theory in crisis. The title is a bit hyperbolic. But in Dienekes’ defense, he’s been on this wagon for over ten years, and the evidence is moving in his direction, and not against it. I think a little crowing is understandable on this part. With […]

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Current Anthropology has a bunch of articles related to the human settlement of Asia in its latest issue ahead of print. Aside from Martin Sikora’s most of them have a more traditional paleontological focus, so it’s pretty tough for me to understand them in context. But it’s all important to take in as we get […]

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Neanderthals are in the news again! This is good for me personally, as my company is selling Neanderthal trait analysis. Ooga-booga! In any case, the two papers which have triggered the current wave of Neandermania are The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans, and A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. […]

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In France you can find Neanderthals’ tools in your garden, everywhere. A small population is indeed hard to believe.https://t.co/b2I2WbLUsL — David Enard (@DavidEnard) September 18, 2017 The above tweet is in response to a article which reports on the finding past month in PNAS, Early history of Neanderthals and Denisovans. It’s open access, you should […]

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The end of Eden A particular conception of the “Out of Africa” model of human origins died in this decade. This model hooked into preexistence narratives about “Adam” and “Eve”, utilizing Y and mitochondrial DNA lineages passed down through direct male and female lines respectively. Its most extreme manifestation could be exemplified by Richard Klein’s […]

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Genetic science is good at many things, but precise dates have not always been its strong suit. There are many reasons for this, and the possibility of variable mutation rates puts a major a barrier in our ability to get absolute precision. From what I can archaeology is a little better here, despite all the […]

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The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically […]

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The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch …

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The media is reporting rather breathlessly a new find out of Arabia which seems to push much further back the presence of anatomically modern humans in this region (more accurately, the archaeology was so sparse that assessments of human habitation see…

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Image credit: Luna04

My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixtur…

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Razib Khan