Hominids 'n Such

130,000-year-old fossils from San Diego show signs of butchery, significantly pushing back the timeline of human history in the Americas.

We know a lot about the life of Lucy, the famous fossil of Australopithecus afarensis —our ancient ancestor and bridge to the ape world.

Lucy was 3 feet tall; she lived in what is now Ethiopia and she walked upright. She ate leaves, grass and maybe nuts and seeds. She probably slept in a tree nest.

And now, after studying a 3-D scan of Lucy’s bones, scientists say they know something about her death. In a study published Monday in Nature, researchers at the University of Texas present evidence they say shows Lucy died after she fell out of a tree.

But other paleoanthropologists fired back, saying there was insufficient evidence to support the tree-fall theory.

Read more about the new theory here - and decide if you buy it!

Carved Box with Deities

Guatemala, Northern Petén, Maya, 450-550

Slip-painted ceramic with post-fire pigment

It is extremely rare to find preserved brain dating back to ancient times because brain tissue is rich in enzymes which cause cells to break down rapidly after death. If analyses confirm the grey-matter found within the 8,000-year-old skull in Norway is indeed brain, it will constitute one of the oldest brains ever found. Being able to study a preserved brain enables scientists to piece together the individual’s last hours and may also shed new light on health and disease in prehistoric times.

shanidar 1 is a neanderthal who, at a pretty young age, was hit in the head hard enough to blind him. this also led to that side of his brain shutting down and withering his right arm, and possibly crippling his entire right side. not only that but his skeleton also shows that at some point, he broke a bone in his foot and, in addition to the other factors, resulted in a noticeable limp. there are some sources which say he likely had degenerative diseases. (arthritis was really common in neanderthals) 

going off of widespread ideas of “”primitive”” (no longer the word used in anthropology/academia to describe early-modern humans) societies, shanidar probably died really young, deliberately abandoned or killed. i mean, he was severely crippled, blind, etc., he couldn’t contribute anything, he would have been a “”burden to society””, right? 

except he lived to be between 40 and 50 years old. (about ~80 in human years)

this means that his social group had to have taken care of him for a minimum of two or three decades without his ‘contributing’ anything significant to the group. this discovery (and Shanidar III’s) was huge because it basically proves that early humans had a concept of hospice. early modern humans cared for the sick and the elderly, greatly extending their lifespan, simply because they cared. 

When you think of a Neanderthal what do you imagine? Do you see a prehistoric teacher for modern humans? Some tools found in France suggest that they may have been skilled at toolmaking, and even shared their abilities with our ancestors!

In saliva, scientists have found hints that a “ghost” species of archaic humans may have contributed genetic material to ancestors of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa today.

The research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that sexual rendezvous between different archaic human species may not have been unusual.

Past studies have concluded that the forebears of modern humans in Asia and Europe interbred with other early hominin species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. The new research is among more recent genetic analyses indicating that ancient Africans also had trysts with other early hominins.