Anthropologist Gregory Forth at the University of Alberta in Canada authored a controversial opinion piece in The Scientist on April 18, 2022. In it, he claims that a relic population of elf-like ancient hominins might still roam the jungles of a remote Indonesian island.The discovery of the remains of Homo floresiensis in 2003 – a tiny hominin standing just 3.5 feet (106 cm) tall and weighing only 66 pounds (30 kg) – caught the scientific world completely by surprise. Scientists announced the initial find in 2004.
Subsequent work on the Pacific island of Flores unearthed fossils of an entirely new species, now known colloquially as “the hobbit” or Flores man. H. floresiensis dates to between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Tools of the diminutive people appear in the fossil record from 190,000 to 50,000 years ago, meaning the so-called hobbits shared their world with modern humans.According to Forth, the hobbits may still hide today in the lush rain forests of Flores, alongside the ravenous Komodo dragon. READ MORE...
The course of human evolution never did run smooth. The emergence of hominins on the continent of Africa is full of twists, turns, gaps, and dead ends, which makes it all the more difficult to retrace the rise of our own species.
Today, we still don't really know when or where the first Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, although an archaeological site in southwestern Ethiopia is one of our best lines of evidence.
It was here, in the 1960s, that paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey uncovered the earliest examples of fossils with undisputedly modern human anatomies.
To be clear, older remains attributed to Homo sapiens exist, dating back hundreds of thousands of years. But the line between us and our ancestors is a smear of characteristics, leaving us with the remains known as Omo I as a starting point for what is unequivocally modern.
The ancient bones of this long lost ancestor, named for the nearby Omo River, were buried with mollusk shells, which were, at the time, dated to about 130,000 years of age.
In the decades since, radioactive dating of the surrounding soil has allowed us to push back that age even further to about 200,000 years. And yet even that could be an underestimation. READ MORE...
Fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.
In the 150 years since Charles Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa, the number of species in the human family tree has exploded, but so has the level of dispute concerning early human evolution. Fossil apes are often at the center of the debate, with some scientists dismissing their importance to the origins of the human lineage (the “hominins”), and others conferring them starring evolutionary roles. A new review out on May 7 in the journal Science looks at the major discoveries in hominin origins since Darwin’s works and argues that fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.
Humans diverged from apes — specifically, the chimpanzee lineage — at some point between about 9.3 million and 6.5 million years ago, towards the end of the Miocene epoch. To understand hominin origins, paleoanthropologists aim to reconstruct the physical characteristics, behavior, and environment of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.
“When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it’s just a big mess — there’s no consensus whatsoever,” said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review. “People are working under completely different paradigms, and that’s something that I don’t see happening in other fields of science.”
There are two major approaches to resolving the human origins problem: “Top-down,” which relies on analysis of living apes, especially chimpanzees; and “bottom-up,” which puts importance on the larger tree of mostly extinct apes. For example, some scientists assume that hominins originated from a chimp-like knuckle-walking ancestor. Others argue that the human lineage originated from an ancestor more closely resembling, in some features, some of the strange Miocene apes. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
