Latest Prehistoric Africa Stories

Within the coarsening base of an ancient mudstone exposure in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, researchers say they found evidence that provides new information about the best-known early human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis.Yohannes Haile-Selassie--curator and head of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History--and an international team of scientists dug up a 3.6 million-year-old partial skeleton of the same species as the famed hominid "Lucy." It's only the...

Almost two million years ago, early humans began eating food such as crocodiles, turtles and fish "“ a diet that could have played an important role in the evolution of human brains and our footsteps out of Africa, according to new research.In what is the first evidence of consistent amounts of aquatic foods in the human diet, an international team of researchers has discovered early stone tools and cut marked animal remains in northern Kenya. The work has just been published in the...

According to a genetic study, researchers have found that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, most likely at the time when early humans first began to migrate from Africa. In Friday's issue of the journal Science, researchers report that people of European, Asian and Australian origin all have Neanderthal DNA. They discovered, however, that people from Africa have no traces of the ancient genome. Researchers believe the study will help resolve a long-lasting debate over whether...

Fossil find sheds light on the transition to Homo genus from earlier hominidsTwo partial skeletons unearthed from a cave in South Africa belong to a previously unclassified species of hominid that is now shedding new light on the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens, researchers say. The newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, was an upright walker that shared many physical traits with the earliest known Homo species"”and its introduction into the fossil record might...

Experiments by a UA anthropologist and his colleagues show that fossil footprints made 3.6 million years ago are the earliest direct evidence of early hominids using the kind of efficient, upright posture and gait now seen in modern humansMore than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening.David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology,...

In recent years, DNA evidence has added important new tools for scientists studying the human past. Now, a collection of reviews published by Cell Press in a special issue of Current Biology published online on February 22nd offers a timely update on how new genetic evidence, together with archaeological and linguistic evidence, has enriched our understanding of human history on earth."To understand what it is to be human, it is essential to understand the human past," says Colin...

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...

A U.S. biological anthropologist says he's determined humans did not evolve from apes, but, rather, apes evolved from humans. Kent State University Professor C. Owen Lovejoy, who specializes in the study of human origins, said his findings came from a study of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what now is Ethiopia. People often think we evolved from apes, but no, apes in many ways evolved from us, Lovejoy said. It has been a popular idea to think...

A 17-year investigation into the discovery of the fragile remains of a small "ground ape" discovered in Ethiopia is described today in a special issue of the journal Science.The report includes 11 papers about the discovery of the Ardipithecus fossils, which include a partial skeleton of a female nicknamed "Ardi", the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree.  The branch includes Homo sapiens as well as species closer to humans than to...

Thousands of years ago, early humans formed higher quality stone tools by putting the rocks in a fire. The 72,000-year-old evidence has been dug up in Africa, researchers announced in of the journal Science.The discovery predates the first evidence of this kind of skill by 45,000 years, reported Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Human Origins, and a co-writer of the report."Heat treatment technology begins with a genius moment - someone discovers that heating stone...