Topic
The scientific study of how modern humans emerged from and diverged anatomically, genetically, and behaviorally from earlier hominins and related primates.
Anthropologists Osbjorn Pearson and John Fleagle estimate Omo I at about 1.65 m and 71 kg after dropping one doubtful humerus length. Their reanalysis rests on one skeleton and the lower of two stature estimates, so it tests ideas about early Homo sapiens bodies without settling them.
Reality
Two researchers propose that diving for food about 2 million to 3 million years ago helped shape human endurance. The hypothesis, published September 17 in PaleoAnthropology, has drawn both support and sharp objections.
Reality
Hannah Farrell's team at Haifa University used a 700,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant molar to reconstruct wetland and oak woodland in northern Israel. The tooth covers a few years of one animal's life at one site, so the evidence fits a wet stopover on the route out of Africa.
Reality
Hannah Farrell's team used a 700,000-year-old elephant molar from Israel's Gesher Benot Ya'aqov to reconstruct woodland and wetland around early toolmakers. The idea that the wet valley eased travel along the Africa-Eurasia land bridge is the authors' inference from one site and one elephant.
Reality
La Trobe University researchers described 18 Drimolen Cave fossils, including an adult Homo erectus skull fragment dated to about 2 million years ago. The adult specimen shores up an age for the species in southern Africa that had rested on a child's skull.
Reality
La Trobe researchers describe DNH 127, the first adult Homo erectus fossil from South Africa's Drimolen cave, dated to 2 million years ago. It is 200,000 years older than adult specimens found elsewhere and supports a first-appearance date that had rested on a child's skull from the same cave.
Reality
Bearded capuchins turn predator when fruit thins, and the clearest evidence comes from a second group that was fed daily for an unrelated project and hunted roughly half as often.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
A Nature screen of 561,410 human-derived variants in cartilage cells, cross-checked in human-ape hybrid cells, traces that gap to suppressed glycosaminoglycan biosynthesis, and the authors argue it helps explain human joint disease.
Reality
A Kyoto and Weizmann team screened 561,000 human-specific regulatory changes in cartilage cells. The survivors were then read inside cells carrying both human and gorilla chromosomes, where glycosaminoglycan genes ran lower on the human copies.
Reality
The forthcoming PaleoAnthropology paper argues that pacing oxygen across repeated shallow dives built the cardiorespiratory stamina later used for running, with a two-hour recording of one Ama diver's shift supplying the measurements.
Reality
A USC-led team scanned seven fossil skeletons and read each one's arm strength against its own leg bones. The split they found puts a change in how our ancestors moved at about two million years ago.
Reality
Male newborns are the heavier sex in most placental mammals the authors surveyed, which makes birth risk unequal for sons and daughters. Whether that inequality causes obstructed labour is still untested outside humans and farm animals.
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Ohio State researchers filmed sooty mangabeys in Ivory Coast and measured midfoot flexion that matches a climbing chimpanzee's ankle, which means a fossil foot that looks monkey-like cannot by itself rule out vertical climbing.
Reality
LB 1's hip bones group statistically with Pleistocene Homo and away from the australopiths. That retires the convenient reading that the hobbit's odd skeleton is simply primitive. Its ancestry stays as open as before.
Reality
A Monash researcher argues Australopithecus and Paranthropus belong inside Homo because the traits that once separated them no longer hold. The fossils do not change; every label on them would.
Reality
A Tel Aviv University team reports that male Neanderthal pelvises track modern human females, not males, inverting a baseline used for decades to read hominin hips.
Reality