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Dart and the Taung juvenile: making sense of a century-old record of hominin evolution in Africa.
Biol Lett
July 2024
CASHP, Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
The announcement in 1925 by Raymond Dart of the discovery of the Taung juvenile's skull in a quarry in sub-Saharan Africa is deservedly a classic publication in the history of palaeoanthropology. Dart's paper-which designated Taung as the type specimen of the early hominin species -provided the first fossil evidence supporting Charles Darwin's 1871 prediction that Africa was where the human lineage originated. The Taung juvenile's combination of ape and human characteristics eventually led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of human evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpatial and temporal heterogeneity in human mobility patterns in Holocene Southwest Asia and the East Mediterranean.
Curr Biol
January 2023
Department of Health Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey; Department of Biological Sciences, Middle East Technical University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey. Electronic address:
Article Synopsis
- - The study maps human genetic diversity across regions like Anatolia, Iran, and the Aegean, highlighting changes from the early Neolithic period to more complex societal structures using a combination of ancient and modern genomes.
- - Findings reveal that genetic diversity increased over time, with early Holocene populations in Southwest Asia and the East Mediterranean becoming more similar, followed by a divergence starting in the Bronze Age due to external gene flow, described as "the expanding mobility model."
- - The research also uncovers a trend of increasing male bias in admixture events throughout the Holocene, which is measured using specific genetic distance methods that are more effective than traditional F statistics.
Innovative ochre processing and tool use in China 40,000 years ago.
Nature
March 2022
Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
Article Synopsis
- Homo sapiens arrived in northern Asia around 40,000 years ago, replacing earlier archaic populations through previous expansions and interbreeding.
- The archaeological site Xiamabei in northern China, dating back 40,000 years, features unique traits like the earliest ochre-processing evidence in East Asia and specialized tools.
- Findings from Xiamabei suggest a distinct cultural and technological development in northern Asia that differs from other sites associated with archaic humans and early H. sapiens expansions.
Hyaenas and early humans in the latest Early Pleistocene of South-Western Europe.
Sci Rep
December 2021
Murcian Association for the Study of Palaeoanthropology and the Quaternary (MUPANTQUAT), Murcia, Spain.
Throughout the Pleistocene, early humans and carnivores frequented caves and large rock-shelters, usually generating bone accumulations. The well-preserved late Early Pleistocene sedimentary sequence at Cueva Negra del Estrecho del Río Quípar (CNERQ) has provided substantial evidence concerning the behavioural and adaptive skills of early humans in Western Europe, such as butchery practices, lithic technology or tending fire, whilst also bearing witness to the bone-altering activities of carnivores. Recent fieldwork has allowed the re-examination of the spatial and taphonomical nature of the macrofaunal assemblage from the upper layers of Complex 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHominin evolutionary thanatology from the mortuary to funerary realm: the palaeoanthropological bridge between chemistry and culture.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
September 2018
Department of Archaeology, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
Palaeoanthropology, or more precisely Palaeolithic archaeology, offers the possibility of bridging the gap between mortuary activities that can be observed in the wider animal community and which relate to chemistry and emotion; to the often-elaborate systems of rationalization and symbolic contextualisation that are characteristic of recently observable societies. I draw on ethological studies to provide a core set of mortuary behaviours one might expect hominoids to inherit, and on anthropological observations to explore funerary activity represented in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, in order to examine how a distinctly human set of funerary behaviours arose from a more widespread set of mortuary behaviours. I suggest that the most profound innovation of the hominins was the incorporation of places into the commemoration of the dead, and propose a falsifiable mechanism for why this came about; and I suggest that the pattern of the earliest burials fits with modern hunter-gatherer belief systems about death, and how these vary by social complexity.
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