Walking on two feet
Displaying 21 - 30 of 44 articles
Australians have become oddly obsessed with our ancestry. Something in our collective psyche as a nation seems to be turning a healthy curiosity about the past into a deep yearning to belong. What’s fuelling…
For the first couple of centuries of European occupation of Australia the history of its Indigenous people, as written by white fellas, drew heavily on adjectives like ‘primitive’. As both a white fella…
When I think back to the traumatic birth of my own daughter - and how I would have lost her and my partner if it hadn’t been for some swift medical intervention - I can’t help but wonder how the heck we’ve…
When a skeleton of the so-called ‘Hobbit’ - scientific name Homo floresiensis - was unearthed in Indonesia in 2003 it would go on to cause a major furor in anthropological circles like few others before…
If I had taken a straw poll among anthropologists 10 years ago asking them how far genetic research would come in the next decade, I doubt anyone would have come close to predicting the big impact fossil…
When was the remote Australian continent first settled? Where did these ancient Australians come from? Was the island settled once, or on multiple occasions? Is there a genealogical connection between…
When and where did humans split from the apes to become a separate branch of bipeds? Are we an ape or not? If so, which of the living Great Apes is the closest to humans? European philosophers and scientists…
Political and economic pundits constantly remind us that this is the ‘Asian Century’, and it’s shaping up to be that way also for human origins science. I’ve only recently waxed lyrical about the enormous…
Archaeological discoveries in East Asia over the last decade or so have dramatically rewritten our understanding of human evolution. But the implications don’t sit easily with many scholars internationally…
Humans have had a profound influence over evolution; ours and the evolution of many other species. So much so today that we are without doubt in the driver’s seat of evolution for many species, including…