Latest Hominini Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Our ancestors about 3.5 million years ago had a diet that mainly consisted of tropical grasses and sedges, according to a new study. Scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that they extracted information from the fossilized teeth of three Australopithecus bahrelghazali individuals, which were the first early hominins excavated at two sites in Africa. "We found evidence suggesting that early...
Chimpanzee behavior suggests tree-to-ground transition occurred before emergence of ancient humans The first study into rarely documented ground-nest building by wild chimpanzees offers new clues about the ancient transition of early hominins from sleeping in trees to sleeping on the ground. While most apes build nests in trees, this study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, focused on a group of wild West African chimpanzees that often shows ground-nesting...
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...
In an article published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE on October 21, 2009, Dr Thomas Plummer of Queens College at the City University of New York, Dr Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and colleagues report the oldest archeological evidence of early human activities in a grassland environment, dating to 2 million years ago. The article highlights new research and its implications concerning the environments in which human...
Researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia (ICP), from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, directed by professor Salvador Moyà -Solà , publish this week in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS) the results of their research regarding the find of a new genus of hominoid primate at els Hostalets de Pierola, l'Anoia. This fossil remains displays very interesting particularities, such as an extraordinarily flat face, and...
A 6 million-year-old early relative of modern humans apparently walked on two feet, pushing back the origins of so-called bipedalism, according to a new study of a fossil found in Kenya. "I would say at this point it's the earliest fossil hominin that we can clearly identify as bipedal," said paleoanthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University, who conducted a quantitative analysis with Brian Richmond of George Washington University of a fossilized femur...
A new study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knucklewalking. David Raichlen, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, conducted the study with Michael Sockol from the University of California, Davis, who was the lead author of the paper, and Herman Pontzer from Washington University in St. Louis. Raichlen and his colleagues will publish the article, "Chimpanzee...
