Palaeoanthropology

JCU's Professor Paul Dirks and Associate Professor Eric Roberts have spent the past few years analysing fossils of the hominid Homo naledi, found deep in a cave system in South Africa in 2013. The pair were involved in investigating the site and describing the find in a paper released in 2015.

A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) of the bony head-crests of male gorillas could provide some of the first clues about the social structures of our extinct human relatives, including how they chose their sexual partners.

The sediments forming the layers or strata at archaeological sites can be very rich in bone remains, but until now their possible fossil DNA content had not attracted the attention of paleoanthropologists.

The most comprehensive study on the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, has found that they most likely evolved from an ancestor in Africa and not from Homo erectus as has been widely believed.

On the 18th of December 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery of the infamous Piltdown bones to the Royal Geological Society. Contrary to popular opinion and in keeping with the scientific process, the scientific community were very sceptical of the discovery. That didn’t stop tabloid journalism from exaggerating and embellishing the discovery for a patriotic and nationalistic British public.

The cognitive abilities of Neanderthals are debated, but a raven bone fragment found at the Zaskalnaya VI (ZSK) site in Crimea features two notches that may have been made by Neanderthals intentionally to display a visually consistent pattern.

The decade of the 1970’s will be remembered for a long time to come as a paradigm altering time in hominin evolutionary research and much was attributable to the 1974 discovery of A.L. 288-1, known to most by the nickname “Lucy”. For most of us who work in palaeoanthropology, the story of how this partial skeleton was found has been covered to death in books and articles countless times.

The Upper Palaeolithic is best understood period of the Old Stone Age, beginning shortly after the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis and the encroachment of the new hominin Homo sapiens from Africa into Europe.

A large international research team has found the oldest fossil human cranium in Portugal, marking an important contribution to knowledge of human evolution during the middle Pleistocene in Europe and to the origin of the Neandertals.

Ancient DNA found in the dental plaque of Neandertals – our nearest extinct relative – has provided remarkable new insights into their behaviour, diet and evolutionary history, including their use of plant-based medicine to treat pain and illness.

Nature magazine, and in which scientific investigators from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) collaborated, provides information about the diet of the Neanderthals who inhabited the El Sidrón site in Asturias, northern Spain.

Two partial archaic human skulls, from the Lingjing site, Xuchang, central China, provide a new window into the biology and populations patterns of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia.

The Homo antecessor, a hominin species that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula around 800,000 years ago, would have a mechanically more demanding diet than other hominin species in Europe and the African continent.

Researchers working on ancient DNA extracted from human remains interred almost 8,000 years ago in a cave in the Russian Far East have found that the genetic makeup of certain modern East Asian populations closely resemble that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

An international group that includes a University of Kansas researcher has discovered a brownish piece of split limestone in a site in Croatia that suggests Neanderthals 130,000 years ago collected the rock that stands out among all other items in the cave.