News on South Africa’s Hominins: Berger’s Rising Star Expedition

This November, a team funded by National Geographic and led by Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg made a huge find. 1200 hominin skeletal elements were recovered from a South African cave, representing at least 12 individuals. Human remains are pretty rare, and this one site contains more human fossil material than...

Australopithecus sediba (UW88-50) of Malapa, South Africa

Lee Berger's son, Matthew, found the ~1.9 million year old hominin remains of female adult and a juvenile male in cave deposits at Malapa, South Africa. The remains have been analyzed and been published in Science today, and so far this finding is the big fossil hominid of 2010. The skull of the juvenile is the...

Berger Can’t Get A Break

It has been almost two years since Lee Berger and I shared a few words on Anthropology.net about his small people of Palau. Since then, a TKO paper, published in the summer of 2008, basically thwarting Berger's claims. Thankfully, we haven't heard much of his sensationalist research since... But his documentary is still floating around. It recently...

Debunking Lee Berger’s Palaun Dwarf Population

Lee Berger's got a big problem. Rex Dalton was on his case earlier this year about Berger's political and cultural approach to his Palaun study. And now Scott Fitzpatrick, one of the most vocal critics of Berger's dwarves from Palau, has a new paper out in the open access journal PLoS One, where he sinks...

Palau, Lee Berger, and the junction between entertainment and science

Rex Dalton is back on the Palau issue that got so much attention last month. He's investigated the facts in much more detail than he did previously and does not necessarily have kind words for the research behind the Palaun fossils. He has written up his news feature in the latest issue of Nature. The...

3,000 year old small body humans in Palau, Micronesia

PLoS One completely surprised me today by releasing this paper, "Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia." The research comes from South African and American researchers, and the paper was edited by John Hawks, who apparently can really keep a secret it seems. I had no idea about this study and find it a really remarkable find...