Latest Hominidae Stories

Culture is not a trait that is unique to humans. By studying orangutan populations, a team of researchers headed by anthropologist Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich has demonstrated that great apes also have the ability to learn socially and pass them down through a great many generations. The researchers provide the first evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots, thus answering the contentious question as to whether variation in behavioral...

New assessments by researchers using the latest high-tech tools to study the diets of early hominids are challenging long-held assumptions about what our ancestors ate, says a study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Arkansas. By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical...

Although humans and chimpanzees move quite differently, muscle attachment sites at their thighbones are similar. This result, which has recently been published by anthropologists of Zurich University in the scientific journal "Anatomical Record", has major consequences for the interpretation of fossil hominin finds. PhD student Naoki Morimoto, member of the Computer-Assisted Paleoanthropology group of Ch. Zollikofer and M. Ponce de León, and junior author of the study, was surprised by...

  Mandenka, Biaka and San tested for DNA evidence of ancient interbreeding inside Africa The past is present when it comes to human evolution. That seems to be the takeaway from new research that concludes "archaic" humans, somewhere in Africa during the last 20-60 thousand years, interbred with anatomically modern humans and transferred small amounts of genetic material to their offspring who are alive today. University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer and a team of...

  According to a new study, the first ancestor of modern humans to master the art of cooking was homo erectus. Harvard University researchers said that the ability to cook and process food allowed homo erectus, the Neanderthals and homo sapiens to make huge evolutionary leaps that differentiated them from chimpanzees and other primates. The scientists back-up claims by previous studies that suggest homo erectus may have known how to cook.  They based their results on an analysis of...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool discovered ancient footprints that show human-like features of the feet and gait existed two million years earlier than previously thought. Earlier studies suggested that the characteristics of the human foot, such as the ability to walk upright, emerged in early Homo, which was about 1.9 million years ago. However, the Liverpool researchers have shown that footprints of a human ancestor dating back 3.7 million years ago show features of the foot with...

An analysis of two ancient hominid species that roamed southern Africa more than a million years ago suggests that females left their childhood homes while males stayed at home, an international team of researchers said on Wednesday.The scientists studied teeth from a group of extinct Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus individuals from two adjacent cave systems, and found that more than half of the female teeth were from outside the local area.By comparison, just 10 percent...

New research finds that the ancient pre-human known as "Nutcracker Man" did not dine on nuts after all, but instead dined on large quantities of grasses and sedges -- a discovery that upsets conventional wisdom about the diet of early humans."It most likely was eating grass, and most definitely was not cracking nuts," said University of Utah geochemist Thure Cerling, lead author of the study.The "Nutcracker Man", or Paranthropus boisei, is an ancient human relative that...

U.S. lawmakers proposed bills on Wednesday that would ban medical researchers from using chimpanzees in the U.S."Scientists worldwide have halted chimpanzee experiments, because these intelligent creatures suffer immensely and are poor models for researching human diseases," Elizabeth Kucinich, director of government affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said in a statement. Her research ethics group has campaigned for the bills now being pushed in the...

Experiment stresses consequences of placing newly discovered fossils on human family treeSomeday a future intelligent organism could sweep away a million years of dust and find the bones of a Homo sapiens and wonder what he was.Further research would show Homo sapiens walked upright, lived in communities and buried their dead. But this future intelligent organism might be faced with an old puzzle--determining where Homo sapiens came from."If their cognitive world induced them to ask the...