Footprints thought to have been made by children and teenagers between 23 and 21 thousand years ago in lake shore muds at White Sands, New Mexico. (Credit Bennett et al. 2021)
Earliest Americans and Denisovan art
Opportunities for anatomically modern humans to have left Africa
Key ages of early H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans (image credit: Delson, 2019; Fig. 1)
Massive hominin skull from China: is it a Denisovan?
“In 1933 labourers unearthed a very large skull during the construction of a bridge near Harbin, Northern China.”
Relationships between modern humans and Neanderthals
The likely appearances of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans when they first met between 50 and 40 thousand years ago. (Credit: Jason Ford, New York University)
Early Humans: The Low-Flow Model & the Advantages of a Big Nose
Something changed over the course of human evolution that reduced the amount of water our body uses each day to stay healthy.
The ancestry of our opposable thumbs
“The first makers of sophisticated stone tools must have been able to grip between fingers and thumb to manipulate the materials from which they were made”
West Africa “a real frontier for human evolutionary studies”
Groups of hunter-gatherers in what is today Senegal continued to use Middle Stone Age technologies associated with our species’ earliest prehistory as late as 11 thousand years ago.
How like the Neanderthals are we?
” A Neanderthal skeleton (dated at 50 ka) found in a cave at La Chappelle-aux-Saints appears to have been buried and made safe from scavengers and erosion. “
Earliest sign of a sense of aesthetics
“In 1925 Wilfred Eitzman, a school teacher, investigated a cave in the Makapansgat Valley in Limpopo Province, South Africa that had been exposed by quarry workers.”
More Denisovan connections
“In 2006 mining operations in NE Mongolia uncovered a human skull cap with prominent brow ridges.”
