Palaeoanthropology

The science of Palaeoanthropology is an ever-changing field with advances in technology and the discovery of fresh evidence allowing interpretational change.

As more DNA sequencing data continues to become available, including extinct hominids, a new human origins study has been performed that augments a trio of influential papers published in 2016 in the journal Nature.

Bits of wood recovered from a 1.2-million-year-old tooth found at an excavation site in northern Spain indicate that the ancient relatives of man may have use a kind of toothpick.

Studying dental plaque from a 1.2 million year old hominin (early human species), recovered by the Atapuerca Research Team in 2007 in Sima del Elefante in northern Spain, archaeologists extracted microfossils to find the earliest direct evidence of food eaten by early humans.

New research led by the University of Southampton shows Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago.

Scans of bones from "Lucy," the 3.18 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis fossil, suggest that the relative strength of her arms and legs was in between that of modern chimpanzees and modern humans, according to a study published November 30, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Christopher Ruff from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA, and colleagues.

Scientists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen discovered that Neanderthals modified their survival strategies even without external influences, such as environmental or climate changes.

Our most remote ancestors, hominines, had a diet richer and more varied that what it was thought until the present moment, according to an article published in the journal PLOS ONE by a team of the Biological Anthropology Unit from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the University of Barcelona.

The Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago, but little pieces of them live on in the form of DNA sequences scattered through the modern...

A fossil footprint is one of the most evocative insights into the past. It can tell you not only about presence, but also about the biomechanics of the track-maker. We have studied ancient footprints from around the world for more than a decade – and perhaps most notably we were part of the team that discovered the second oldest human footprints at Ileret in northern Kenya in 2009. They date back 1.5m years and were likely made by Homo erectus.

Neanderthals in cold regions probably ate a lot more vegetable food than was previously thought. This is what archaeologist Robert Power has discovered based on new research on ancient Neanderthal dental plaque.

Perhaps the bias against left-handers dates back much further than we thought.

Cancer is often viewed as a fundamentally modern and monolithic disease. Many people think its rise and spread has been driven almost exclusively by the developed world’s toxins and poisons; by our bad eating habits, lifestyles, and the very air we breathe.

Lucy, the most famous fossil of a human ancestor, probably died after falling from a tree, according to a study appearing inNature led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The study of dental calculus from Late Mesolithic individuals from the site of Vlasac in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans has provided direct evidence that Mesolithic foragers of this region consumed domestic cereals already by c. 6600 BC, i.e. almost half a millennium earlier than previously thought.