Latest Homo Stories

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...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists know that early Humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (H. s. neanderthalensis) coexisted for a short time before the latter eventually became extinct. While it was understood that humans had better developed brains than their more primitive counterparts, it was generally not well-known why these early ancestors made a grand exit. A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests one...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In a field of study that remains largely in the dark, we have relied on the voice talent of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary to instruct our children about life in the time of the Ice Age. While the lessons learned aren’t necessarily accurate, one Bournemouth University lecturer on palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and environmental change seemingly thinks it might be a good place to start. Dr. John Stewart, throughout...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Popular theories have placed the Neanderthal extinction at about 35,000 years ago, based on dating of the earliest bone fossils found at a Neanderthal site in southern Iberia. However, researchers from Australia and Europe are now refuting that evidence after taking another careful look at the bones and implementing an improved method to filter out contamination. Based on the new study, the Neanderthal may have actually died out much...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A multinational team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the leg of an early modern human found in the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. The Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestor of many present-day Asians and Native Americans, the analysis showed. Moreover, the team found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Research and excavations by a Canadian researcher from sites in southern Tanzania could lead to a rethinking of the ‘Out of Africa’ narrative that describes the human diaspora around the globe, according to a new report in the journal Quaternary International. Led by Pamela Willoughby, the Iringa Region Archaeological Project has uncovered artifacts that suggest a constant human occupation between today and at least 200,000...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Africa, and especially South Africa, is one-step closer to being confirmed as the primary center for the early development of human behavior. Scientists have searched for the origin of modern human behavior and technological advancement among our early African ancestors for a long time. Wits University archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, along with a team of international researchers, has published the first detailed summary...

Watch the Video: Mysterious Hominids Discovered In Denisova Cave April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A tiny bit of a finger bone, found in a Siberian cave, is shedding light on a rather enigmatic group of early humans called the Denisovans. The 80,000 year-old finger bone, along with two molars, were found in 2010 at the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia's Altai Mountains. Other than the fact that they were contemporaries of Neanderthals, another extinct human...

Wits' scientists are part of the most comprehensive research to come out of Olduvai in East Africa since the early 1980s The first systematic, multidisciplinary results to come out of research conducted on the edge of the Serengeti at the rich palaeoanthropological site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania since that produced by Louis and Mary Leakey's team, have recently been published in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Human Evolution. Professor Marion Bamford, deputy...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists has reconstructed the dietary preferences of 3 groups of hominins found in South Africa. The paper, “Evidence for diet but not landscape use in South African early hominins," is a joint effort between the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier, and the University of the Witwatersrand and has been selected for Advanced Online Publication in the journal Nature. The...