It almost goes without saying, but 2016 has been a tough year. However, we did learn a lot in the realm of paleoanthropology this year (as we do every year)! And because focusing on the positive is a good coping strategy, I think a look back the incredible science announced this year is in order. Last…
November 24th is my favorite day of the year. Not because ski season has officially begun (though that is great), but because a couple of pretty incredible events occurred on this day in history. On November 24th, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published AND our favorite human ancestor, Lucy, was discovered! Both moments,…
“LUCY WAS PUSHED!” someone shouted at me through the fibers of the internet. I had just shared the new Lucy study on Twitter, which I’m sure many of you have seen by now: the idea that Lucy–the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton–fell to her death 3.2 million years ago. My mother felt just as incredulous as…
In the study of human evolution, 2015 was an insane year. Paleoanthropologists made discoveries that increased our knowledge about everything from stone tools to Neandertal ancestry. The announcements were surprising, enlightening, and drawn from all corners of the scientific discipline. Some discoveries were those of new fossils, while others drew from ancient DNA, and others still reconstructed…
“The middle Pliocene gets crowded.” New fossils have recently been announced that were found in East Africa by a team of scientists led by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. According to Haile-Selassie, these fossil fragments constitute a new species of hominin! The creature has been named Australopithecus deyiremeda, combining the word deyi, meaning close, with remeda, meaning relative in…
A press release came out on recently that made me double check the date to make sure it wasn’t April fools day. The release stated that two scientists, upon reexamining replicas of the famous Lucy fossils, recognized that one of the her vertebra fragments doesn’t quite look like the others. The scientists argue that this vertebrae, which is only…
An exciting fossil discovery of a possible early member of the Homo genus was announced this week through Science. Summaries of the fossil, which is a jawbone dating back to 2.8 million years ago, are all over the web (my personal favorite being a video and press release through ASU). However, the fossil publication was only one of three published…
Fossil History 