Ardipithecus has arrived.

After near fifteen years of waiting, the partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus is published this week in Science. “Ardi” is a 4.4 million year old hominin from the Aramis region of Ethiopia and is the oldest partial hominin skeleton discovered to date. There are 11 publications in this week’s Science covering all things Ardipithecus. Here [...]

A summer for hobbits

Two publications in Nature this week 1,2, a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, and a conference at Stony Brook University this past month provide new data on the origins of the curious fossil hominin from Ling Bua Cave, Flores, Indonesia. First announced in 2004 3,4, the LB-1 fossil hominin has been the [...]

More Pan hunting

Earlier this year, I commented on an article describing the first instance of primate hunting by bonobos (Pan paniscus) [1]. Bonobos, like their more famous cousins—chimpanzees, hunt in groups. This is interesting because both chimpanzees and bonobos are omnivores; hence they need not hunt in groups to acquire adequate nutrition. While individual benefit from group [...]

Neandertal mtDNA genome sequenced, suggests no admixture with anatomically modern humans

A team of researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the mitochondrial (mtDNA) genome sequence of an individual neandertal in the current issue of Cell (Green et al. 2008). The sequence is of an individual neandertal from Vindija (Croatia), whose fossilized remains date to approximately 38,000 years ago (Green et al. 2008). The [...]