This volume provides a landscape narrative of early hominin evolution, linking conventional material and geographic aspects of the early archaeological record with wider and more elusive social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. It seeks to move beyond a limiting notion of … Continue reading
At once a pioneering study of evolution and an accessible and lively reading experience, The Mating Mind marks the arrival of a prescient and provocative new science writer. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers the most convincing–and radical–explanation for how and why … Continue reading
Over time, diet causes dramatic changes to our anatomy, immune systems and maybe skin color. You aren’t what you eat, exactly. But over many generations, what we eat does shape our evolutionary path. “Diet,” says anthropologist John Hawks, of the … Continue reading
Palaeoanthropologists have used the anatomical signs of bipedalism to identify our earliest ancestors, demonstrating our shared genetic heritage with great apes. However, despite this shared history, human evolution set out on a trajectory that has led to significant distinctions from … Continue reading
Fossil evidence points to an African origin of Homo sapiens from a group called either H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis. However, the exact place and time of emergence of H. sapiens remain obscure because the fossil record is scarce and the chronological age of … Continue reading
Neanderthals are an extinct group of fossil humans that appeared in Western Eurasia in the mid-Middle Pleistocene. They shared the stage with the first modern humans arriving in Europe from around 45,000 years ago, before disappearing from the fossil record … Continue reading
Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species of human that is identified in both Africa and western Eurasia from roughly 700,000 years ago onwards until around 200,000 years ago – fitting snugly within the Middle Pleistocene. Named for a piece of … Continue reading
Over the past half-decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years. Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the … Continue reading
The origin of modern humans continues to be a major topic in paleoanthropology. The debate over the mode of the origin of modern humans – was it a single, recent origin or global and gradual – continues, but new genetic … Continue reading
Many of the important advances made by biologists in the past 150 years can be reduced to a single metaphor. All living, or extant, organisms, that is, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and all the types of organisms that lived … Continue reading
