Dawn of sapiens

I colorized this ancient water spout, likely from Cyprus and now at the Met Museum
/End

That's not an accurate description of hunter-gatherers. They weren't migrating every day, week, or even every month. They moved 3-6 times a year but weren't moving into unknown lands. They require intimate knowledge of the land. I.e. "remember that dead hollow tree that has a week's worth of water?"

Bizarre foods: Neanderthal edition Scientists propose a maggot-fueled hypothesis for the diets of ancient hunters

People eat food in many ways that may offend the palates of those who didn't grow up with their customs. Eating fermented or putrifying meat is common among traditional hunting societies but overlooked by many who study past hunters like Neanderthals.

www.johnhawks.net/p/bizarre-fo...

The leap of butchered elephants = large groups, i.e. a fiesta of hundreds or 1,000 Neanderthals, was always questionable to me. Especially when you consider genetic evidence of low diversity. They don't seem to have gathered in large groups unless they were very serious about abstinence. Not likely.

It's all more evidence #Neanderthals were highly adaptable inc warm climate, also using plant foods.
Broader Qs beyond this paper: food storage & elephants hunts = larger groups? While focused task locales & evidence from lithics of reduced mobility might indicate a particular way of forest life.

What exactly do you mean by "finalized"...several million years would encompass the whole of the genus homo

The developing rift between what the genetics tell us and what's inferred through morphology is fascinating. Either sapiens split ~1 mya or ~700 kya, it can't be both. Perhaps the molecular clock isn't fine tuned enough or morphological models are generating associations that don't exist.

I’ve only just discovered these searchable Nature databases… www.nature.com/search?q=Fos...

Tickets to the Austin show purchased! Thanks for remembering us behind enemy lines 😂

When did our ancestors start looking up to the stars? Changes in the sky have been important to peoples throughout the world. That connection may go back much further than our species.

So many connections between star knowledge and ancient societies. Some have been embodied in monuments like Stonehenge, but the knowledge of they sky and its relation to natural and social cycles is vastly older.

www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-o...

I see that diversity across time (Sima de los Huesos root Neanderthal and Denisova 5) but isn't it true that after ~105 kya most Neanderthals were closely related? Besides the Thorin pop. what other deep lineage has been found? If DNA can be obtained I could see the Krapina pop. being divergent.

Denisovan Sites | Genially

If you ever wanted to explore history of the Denisovans but didn't know where to start, this is for you.

view.genially.com/68097ef2bb6b...

More hominins raised from beneath the waves Fossils from the Madura Strait of Indonesia remind us of the expansive sunken landscapes of our ancestors.

Two pieces of hominin skull sucked up and spit out of a giant undersea vacuum cleaner, with thousands of fragments of animal bones that were once buried in the course of the Solo River. Remarkable discovery from hard work and years of survey.

www.johnhawks.net/p/more-homin...

SoS 238: Rethinking the obstetric dilemma with Anna Warrener Host Courtney Manthey unpack the obstetric dilemma with Dr. Anna G. Warrener. Dr. Anna G. Warrener earned her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012. She is now an assistant professor of

The classic rendering of the obstetric dilemma hypothesis is that the size & shape of the human pelvis has been constrained by its restructuring for bipedal locomotion, making birth difficult. Nice discussion on the topic with CU Denver's Dr. Anna Warrener. #paleoanthropology #humanevolution

In Fongoli news, there have been a couple of big rains - enough to clean out & fill Sakoto pool, one of the chimps’ favorite soaking spots!

The Wood Age,it seems, is a lost world. It should be considered more often when reconstructing human origins.

How feminism changed primatology - ABC listen For decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scientists in the 1960s and 70s changed the narrative....

Fascinating - how encounters with feminist conscious raising groups & reading feminist texts changed primatology, showing how male bias worked in developing now outmoded evolutionary ideas like ‘man the hunter’ and ‘the military model of primate behaviour’! www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

YouTube video by Chris Stringer Chris Stringer discusses the Harbin cranium - Dragon Man

I discuss the Harbin cranium (probably the most complete Denisovan fossil found so far) youtu.be/VxRPbwc-Izc?...

I read the article. The thing is, we don't need Colossal's permission to call them what they are or are not.

dawnofsapiens.substack.com/p/the-lost-t...

There's something ironic about a geneticist using the morphological species concept to characterize these gray wolves as dire wolves because she knows genetically defining them as dire wolves is laughable.

Sometimes fossils are not as striking or immediately impressive to the eye. But even poorly preserved fossils can be critically important based on their context. This “bone mush” appears to be a hominin from a new area at Malapa and if so is likely an indication of big discoveries to come!

So I guess Jurassic Park in real life would be billions in VC investment and years of press releases followed by a tank containing five deformed iguanas

Researchers have been doing knock-in studies for years. But they had the awareness and humility to know they were only experimenting.

"Ma Zandi" in her labs and a new 2 million year old hominin humerus prepared only today.

For #FossilFriday an image of a 2 million year old #hominin humerus freed from the rock just today so you are among the first humans in the world to see it! Prepared by Zandile Ndaba or "Ma Zandi" the work on this skeleton has involved her for years. We owe her and our other preparators a great deal

#FossilFriday The Dali cranium, about 260,000 years old. Probably Homo longi and therefore probably a Denisovan…

A scientifically illiterate fascist who is defunding science, and FRS.

The toadying lickspittles who championed this marketing creep should lose their privileges. What did they want? To brownnose a big boy under the misapprehension that standing near the powerful gifts them power.

Hold the line Dan! This was a much needed episode.

Human evolution: a one-million-year clusterf**k A new incredibly subtle and elegant analysis of our living genomes reveals yet another major piece in the jigsaw of human evolution, completely hidden until now.

New substack, on @trevorcousins.bsky.social and @aylwyn-scally.bsky.social's brilliant new paper on the origin of Homo sapiens.

arutherford.substack.com/p/human-evol...

How does the inferred chromosome 2 fusion play into this? At a proposed ~1 mya you would have thought populations that split before that would not be capable of mixing with our (and likely Neandersovan's) lineage. Unless the fusion was earlier or the fusion happened more than once. Very interesting.