Latest Homo erectus Stories

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study has once again shown that our human ancestors had no qualms about eating every part of their prey, including the brains. After uncovering fossils in Kenya, anthropologist Joseph Ferraro of Baylor University and his colleagues discovered that the earliest humans living in East Africa had a taste for multiple parts of the antelope. These early humans would even scavenge the leftovers of larger predators and finish off...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The hobbit human, a small-statured race that evolved separately from our own ancestor Homo erectus on an island of the Indonesian Archipelago some 50,000 years ago, has been discovered by Japanese scientists to have a bigger brain than once believed. Hobbit humans, named after the tiny folk from JRR Tolkein's novels, are collectively known as Homo floresiensis (Man of Flores). The remains of the ancient humans were discovered on...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Although it is considered completely taboo in most modern societies, an ancient human skull found in northern China suggests inbreeding could have been prevalent among ancient peoples around 100,000 years ago, according to a report in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The skull – which was found at Xujiayao, a mountainous excavation site several hundred miles from the Mongolian border – contained an enlarged parietal foramen (EPF),...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of anthropologists, led by the University of Toronto, has found evidence that human ancestors used stone tipped weapons for hunting 500,000 years ago. This is 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to the new study published in Science. "This changes the way we think about early human adaptations and capacities before the origin of our own species," says Jayne Wilkins, a PhD candidate in the Department of...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the human and primate fossil records become more complete, researchers are beginning to see the amount of complexity involved in man’s evolution. That evolutionary tree became even more complex with the discovery of new fossils that suggest there were two additional Homo species living alongside our direct ancestors, Homo erectus, around two million years ago. According to a report published in the journal Nature this week,...

The reconstruction of 27 complete human limb bones found in Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) has helped to determine the height of various species of the Pleistocene era. Homo heilderbergensis, like Neanderthals, were similar in height to the current population of the Mediterranean. Along with its enormous quantity of fossils, one of the most important features of the Sima de los Huesos (SH) site in Atapuerca, Burgos, is the splendid state of the findings. They are so well conserved that the 27...

Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com The reexamination of an ancestral human fossil found almost 90 years ago indicates that evolutionary changes in human brain development started 2.5 million years ago, about the time these ancestors began to walk upright. Florida State University researcher Dean Faulk and her colleagues analyzed the 2.2 million-year-old Taung fossil of a 3 to 4-year-old child and found several features that suggest a developed mechanism that allowed for the growth of a more...

An international team of researchers say that they have identified one-million year old archaeological evidence that human ancestors used and controlled fire, suggesting that our predecessors may have mastered flame approximately 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, which was led by researchers from the University of Toronto and Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), resulted in the discovery...

The sciences website EurekaMag.com publishes insights into specific subjects of all areas of natural science. The latest review covers the Great White Shark which is a large lamniform shark found in coastal surface waters in all major oceans, Homo Erectus which is an extinct species of humans that lived between 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago, and Vostok station which is a Russian Antarctic research station at the southern Pole of Cold, with the lowest temperature on Earth of −89.2 degrees...

Dietary change led to the appearance of modern humans in the Middle East 400,000 years ago, say TAU researchers Elephants have long been known to be part of the Homo erectus diet. But the significance of this specific food source, in relation to both the survival of Homo erectus and the evolution of modern humans, has never been understood — until now. When Tel Aviv University researchers Dr. Ran Barkai, Miki Ben-Dor, and Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient...