History

Elgidius Ichumbaki, University of Dar es Salaam and Marco Cherin, Università degli Studi di Perugia In 1976 paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey and other scientists reported that they’d found ancient hominin footprints at a site in Laetoli, northeastern Tanzania. The footprints were frozen in volcanic deposits from the Pliocene, an epoch that lasted from 5.333 million to […]

Jan Simek, University of Tennessee Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. When and how was walking invented? — Rayssa, 11, Newark, New Jersey This is an important question because many anthropologists see bipedalism – which means

Richard Potts, Smithsonian Institution People thrive all across the globe, at every temperature, altitude and landscape. How did human beings become so successful at adapting to whatever environment we wind up in? Human origins researchers like me are interested in how this quintessential human trait, adaptability, evolved. At a site in Kenya, my colleagues and

Duane Jethro, University of Cape Town “Lucy, you want to see Lucy?” young, would-be tour guides prompt in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Lucy stars in tourist brochures as one of the East African country’s great attractions. She also appears in the cultural history collage at the entrance of the Ethiopian National Museum. Ethiopians are clearly

Duane Jethro, University of Cape Town “Lucy, you want to see Lucy?” young, would-be tour guides prompt in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Lucy stars in tourist brochures as one of the East African country’s great attractions. She also appears in the cultural history collage at the entrance of the Ethiopian National Museum. Ethiopians are clearly

Irene Esteban, University of the Witwatersrand and Paloma de la Peña Alonso, University of the Witwatersrand There is a fair amount of archaeological evidence that indicates complex behaviour among our ancestors. For instance, there are bone tools that were used as hunting projectiles, for working leather or for processing plants. Ochre remnants were used for

Darren Curnoe, UNSW Sydney A report published today in Nature by Yohannes Hailie-Selassie and co-workers outlines the importance to our evolutionary story of some very ancient foot bones discovered recently in the Rift Valley of northern Ethiopia. The findings matter because the beginnings of the human evolutionary line remain murky. We know that humans shared

Darren Curnoe, UNSW Sydney The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science. One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define ourselves. In other words, what is it that makes us human (or, scientifically, Homo sapiens)?

Roger S. Seymour Anthropologists have been curious about the evolution of human intelligence for many decades. The main lines of research have involved archaeological finds concerning the use of fire, tools and so on. But what about looking for evidence in fossil skulls, the place where the brain resided? The volume of the human brain

Ian Moffat, Flinders University If you bumped into a Homo erectus in the street you might not recognise them as being very different from you. You’d see a certain “human-ness” in the stance, and his or her size and shape might be similar to yours. But their face would be flatter, with a more obvious