Latest Paranthropus Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Four new studies have taken a new look at the diets of our ancestors and have found their behavior was a “game changer” for early humans some 3.5 million years ago. An ape-like diet that included grasses and sedges paved the way for a diet rich in grains, meats and dairy from grazing animals. In the first of the four studies, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder conducted high-tech tests on tooth enamel of...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the largest studies on some of the most complete remains of early human ancestors has culminated in a comprehensive look into how an early hominid (Australopithecus sediba) moved and chewed. The study, collaborated on by an international team of scientists and published in six papers in the journal Science, details not only early traits but also describes notable features that set it apart from modern humans. The research...

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...

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...

  CT scans of fossil skull fragments may help researchers settle a long-standing debate about the evolution of Africa's Australopithecus, a key ancestor of modern humans that died out some 1.4 million years ago. The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains how CT scans shed new light on a classic evolutionary puzzle by providing crucial information about the internal anatomy of the face. For decades scientists have disagreed about the...

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...

What was really on the menus of our ancestors?For human ancestors, eating could be hard work."Our ancestors were large creatures. With very low quality foods, without cooked foods, it's very likely that they would have spent a great deal more of their day eating than we do," says Peter Ungar, distinguished professor and chairman of anthropology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.Ungar's work, understanding ancient diets, is a combination of anthropology, biology,...

Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets.Piecing together relationships between the diets of hominids several million years ago to that of early and modern humans is allowing scientists to see how diet relates to the evolution of cognitive abilities, social structures, locomotion and even...