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Today we’re celebrating. On February 7, 1925, a paper announced a startling fossil had been uncovered in a South African mine. With the face of a human but the small brain of a chimpanzee, the small, juvenile skull was proposed as an ancestor intermediate between humans and apes. Named Australopithecus africanus—from Australis, Latin for southern,…
For the twentieth anniversary of the surprising discovery on the island of Flores, I’ve put together a list of twenty things to know about Homo floresiensis. Found in September of 2003, the specimen came to be known as Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the hobbit. The discovery was announced a mere thirteen months later, in October…
Many have now seen the claim put forward that Homo naledi buried their dead. While I’m not here to comment on the evidence put forward in the preprint, or my concerns about announcing a find before it has completed the peer review process, I do want to address a different component of the issue. One…
People are sometimes hesitant to refer to the tiny collection of bones uncovered on the Indonesian island of Flores as the “hobbit.” It is a serious scientific discovery, after all. The steady stream of tourists who visit the cave of Liang Bua, where the discovery was made, is no exception. “These,” I tell them, showing…
One Tuesday in early November 2004, a man carefully packed a small, human-looking skull into a suitcase, descended a staircase, and exited a research center in Jakarta, Indonesia. News of the event quickly spread beyond the archipelago, provoking an international controversy. The skull, along with other bones that had been packed away with it, was…
In August of 1908, a fossil human relative was discovered when a pickaxe struck the side of a skull. That fossil, which became known as the Old Man of La Chappelle, was sent to leading paleontologist Marcellin Boule in Paris for analysis. There, Boule described a brutish creature who was crude, unintelligent, shuffling, and hunched…
“This is what Homo floresiensis must have felt like,” a paleoanthropologist mused through the darkness. It is almost 8pm on a Thursday and I am sitting on the floor of the cave known as Liang Bua. Other researchers stand only a meter from me, but I cannot see them, my eyes have yet to adjust…
“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Alice Bowman announced on the evening of July 14, 2015. Bowman, the operations manager for the New Horizons mission, was commenting on the incredible flyby of Pluto, a flyby that gave humans a closer view of the planet than we had ever seen before. In an interview following the historic flyby,…
In 2003, a single swipe of a spade rocked the field of paleoanthropology. During a routine excavation, digging through damp clay of a cave floor, that single swipe revealed an entirely unexpected creature. It was the small skull of a primitive-looking hominin, hypothesized to be a new species of human, Homo floresiensis. This incident occurred…
2017 was not an easy year. Many of us found ourselves consistently disheartened and frustrated with the events unfolding around us–so much so that it was sometimes difficult to focus on science. Given those frustrations, how does one write a roundup post celebrating the year? By applauding scientific achievement and discovery, does this diminish the…
Human evolution was a pretty crazy event (or series of events, specifically). One can’t help but wonder, how did a group of tree-dwelling apes evolve into the large-brained, upright walking creatures we see dominating the planet today? On a related note–where did this transformation even occur? This question–the question of where–has a fascinating history. Scientists…
How is it August already?! We’re more than halfway through 2017 and a dizzying amount of paleoanthropology has already happened this year. I can’t think of a better time to look back on some of the incredible discoveries that have been announced so far, so let’s count down my favorites! 5. Alesi. A 13 million-year-old ape…
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been detailing the event of “Darwin’s Worst Nightmare” as it unfolded in 1858. First, Darwin received a letter that rocked his world (not in a good way), then he asked his friends to spring into action and help him preserve his scientific priority. Today, July 1st marks the final…
Last week, I told the story of the time Darwin received a harrowing letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. The date was June 18th, 1858, and Darwin had potentially lost his originality. His claim to “discovering” evolution through natural selection–an idea he had been working on for twenty years–had seemingly vanished before his eyes. When I…
June 18th, 1858 was a rough day for Charles Darwin. On that day, he saw his worst nightmare unfold right in front of his eyes. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” he wrote to a friend, fearing that his life’s work had collapsed. What caused this moment of panic? A…
Fossil History