Many have now seen the claim put forward that Homo naledi buried their dead. While I’m not here to comment on the evidence put forward in the preprint, or my concerns about announcing a find before it has completed the peer review process, I do want to address a different component of the issue. One…
In August of 1908, a fossil human relative was discovered when a pickaxe struck the side of a skull. That fossil, which became known as the Old Man of La Chappelle, was sent to leading paleontologist Marcellin Boule in Paris for analysis. There, Boule described a brutish creature who was crude, unintelligent, shuffling, and hunched…
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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,…
How to make sense of a skull Imagine this scenario: you are handed a skull. That’s all you’ve got, no other information. The skull is only partial, but it’s relatively large, approximately the size of a human skull. But it’s strange, it doesn’t look like any human skull you’ve ever seen. You examine its shape and notice it…
“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…
A Strange Skeleton The bones revealed a human of “extraordinary form,” he concluded. It was January 1857, and Hermann Schaaffhausen had just viewed a fossilized skeleton that was unlike anything he had ever seen. The surviving bits of the skeleton–made up of a partial skull, along with some leg bones, ribs, and other bits…
Summer is coming to a close, giving us a great excuse to reflect on the incredible announcements that have been recently made in paleoanthropology. From footprints to new fossils, these discoveries have definitely altered the ways I think about many hominin species, so I’m counting down my favorites. This time, I polled a bunch of you…
Who were the Neanderthals, and how were they related to humans? These are questions that have plagued paleoanthropologists since the first Neanderthal fossil was found over a century and a half ago. On July 11, 1997 a very important paper appeared in the journal Cell that shed light on this issue. It was titled “Neanderthal…
Fossil History 