[THREAD] For @sciam’s 175th birthday, I looked at what scientists have learned about human origins since the magazine debuted in 1845. Pretty much everything we know about the evolution of our branch of the tree of life has come to light in that time scientificamerican.com/article/how-sc… I’ve been writing about human evolution for @sciam since 1997. I'm biased but I think the past couple decades have been especially exciting for this field, not only because of amazing fossil and archaeological finds but also breakthroughs in ancient DNA research. Some highlights:

[THREAD] Recently I’ve been fixated on the fledgling brown-headed cowbirds in my yard. Cowbirds, if you’re not familiar with them, are brood parasites—females lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving their young to be incubated and raised by parents of another species. The fostering occurs at the expense of the host’s own chicks, who may get pushed out of the nest or smothered by the young cowbird.

[THREAD] Researchers working in Ethiopia have discovered a nearly complete fossil cranium from a long-vanished member of the human family and it is NEXT LEVEL 🤩. Here’s the lowdown. [Image: Dale Omori, courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Natural History] The fossil (nature.com/articles/s4158…), dated to 3.8 million years ago (nature.com/articles/s4158…), finally reveals the face of Australopithecus anamensis, a human species first described in 1995.

[THREAD] This re-analysis of two partial fossil skulls from Apidima Cave in Greece is super interesting! One looks to be a Neandertal from ~170,000 years ago nature.com/articles/s4158… [Image: Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen] The other is purportedly early Homo sapiens, dated to at least 210,000 years ago. This latter fossil, called Apidima 1, could really shake up our understanding of this interval in human prehistory. [Image: Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen]