From the Middle Awash of Ethiopia, BOU-VP 16/1 is one of three skulls from the Herto area. The best estimate of its age is 165,000 years old, and its describers called it Homo sapiens idaltu. #inktober twenty-ninth
It’s pretty common for anthropologists to call this Herto specimen “anatomically modern”, or “early modern”, or “near modern.” These terms reflect assumptions about the process of evolution.
How does the skull fit in? There is no direct archaeological association. Nearby stone tools from around the same time include some of the latest Acheulean handaxes. A child’s skull from nearby has a polished surface, as if it were kept and handled often.
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Quite like the new paper by my @UWMadison colleague @apragsdale. Fun to see lots of people newly discovering these ideas about metapopulation models! A couple of notes: nature.com/articles/s4158…
An implication of this population model is that the structure of our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge several hundred thousand years earlier than the dispersal that led to Neandertal and Denisovan populations.
When added to other evidence of recurring gene flow between Neandertal and African ancestral populations, this very strongly implies that Neandertals are Homo sapiens.
So this seems very unpopular for some reason, but humans DID evolve from apes. We did not evolve from chimpanzees, gorillas, or any other living apes. They are our cousins. Our close fossil relatives were like living great apes in many ways and more like humans in others.
Today's great apes, including chimpanzees and bonobos, two species of gorillas, and three species of orangutans, are a small surviving remnant of the diversity of apes that once existed. Each evolved in ways that helped them survive, just as our ancestors did.
Paleontologists have discovered many more forms of extinct apes than living ones. They were adapted to their time and place, some Asian, some African, and some European, but did not survive to the present day. Many of them lived in the period before 5 million years ago.
Some discussion in comments last week in @ScienceMagazine about "paleodemes" with a short defense of the value of the concept. I think the paleodeme concept has most of the problems of paleo species concepts with none of their benefits. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
The person probably most responsible for the paleodeme concept in human origins is Clark Howell, whose 1999 paper "Paleo-Demes, Species Clades, and Extinctions in the Pleistocene Hominin Record" defined (although it did not first introduce) the concept. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
As presented by Howell, a paleodeme corresponds to a regional sample of fossils across a delimited range of time, with some morphological distinctiveness. These were groups like "Neandertal", "Skhūl/Qafzeh", or "Petralona/Atapuerca-Sima".
Interesting paper on cutmark evidence from Olduvai, further substantiating early access to animal carcasses by tool-wielding Early Pleistocene hominins. @SciReportsnature.com/articles/s4159…
The paper's discussion raises lots of reasons why the anatomy of early Homo supports the idea that they were competent hunters. On this I don't disagree, but I think that focusing on "early Homo" here is misleading for several reasons.
First, "early Homo" fossils overlap substantially in anatomy with Australopithecus and Paranthropus. So much that we cannot always tell them apart (including long-standing arguments about well-known and not-so-fragmentary fossils).
So, Homo longi. It's such a good name. Dragon people. And an amazing skull discovery. Adds to our knowledge of the Middle Pleistocene in China. But it's sad that the name is not going to stay. cell.com/the-innovation…
The boring reason why we can't use the Homo longi name is technical. The research puts the Harbin skull together with the Dali skull, and Xinzhi Wu gave that the name Homo sapiens daliensis more than 40 years ago. So IF there's a species, it has to be H. daliensis.
In case you wonder how close Harbin looks to Dali, here is Harbin on the left and Dali (which has some crushing to the maxilla) on the right. As Weidenreich might have said, they resemble each other as closely as one egg resembles another.
The new report of fossil material from Nesher Ramla, Israel, claims a "previously unknown archaic Homo population" some 140,000 years ago. It's a big claim in an area where most scientists have thought that early modern humans and Neandertals interacted. science.sciencemag.org/content/372/65…
Looking at the morphology of the mandible NR-2, it falls within the variation of fossils attributed to Neandertals, and is similar to Krapina, which is around the same age, and Sima, which are early Neandertals. This seems like a basic early Neandertal jaw.
The other fossil NR-1 is a complete right parietal bone and fragments of the left parietal. The analysis of shape places is near late Neandertals and early Neandertals, but a bit less "barrel-shaped", thereby similar to generalized H. erectus and African Middle Pleistocene Homo.