Latest Homo Stories

By Simon Usborne It was 1974 and Dr Donald Johanson and his student, Tom Gray, were heading back to camp after a fruitless morning searching for fossils in the scorched ravines of Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Then something in the dust caught Gray's eye. It was part of an arm, immediately recognisable as hominid, or human-like. As the American paleoanthropologists looked further, they spotted fragments of a skull, thigh, ribs and jaw. Bone sightings in the Awash valley, one of the world's most...

By David Charters LANGUAGE leaves no bones in the earth for the archaeologists, so we cannot tell when man first spoke. But we can stretch our imaginations back to the edge of a pond, where a young woman completes her ablutions by rubbing a pigment into her cheeks. She smiles at the reflection. "Wow", or "phew", or "mmmm", says the young chap on the far bank, not realising that his utterance changed the world. For this vocal appreciation of colour used as a...

By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - Hobbit-sized humans who survived on an isolated Indonesian island until 12,000 years ago were smart enough to make stone tools even though they had small brains, scientists said on Wednesday. Some researchers doubt that tools found with the remains of the species named Homo floresiensis in a cave on the island of Flores could have been made by the 3 foot tall creatures whose brains were about the size of a grapefruit. They believe the tools must...

By Patricia ReaneyLONDON -- Hobbit-sized humans who survived on an isolated Indonesian island until 12,000 years ago were smart enough to make stone tools even though they had small brains, scientists said on Wednesday.Some researchers doubt that tools found with the remains of the species named Homo floresiensis in a cave on the island of Flores could have been made by the 3 foot tall creatures whose brains were about the size of a grapefruit.They believe the tools must have been made by...

NASA -- Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. Instead, imagine ancient hominid children chasing frogs. Not for fun, but for food. According to Dr. Stephen Cunnane it was a rich and secure shore-based diet that fuelled and provided the essential nutrients to make our brains what they are today. Controversially, according to Dr. Cunnane our initial brain boost didn't happen by adaptation, but by exaptation, or chance....

LONDON -- Australian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered more remains of hobbit-sized humans which belong to a previously unknown species that lived at the end of the last Ice Age.Professor Mike Morwood, of the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, stunned the science world last year when he and his team announced the discovery of 18,000-year-old remains of a new human species called Homo floresiensis.The partial skeleton discovered in a limestone cave on the...

SHE MAY have only been a midget but her bones have generated a huge row in the world of human palaeontology, already reeling from the dramatic implications of her discovery. All the experts who have studied her tiny skull and skeleton believe the "hobbit woman" found on a remote Indonesian island represents a new human species that only died out in recent history. However, a maverick scientist disputes this interpretation, saying she was just another member of our own species but with a...