The amazing talking Neandertals
This week, Johannes Krause and colleagues from the Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology institute announced that they had tickled FoxP2 out of two Neandertal specimens from El Sidrón, Spain. The bones...
View ArticleNew Year's predictions, 2008 edition
It's that time of year again -- the time when those boring ``Year in Review'' magazines are on newsstands, and when pundits make fools of themselves predicting what will happen in the next year. Well,...
View ArticleAn interview with Michelle Drapeau
I've been trying to spread the interviews across the field in various directions. I (virtually) talked with Mica Glantz about Neandertals, Adam Van Arsdale about early Homo, and Anne Weaver about...
View ArticleThe Orrorin identity
There's nothing especially surprising about the functional interpretations in Richmond and Jungers' paper about the Orrorin BAR 1002'00 femur. They conclude it was an australopithecine-like biped,...
View ArticleOH 7 and OH 8: One individual or two?
In the current AJPA, Randall Susman reviews the stratigraphic and morphological evidence concerning Olduvai Hominids 7, 8 and 35. Some history: Fossil evidence of Homo habilis was recovered from...
View ArticleBut will it include recipes?
I've ordered a copy of Richard Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I was weighing it, and a reader tipped me over the edge. I'll give a full report on it after it comes....
View ArticleThe mystery ape from Longgupo
In last week's Nature, Russell Ciochon has a remarkable essay: For many years, I used Longgupo to promote this pre-erectus origin for H. erectus finds in Asia. But now, in light of new evidence from...
View ArticleMailbag: Bromage's KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction, systematic position of Homo...
(this letter refers to my 2007 comments on Tim Bromage's KNM-ER 1470 reconstruction)Dear Professor Hawks,You may dispute Dr Bromage's work on skull 1470 which effectively relegates "rudolfensis" to the...
View ArticleNOVA: Becoming Human
OK, I'm going to live-blog this show. I've been looking forward to it for a while -- I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in classes but I had to stop several years...
View ArticleMalapa surfacing
Richard Gray of The Telegraph has a story about the upcoming Malapa hominin announcement: "Missing link between man and apes found"Palaeontologists and human evolutionary experts behind the discovery...
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What, if anything, is Australopithecus sediba?
Today we finally get to learn about the exceptional discovery of four partial hominin skeletons from Malapa Cave, South Africa. Two of the fossil skeletons are described by Lee Berger and colleagues in...
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Malapa and the "problem" skull KNM-ER 1813
The announcement of the Malapa skeletons has many of us going back to descriptions of early Homo. After the paper by Berger and colleagues came out last month, I wrote up some notes on KNM-ER 1813....
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Meet Homo habilis
Synopsis: A tour of four crania of Homo habilisThis station has several of the key cranial specimens of Homo habilis, together with Sts 5, the representative of Australopithecus africanus. The H....
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Sketchbook
Today's sketchbook: KNM-ER 1802 mandible, in occlusal view. This mandible is attributed to the genus Homo, often placed in Homo habilis, although those who believe in Homo rudolfensis generally include...
View ArticleKoobi Fora perspectives
I'm in Kansas and my internet is spottier here than it was in Africa. So I have a bunch of thoughts about the new Koobi Fora fossils published by Maeve Leakey and coworkers this week [1], and I have to...
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The new skull from Dmanisi
It smells like ashes. Holding it and examining it is really not like the other fossil crania I've studied. The other Dmanisi crania strike me as being very like some Neandertals in their preservation...
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