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Articles on Hominids

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Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate. Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

Fossil teeth reveal how brains developed in utero over millions of years of human evolution – new research

Using a new equation based on today’s primates, scientists can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.
The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia. Ludovic Slimak

New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories

Stone artifacts and a fossil tooth point to Homo sapiens living at Grotte Mandrin 54,000 years ago, at a time when Neanderthals were still living in Europe.
Rampasasa people are from Waemulu village, Flores – near Liang Bua where ‘the Hobbit’ fossils were discovered. Dean Falk, Florida State University

We know why short-statured people of Flores became small – but for the extinct ‘Hobbit’ it’s not so clear

Modern day people of short stature became physically small due to the effects of living on a small island or forested environment. But we’re not sure why “the Hobbit” of Flores was so small.
Volume rendered image of the external morphology of the foot bone shows the extent of expansion of the primary bone cancer beyond the surface of the bone. Patrick Randolph-Quinney (UCLAN)

What can a 1.7-million-year-old hominid fossil teach us about cancer?

Cancer is a deadly disease and would have been particularly lethal before the recent development of effective treatments. So why didn’t it – or our susceptibility to it – die out long ago?
Excavating stone artifacts that date from 3.3 million years ago in Kenya. MPK-WTAP

Our stone tool discovery pushes back the archaeological record by 700,000 years

Stone tools excavated in Kenya date back 3.3 million years – making them about a million years older than the oldest known fossils from our own hominid genus Homo. Who made and used these tools?
Very few people today live a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and Paleo diets likely oversimplify what would have been on the table many millennia ago. Thiery

Real Paleo Diet: early hominids ate just about everything

Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something…

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