“This is what Homo floresiensis must have felt like,” a paleoanthropologist mused through the darkness. It is almost 8pm on a Thursday and I am sitting on the floor of the cave known as Liang Bua. Other researchers stand only a meter from me, but I cannot see them, my eyes have yet to adjust…
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Alice Bowman announced on the evening of July 14, 2015. Bowman, the operations manager for the New Horizons mission, was commenting on the incredible flyby of Pluto, a flyby that gave humans a closer view of the planet than we had ever seen before. In an interview following the historic flyby,…
In 2003, a single swipe of a spade rocked the field of paleoanthropology. During a routine excavation, digging through damp clay of a cave floor, that single swipe revealed an entirely unexpected creature. It was the small skull of a primitive-looking hominin, hypothesized to be a new species of human, Homo floresiensis. This incident occurred…
2017 was not an easy year. Many of us found ourselves consistently disheartened and frustrated with the events unfolding around us–so much so that it was sometimes difficult to focus on science. Given those frustrations, how does one write a roundup post celebrating the year? By applauding scientific achievement and discovery, does this diminish the…
Human evolution was a pretty crazy event (or series of events, specifically). One can’t help but wonder, how did a group of tree-dwelling apes evolve into the large-brained, upright walking creatures we see dominating the planet today? On a related note–where did this transformation even occur? This question–the question of where–has a fascinating history. Scientists…
How is it August already?! We’re more than halfway through 2017 and a dizzying amount of paleoanthropology has already happened this year. I can’t think of a better time to look back on some of the incredible discoveries that have been announced so far, so let’s count down my favorites! 5. Alesi. A 13 million-year-old ape…
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been detailing the event of “Darwin’s Worst Nightmare” as it unfolded in 1858. First, Darwin received a letter that rocked his world (not in a good way), then he asked his friends to spring into action and help him preserve his scientific priority. Today, July 1st marks the final…
Last week, I told the story of the time Darwin received a harrowing letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. The date was June 18th, 1858, and Darwin had potentially lost his originality. His claim to “discovering” evolution through natural selection–an idea he had been working on for twenty years–had seemingly vanished before his eyes. When I…
June 18th, 1858 was a rough day for Charles Darwin. On that day, he saw his worst nightmare unfold right in front of his eyes. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” he wrote to a friend, fearing that his life’s work had collapsed. What caused this moment of panic? A…
Readers of this blog are familiar with my fascination of the fossils of human ancestors. I’ve written about fossils’ beauty, their strange stories, and the ways they make us question our ideas. Despite these points, critics often ask: do the discoveries of these bits of bone actually make any difference? In other words, why is paleoanthropology important;…
Hesperopithecus, wikicommons In 1922, scientists announced the discovery of a “remarkable tooth” from a Nebraskan hillside. This tooth had the potential to change the story of the human past, scientists argued. The president of the American Natural History Museum, Henry Fairfield claimed that the fossilized tooth belonged to an ape–the first recognized ape in North…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently (or you’re avoiding the news, understandably), you might have noticed some big announcements came out of South Africa this week. A team of researchers, led by Lee Berger and John Hawks, announced 1) the age of Homo naledi 2) a new chamber discovered with fossils in it 3)…
