Qafzeh teeth like Neandertals
Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and Donald Reid report on the perikymata spacing of a sample of fourteen anterior teeth from Qafzeh. These are "early modern humans", among the earliest to be located outside...
View ArticleSeeds of MSA diet breadth
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, along with a few other grasses and palm pith....
View ArticleCrete: Pleistocene port of call?
Bruce Bower reports on excavations by Thomas Strasser on the Mediterranean island of Crete: "Ancient hominids may have been seafarers". At Preveli Gorge, Stone Age artifacts were excavated from four...
View ArticleReturn of the Neanderchimps
Back in 2005, I reviewed the first description of fossil chimpanzee teeth, from the Middle Pleistocene of the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, dating to around 500,000 years ago. At the time, I noted that...
View ArticleThe Darra-i-Kur temporal bone
Wouldn't it be fun to compile a list of skeletal specimens that might prove interesting for DNA analysis? Near the top of my list is the only Middle Paleolithic-associated specimen from Afghanistan, a...
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Sketchbook
Today's sketchbook: The mandible from the Kebara skeleton, top; Qafzeh 3, bottom. Tags: Middle PaleolithicsketchbookLate PleistoceneAsiaartNeandertals
View ArticleLost in Arabia
The BBC is reporting on a talk by archaeologist Michael Petraglia, at the British Science Festival: But Dr Michael Petraglia, of Oxford University, and colleagues say stone artefacts found in the...
View Article43,000-year-old assemblages from Highland New Guinea
Glenn Summerhayes and colleagues [1] enter a brief report in Science this week, describing radiocarbon dates for several small archaeological assemblages from the Ivane Valley, in eastern Highland New...
View ArticleThe Neandertals of Mount Doom
Well, I already snarked on the science headlines that have been claiming volcanoes "wiped out" the Neandertals. Some variation of this story, swapping in a different Neanderkiller, has been circulating...
View ArticleZhirendong puts the chin in China
A 100,000-year-old modern human from China? That's the claim made by Liu and colleagues [1], who report on a mandible and isolated teeth from Zhirendong, in South China. The remains lie under a thin...
View ArticleOrangutan dynamics of Borneo
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chimpanzees and bonobos, which are good...
View ArticleOlder and younger Acheulean in India
Shanti Pappu and colleagues [1] report on date estimates resulting from new excavations at the old site of Attarampakkam, India. The news element is that they date an Acheulean occurrence to as old as...
View ArticleNeandertals didn't disappear before 40,000 years ago
The science press has its own synchronized cycle, like brain waves, and being in Rome seems to make me into a misfiring neuron. Here it is tomorrow, and there's this story about Neandertals all being...
View ArticleLa Cotte de St. Brelade profiled
The BBC is running a nice article about the ongoing excavations on the island of Jersey at La Cotte de St. Brelade. "Neanderthal survival story revealed in Jersey caves". La Cotte's collapsed cave...
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The radiocarbon dating paper without a radiocarbon date
Nature this week released two papers about European archaeological sites that come near the end of the Neandertals and beginning of the archaeological transition to Upper Paleolithic industries. Here,...
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