The range of diverse habitats with which eastern African #Paranthropus can now be associated shows that this suggested adaptive niche did not restrict its ability to disperse as widely as species of Australopithecus and early Homo. 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09826-x

Check out this new digest paper published in @journal-evo.bsky.social presenting how Malagasy #lemurs cranial shape evolution is influenced by their body size. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/evol...

A fossil belonging to an ancient hominin that lived seven million years ago bears the hallmarks of bipedalism, according to a new study

New research! The paper, “New finds shed light on diet and locomotion in Australopithecus deyiremeda,” was published in the journal Nature this month. The team was led by Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie. Read more: bit.ly/48CmpMi

New post by me on #MITPressReader @mitpress.bsky.social On the 100th anniversary of the #ScopesMonkeyTrial the ways we depict #evolution can still give an erroneous progressive view (that evolution leads to humans or ‘increased complexity’). thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-our-pictu...

Challenging the name! Jesse Martin & colleagues argue Little Foot (StW 573) can’t be called Australopithecus prometheus… …dissent in the fossil world 🦴😅😁 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A paper in Nature shows that a 3.4-million-year-old partial foot found in Ethiopia in 2009 belongs to an ancient human relative named Australopithecus deyiremeda, a more primitive species of Australopithecus than the famous ‘Lucy’ (A. afarensis). go.nature.com/49BkCZY 🏺 🧪

The 3.4 million-year-old Burtele foot from Ethiopia had a grasping big toe & more flexible midfoot than seen in contemporaneous Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species). This suggested a mystery lineage parallel to A. afarensis. Now we might know who that foot belonged to. #paleoanthropology 🧪🏺

Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in 12,000 years 🔗 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n.... A #volcano in #Ethiopia has erupted for the first time in nearly 12,000 years, sending thick plumes of smoke up to 9 miles (14km) into the sky, and across the Red Sea toward #Yemen and #Oman.

“When am I ever going to use this?” The real answer #students need to hear 🔗 substack.com/home/post/p-...

Eating #carrion may have made us human: The importance of #scavenging in our evolution 🔗 phys.org/news/2025-10...

Mongle, C.S., Orr, C.M., Tocheri, M.W. et al. New fossils reveal the hand of Paranthropus boisei. Nature (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Selective use of distant stone resources by the earliest #Oldowan toolmakers 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New discoveries of #Australopithecus and #Homo from #Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The radiation and geographic expansion of #primates through diverse climates 🔗 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Changes in diet drove physical evolution in early humans www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Anthropology collections manager job at the AMNH @amnh.org in New York! Additional info: A PhD (or PhD candidacy) is required to apply. Prior training in collections management and databases is essential. This is not a research position. Salary range $93-98k/year. careers.amnh.org/postings/4509

Check out our new paper, led by former postdoc and current colleague Daniel Green on 18 Ma proteins in fossil teeth! Tim Cleland, a proteomics wizard, did the measurements. What's the take home? We hope to use protein fingerprints to study mammal and hominin phylogenetics! bit.ly/OldProteome

Infant craniofacial #diversity in Early Pleistocene #Homo 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A look at the EDJ of the #teeth of ancient #Egyptians suggests that foraging people were replaced by farmers during the 6th millennium BCE, rather than taking up farming themselves. Some foragers persisted in #Sudan. 🔗 ow.ly/MJEz50VvMGU

Interested in ancient food webs? Check out our new study on the paleoecology of the Pliocene large carnivore guild at Hadar (Lower Awash Valley, Ethiopia): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Why #Africans should be telling the story of human origins 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe phys.org/news/2025-03...

🚨New article🚨Our #research on #elephant🐘and #strontium #isotopes in #teeth🦷is published with @commsbio.bsky.social We show how Sr is recorded in teeth and how we use such records to help reconstruct migration. @kevinuno.bsky.social @kpodkovyroff.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Running performance in Australopithecus afarensis 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An open-access collection of early fossil hominin scans from Swartkrans, South Africa was recently published in the journal PaleoAnthropology by Skinner et al. Both Paranthropus robustus & early Homo are represented in the assemblage. paleoanthropology.org/ojs/index.ph... 🏺🧪🦣 #paleoanthropology

New evidence suggests early human ancestor presence in #Eurasia by at least 2 Mya Curran et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The question of human dominance over the planet has long intrigued scientists and philosophers alike. Recently, #ThomasMorgan, an evolutionary anthropologist @asuiho.bsky.social, proposed a fascinating hypothesis to explain why humans rule the world. 🔗 news.asu.edu/20241107-hea...

In southern Africa, grazing herbivores decline over the last 50 kyr, but regional pollen records show no change in grass abundance through time. How do we make sense of these patterns? Check out our new study led by postdoc Alex Norwood (Univ of Utah) in QSA: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

After the amazing paper by @kevinhatala.bsky.social & colleagues on locomotor variation in early #hominins, an exciting new study led by George Brill on forms of locomotion in #foragers 'Extensive locomotor versatility across a global sample of hunter–gatherer societies' doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Ancient #footprints capture #coexistence of two kinds of human ancestor 🔗 www.science.org/content/arti...

“Analyses showed that the #footprints were made by individuals with different gaits and stances, and the authors hypothesize these to be #Homo erectus and #Paranthropus boilei. “ 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“Variation among species in brain size is associated with body mass differences but not time.” 🔗 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My lab at OSU is hiring a postdoc in skeletal morphology to start fall 25. Salary is at NIH base pay. Deadline to apply is March 2 2025. osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

“Much about the #human evolutionary story has changed over the past century, but one reality has not. Despite crucial developments in molecular & primatological studies, fossils & their context remain the primary evidence for understanding our origins.” 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/....

How human brains got so big: our cells learned to handle the stress that comes with size www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Lucy! Lucy was discovered by paleoanthropologist and long-time supporter of NCSE Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. Her discovery transformed our understanding of human origins. #lucy50 #humanorigins #evolution #celebratescience

Our ancestor Lucy may have used tools more than 3 million years ago 🏺🧪 www.livescience.com/archaeology/... "...we can't definitively say that these early humans crafted stone tools... their hands were frequently used in ways that closely align with the actions necessary for human tool manipulation"

#Ethiopian wolves reported to feed on #nectar for the first time. Researchers have documented Ethiopian wolves consuming nectar from red hot poker flowers, marking the first recorded instance of a large carnivore species feeding on floral nectar. 🔗 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Meet #Lucy, the celebrity of fossils, who changed our view of evolution - @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/science/inte...

" #African scholars were never part of telling the human story; nor could they actively #participate in the analysis of the fossils they found. Up to the 1990s, long after #Lucy was found, we were only present in the form of labourers and fossil hunters." 🔗 theconversation.com/fifty-years-...

Punctuated equilibrium at 50: Anything there for evolutionary anthropology? Yes; definitely 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

‘Deep inside, something told me I had found the earliest human ancestor; I went numb’ – #YohannesHaile-Selassie on his lifetime quest to discover ancient humanity 🔗 theconversation.com/deep-inside-...

Ancient human ancestor #Lucy was not alone — she lived alongside at least 4 other proto-human species, emerging research suggests. 📎 www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

... Sunday reading... 5. Paleo aridity in the Levant driven by a strong North Atlantic latitudinal surface temperature gradient and present-day relevance, by Yochanan Kushnir and colleagues highlighting super interesting regional-specific patterns in interglacials doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Human evolution is not out of the woods yet! Congrats to Enqu on this landmark paper! In it, we present a new model for predicting woody cover based on an Africa-specific soil dataset. Results show hominin sites were ~13% more wooded than previously predicted! authors.elsevier.com/a/1k5a6_14mM...