Long-term biotic homogenization in the East African Rift System over the last 6 million years of hominin evolution.

Eastern Africa preserves the most complete record of human evolution anywhere in the world but we have little knowledge of how long-term biogeographic dynamics in the region influenced hominin diversity and distributions. Here, we use spatial beta diversity analyses of mammal fossil records from the East African Rift System to reveal long-term biotic homogenization (increasing compositional similarity of faunas) over the last 6 Myr. Late Miocene and Pliocene faunas (~6-3 million years ago (Ma)) were largely composed of endemic species, with the shift towards biotic homogenization after ~3 Ma being driven by the loss of endemic species across functional groups and a growing number of shared grazing species.

Early Pleistocene hominin teeth from Gongwangling of Lantian, Central China.

The fossil hominin individual from Gongwangling of Lantian, Central China, represents one of the earliest members attributed to Homo erectus in East Asia. Recent paleomagnetic analyses have yielded an age of 1.63 Ma for the Gongwangling hominin.

TIPICO XI: report of the first series and podcast on infectious diseases and vaccines (aTIPICO).

TIPiCO is an annual expert meeting and workshop on infectious diseases and vaccination. The edition of 2020 changed its name and format to aTIPiCO, the first series and podcasts on infectious diseases and vaccines. A total of 13 prestigious experts from different countries participated in this edition launched on the 26 November 2020.

Comparative dental study between Homo antecessor and Chinese Homo erectus: Nonmetric features and geometric morphometrics.

The Chinese Middle Pleistocene fossils from Hexian, Xichuan, Yiyuan, and Zhoukoudian have been generally classified as Homo erectus s.s. These hominins share some primitive features with other Homo specimens, but they also display unique cranial and dental traits.

The Ratón Pérez collection: Modern deciduous human teeth at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (Burgos, Spain).

Objectives: The aim of this report is to present the large deciduous tooth collection of identified children that is housed at the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain.

Methods: Yearly, members of the Dental Anthropology Group of the CENIEH are in charge of collecting the teeth and registering all the relevant information from the donors at the time of collection. In compliance with Spanish Law 14/2007 of July 3, 2007, on Biomedical Research (BOE-A-2007-12945), all individuals are guaranteed anonymity and confidentiality.

Testing the inhibitory cascade model in a recent human sample.

The Inhibitory Cascade Model was proposed by Kavanagh and colleagues (Nature, 449, 427-433 [2007]) after their experimental studies on the dental development of murine rodent species. These authors described an activator-inhibitor mechanism that has been employed to predict evolutionary size patterns of mammalian teeth, including hominins. In the present study, we measured the crown area of the three lower permanent molars (M1, M2, and M3) of a large recent modern human sample of male and female individuals from a collection preserved at the Institute of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra (Portugal).

Earliest known human burial in Africa.

The origin and evolution of hominin mortuary practices are topics of intense interest and debate. Human burials dated to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) are exceedingly rare in Africa and unknown in East Africa. Here we describe the partial skeleton of a roughly 2.

Testing the inhibitory cascade model in the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain) hominin sample.

The Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos (SH) site has yielded more than 7.500 human fossil remains belonging to a minimum of 29 individuals. Most of these individuals preserve either the complete mandibular molar series or at least the first (M ) and second (M ) molars.

Sexual dimorphism of dental tissues in modern human mandibular molars.

Objectives: Previous studies have revealed that human permanent dental tissue proportions differ significantly between males and females, with females having relatively thicker enamel relative to overall crown area than males. The aims of this study are to investigate sexual dimorphism in permanent mandibular molars and to determine whether such differences can be used to estimate sex in modern humans reliably.

Materials And Methods: The permanent mandibular molars used in this study (n = 51) originate from 36 individuals of known sex from a Spanish anthropological collection.