Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #Homonaledi
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"A new dating program using the isochron method for burial dating has established an absolute age of 2.22 ± 0.09 Ma for a large portion of the Lower Bank, containing the earliest Oldowan stone tools and fossils of Paranthropus robustus in South Africa." doi.org/10.1016/j.jhev… 
If this date is accurate, it places a good Oldowan assemblage into a temporal context where it's not clear Homo was present at all. These are Paranthropus or Australopithecus tools.
Only 2 fossils from Swartkrans Lower Bank can be excluded from Paranthropus: an isolated molar fragment and a juvenile mandible fragment, SKX 21204. The unerupted premolars of this otherwise super fragmented specimen are interesting.
I don't like the frame "Neanderthal mothers took care of their children as intensively as modern humans" based on weaning time. Why? Because great ape mothers breastfeed MUCH LONGER. sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/n…
In other words, weaning time by itself does not provide a scale that is very relevant. The new results are cool in part because they show variation among Neanderthal children, and the survival of children in the face of such variation speaks to resilience, and possible allocare.
Orangutans wean at up to 8 years of age. In some ways, weaning time does inform us about mother-infant bonds and the place of infants in social organization. Weaning also reflects the ease or difficulty of foraging and transition to adult diets.
