A Russian Ancestor to Native Americans

Russian archaeologists in 1976 excavating the Ust’-Kyakhta-3 site on the banks of the Selenga River A. P. Okladnikov During the 1970's, a site called Ust-Kyakhta found between the Mongolian borders and the southern banks of the Lake Baikal, was excavated. The Russian team unearthed many stone and bone tools as well as ceramics, and reindeer...

Engare Sero in Northern Tanzania Yield Largest Collection of Prehistoric Human Footprints in Africa

This volcano in East Africa, called Ol Doinyo Lengai, erupted long ago and produced a mudflow that preserved the biggest collection of ancient human footprints (some shown in the foreground) found in Africa so far. Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce Just south of Lake Natron, in northern Tanzania is the Engare Sero site which was was originally discovered...

The Oldest European Homo sapiens

Excavations at Bacho Kiro Cave, in Bulgaria Last week Jean-Jacques Hublin, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Helen Fewlass who is also at MPI, and their colleagues published in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution reports of their findings in the Bacho Kiro cave site in Bulgaria. They have...

The Last Homo erectus

Last week, in Nature, University of Iowa anthropologist Russell Ciochon and colleagues published new dates on fossils and sediment layers from a site called Ngandong that originally yielded a dozen or so Homo erectus skulls in the 1930's. Using uranium-series dating on some newly excavated mammalian remains from the same sediment layer as the Homo erectus skulls,...

The Discovery of a 3.8 Million Year Old Australopithecus anamensis

The discovery of a mostly intact a 3.8 million year old fossil skull found buried within sandstone, from the Waranjo-Mille site in the Afar region of Ethiopia, was announced last week in Nature. Based on the size and shape of its canines, which has certain anatomical features that make it stand out from A. afarensis and other...

Apidima 1 – A New Look At Old Skull

In the 1970's, the Apidima Cave site in Greece was excavated by archaeologists. Lodged within a chunk of rock was the Apidima 1 specimen. It was found adjacent to a distorted 170,000 year old Neanderthal skull called Apidima 2. In the image below you can see how close in proximity the two specimens were discovered....

Growing ‘Mini-Brains’ With Neanderthal DNA

Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany wants to grow brain organoids from human stem cells that are edited to contain "Neanderthalized" versions of several genes. These blobs of brain are incapable of thoughts or feelings, but replicate basic structures of the brain, such...

Al Wusta Phalanxes Document Humans Travel East of Africa Earlier

Earlier this year we learned about the Misliya maxilla which pushed our understanding of out of Africa by 50,000 years. Last week, the discovery of a 87,000-year-old human intermediate phalanx (Al Wusta-1 (AW-1)) from the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. The importance of both discoveries show that modern humans existed outside Africa...

Oldest Human DNA from Africa Clues Us On Ancient Moroccan Heritage

In 2015 the first African ancient genome of 4,500-year-old human remains found in Ethiopia were published. Now more ancient Africa DNA has been found and published.  The study I am referring to came out in Science which outlines the findings of seven 15,000-year-old modern humans from Morocco. This paper now holds the results of the oldest human DNA ever...

Five Neanderthal Genomes Tell Us More Than Ever

We've been quite limited by our ancient DNA of Neanderthals due to limited sample size from the fossil record and then compounded with degradation and contamination of DNA. Last week, Nature, published a fantastic article ultimately from Svante Pääbo and Janet Kelso on a novel way to extract more DNA from less fossil sample; using...