Michelle Langley, Griffith University Can you imagine walking 14,000km? Trekking across wide savannas, down creek beds, along mountain chains in terrain that is new and home to foreign types of plants and animals? Can I eat this? What is that? This long excursion – once thought only to have been attempted late in the journey […]
Humankind’s odyssey from Africa began more than two million years ago Read More »
Akinwumi Ogundiran, University of North Carolina – Charlotte The Yoruba are among the most storied groups in Africa. Their ancestral homeland cuts across present-day southwest Nigeria, Benin Republic and Togo in West Africa. They number between 35 and 40 million. Their dynamic culture, philosophy, arts, language, sociology and history have attracted numerous studies. What has
A long view sheds fresh light on the history of the Yoruba people in West Africa Read More »
Julie Dunne, University of Bristol The honeybee is the world’s most important pollinator of food crops and beekeeping plays an important global economic role. Around 1.6 million tonnes of honey is produced annually and wild honey is also known to be widely collected by foragers globally. Hive products like honey, beeswax, bee larvae, pollen and
Beeswax in Nok pots provides evidence of early West African honey use Read More »
John McNabb, University of Southampton East Africa is famously the birthplace of humankind and the location where our ancient hominin ancestors first invented sophisticated stone tools. This technology, dating back to 2.6m years ago, is then thought to have spread around Africa and the rest of the Old World later on. But new research, published
Elizabeth Sawchuk, University of Alberta; Jessica Thompson, Yale University, and Mary Prendergast, Rice University Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa. The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared
Jayne Wilkins, Griffith University and Sechaba Maape, University of the Witwatersrand A rockshelter in South Africa’s Kalahari documents the innovative behaviours of early humans who lived there 105,000 years ago. We report the new evidence today in Nature. The rockshelter site is at Ga-Mohana Hill — a striking feature that stands proudly above an expansive
Christopher Henshilwood, University of the Witwatersrand and Karen Loise van Niekerk, University of Bergen The origins of “modern human behaviour” generate lively debate worldwide. The central question in these discussions is: When and where did our common ancestors first start behaving in ways similar to ourselves? Although it is well known that Homo sapiens were
What excavated beads tell us about the when and where of human evolution Read More »
Julien Louys, Griffith University; Gilbert Price, The University of Queensland; Huw Groucutt, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Michael Petraglia, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History If you stood in the middle of the Nefud Desert in central Arabia today, you’d be confronted on all sides by enormous
Martina Demuro; Lee Arnold, and Mathieu Duval, Griffith University Even our earliest human ancestors made and used technology – something we can look back on thanks to the lasting nature of stone tools. An exceptionally high density of giant handaxes dated to 200,000-300,000 years ago has been uncovered at an archaeological site in Galicia, northwest
Giant handaxes suggest that different groups of early humans coexisted in ancient Europe Read More »
Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University The earliest known existence of modern humans, or Homo sapiens, was previously dated to be around 200,000 years ago. It’s a view supported by genetic analysis and dated Homo sapiens fossils (Omo Kibish, estimated age 195,000 years, and Herto, estimated age 160,000 years), both found in modern-day Ethiopia, East Africa.
