The Kabua 1 Skull: What a Long-Neglected Kenyan Fossil Says About Late Pleistocene Human Diversity Dated to at least 64,000 years old, the Kabua 1 cranium is mostly Homo sapiens and partly something harder to place.

The Kabua 1 Skull: What a Long-Neglected Kenyan Fossil Says About Late Pleistocene Human Diversity
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How human evolution has been speeding up Providing some of the missing background for new research on natural selection from ancient DNA

John Hawks: How human evolution has been speeding up open.substack.com/pub/johnhawk...

The Wood They Burned: Firewood, Driftwood, and Camp Selection 780,000 Years Ago A new anthracological study from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov finds that early hominins chose their campsites partly around access to fuel.

The Wood They Burned: Firewood, Driftwood, and Camp Selection 780,000 Years Ago
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Scan Before You Sample: Micro-CT Imaging, Ancient DNA, and the Ethics of the Petrous Bone A new study from Argentina finds that CT scanning doesn’t damage ancient DNA, making the case for digital preservation before destructive analysis.

Scan Before You Sample: Micro-CT Imaging, Ancient DNA, and the Ethics of the Petrous Bone
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The Three Fates of Faro Daba Life and death snapshots from a 100,000-year-old Ethiopian refuge.

The Three Fates of Faro Daba
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The Stone Seekers of Jojosi A site in South Africa's grasslands reveals that Homo sapiens were making dedicated quarrying expeditions 220,000 years ago — far earlier than the field assumed possible

The Stone Seekers of Jojosi
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A 1.8-Million-Year-Old Elephant Butchery Site in Tanzania Rewrites the Timeline of Human Megafaunal Exploitation New spatial and taphonomic evidence from Olduvai Gorge suggests our ancestors were processing giant elephants far earlier — and more systematically — than the fossil record had indicated.

A 1.8-Million-Year-Old Elephant Butchery Site in Tanzania Rewrites the Timeline of Human Megafaunal Exploitation
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The Lehringen Spear, Revisited New analysis of a 125,000-year-old Neanderthal site in Germany settles old doubts about elephant hunting and reveals a far more versatile predator than the record suggested

The Lehringen Spear, Revisited
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One Kind of Stone: What 60 Butchered Bison Reveal About Middle Pleistocene Planning The site where hominins don’t behave the way they’re supposed to

One Kind of Stone: What 60 Butchered Bison Reveal About Middle Pleistocene Planning
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Monte Verde's Dates Are Wrong. Maybe. A new independent study argues the Americas' most famous pre-Clovis site is thousands of years younger than believed — and the original excavators are not having it.

Monte Verde's Dates Are Wrong. Maybe.
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The Bow Didn't Spread Gradually. It Arrived. New radiocarbon evidence rewrites the timeline of one of prehistory's most consequential weapon transitions — and reveals that how a technology spreads depends as much on ecology as on invention.

The Bow Didn't Spread Gradually. It Arrived.
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What Elephant Teeth Tell Us About Neanderthal Hunters Strontium isotopes in 125,000-year-old molars reveal the surprisingly distant origins of the giant prey Neanderthals hunted at a German lakeside site

What Elephant Teeth Tell Us About Neanderthal Hunters
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Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human? Evaluating a recent hypothesis from the geneticist David Reich, focusing on range expansion from Africa.

Did Levallois tools make Neanderthals human?
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What a Fractured Skull Can Tell You About How Someone Died A new bioengineering framework helps archaeologists distinguish violent from accidental cranial trauma in the archaeological record.

What a Fractured Skull Can Tell You About How Someone Died
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A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel Ten years after describing the site, new work details ancient access to the cave.

A look at the Neanderthal deep cave structures from Bruniquel
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A 7.2-Million-Year-Old Femur from Bulgaria and the Origins of Human Walking A nearly complete thighbone from a Bulgarian fossil site suggests bipedalism may have evolved earlier than we thought, and not in Africa

A 7.2-Million-Year-Old Femur from Bulgaria and the Origins of Human Walking
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Possible Arrowheads from 80,000 Years Ago in Uzbekistan Are Rewriting Where Homo sapiens Came From Tiny stone fragments in a Central Asian rock shelter are challenging the standard story of how our species first entered Europe

Possible Arrowheads from 80,000 Years Ago in Uzbekistan Are Rewriting Where Homo sapiens Came From
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Matrilineal networks may be the key to understanding Neanderthal mixture A new study focusing on the X chromosome finds repeated maternal dispersal bias in Neanderthal and modern evolution.

Matrilineal networks may be the key to understanding Neanderthal mixture
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What Mosquitoes Remember About Homo erectus A new genomic study suggests the ancestors of Southeast Asia's deadliest malaria vectors started targeting humans nearly two million years ago — long before Homo sapiens arrived.

What Mosquitoes Remember About Homo erectus
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The X Chromosome That Rewrote What We Know About Neanderthal Sex A new study finds the interbreeding between our species was not random — and the pattern written into ancient DNA is strange enough to demand explanation.

The X Chromosome That Rewrote What We Know About Neanderthal Sex
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Palaeoanthropological evidence from China is changing the picture of hominin evolutionary history - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors review recent archaeological and palaeoanthropological discoveries from China and discuss how they change our understanding of human evolution.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Complex fiber and wood technologies of the first Great Basin peoples From Cougar Mountain Cave and Paisley Caves, Oregon, come remarkably preserved examples of perishable materials.

John Hawks: Complex fiber and wood technologies of the first Great Basin peoples open.substack.com/pub/johnhawk...

The Cave That Kept Calling Them Back For 7,000 years, people in northern Britain buried their dead in the same limestone fissure. They weren't the same people.

The Cave That Kept Calling Them Back
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The Site That Stopped Working: Bison Hunting and Drought in Late Holocene Montana When hunters abandoned a kill site after 700 years of use, the answer wasn't scarcity

The Site That Stopped Working: Bison Hunting and Drought in Late Holocene Montana
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A Neanderthal time capsule from Grotta Guattari Excavations of a new chamber reveal an ancient floor with more than a dozen new Neanderthal fossil remains.

A Neanderthal time capsule from Grotta Guattari
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When AI Imagines Neanderthals, It Dreams of the 1960s A computational analysis reveals that generative AI produces representations of our extinct relatives that are decades out of date—and systematically biased.

When AI Imagines Neanderthals, It Dreams of the 1960s
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When Climate Doesn't Explain Everything: Two Toolkits, Two Worlds The puzzle starts with pollen

When Climate Doesn't Explain Everything: Two Toolkits, Two Worlds
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The Prince and the Bear What a lavish Ice Age burial reveals about a teenager’s violent final encounter

The Prince and the Bear
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Giant mystery fossil reveals secrets of whole new form of life that no longer exists Prototaxites belonged to an ‘entirely extinct evolutionary branch of life‘

www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

The Elephant Bone That Sharpened Stone A half-million-year-old tool from southern England reveals surprising skill in Acheulean hands

The Elephant Bone From Boxgrove That Sharpened Stone open.substack.com/pub/anthropo...