Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The post Neanderthal Gene Still Shapes Muscle and Jaws in Some Living Humans appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A team of researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow argues that dietary sugars, not animal foods, may have played the decisive role in the expansion of the human brain over the past 4 million years, as hominin brain size grew nearly fivefold, from about 300 grams in early relatives like […]
The post Study Points to Sugar, Not Just Meat, as Fuel for Human Brain Evolution appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A 1.4-million-year-old trail of footprints reveals that a powerful human relative grew nearly as large as us and may have traveled in all-male groups. Eight individuals walked across the wet ground beside an ancient Kenyan lake. Within a short time, sediment buried their footprints and preserved a scene that would remain hidden for roughly 1.4 [...]
New research led by the University of California, Berkeley reveals that beyond Neanderthals and Denisovans, humans interbred with two mysterious ‘ghost’ lineages: one in Africa more than 50,000 years ago, another in Eurasia over 1.7 million years ago.
The post Scientists Find Traces of Two Unknown Archaic Hominins in Human DNA appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A fossilized skull fragment of Homo sp. unearthed in central Spain offers paleoanthropologists a fresh window into the story of ancient humans who lived in Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The post 224,000-Year-Old Homo Skull Fragment Adds New Mystery to Human Origins appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A set of 1.43-million-year-old fossil footprints preserved along the margin of an ancient lake in northern Kenya is offering paleoanthropologists new evidence about the size, gait and social lives of the beings who made them and reopening questions about which species they belonged to.
The post Ancient Footprints in Kenya Hint at Bigger Bodies and Group Behavior among Early Human Relatives appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
For decades, paleoanthropologists have largely agreed that somewhere along the evolutionary course from apelike ancestors to modern humans, our bodies got dramatically larger. However, one lingering mystery has been when this intense growth began.
Did our ancestors gradually grow bigger over millions of years? Did the shift coincide with the emergence of the genus Homo? Or did it occur later, after some of the earliest human species had already appeared?
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) argues that the answer is more complex than any single theory has suggested.
Rather than supporting a single long-standing hypothesis, researchers used a sophisticated statistical method to show that human body size likely followed two evolutionary courses simultaneously: a slow, steady increase spanning millions of years, punctuated by a much larger leap in later members of the genus Homo.
The findings help reconcile decades of conflicting research while offering one of the clearest pictures yet of how, and perhaps why, our ancestors evolved into larger-bodied humans.
“Despite its central role in hominin evolution, there is little consensus on how body size increased through time,” researchers write. “We provide strong evidence for a marked size increase in later-occurring Homo, alongside a moderate general increase over time among all hominins.”
Body size is one of the defining characteristics of an organism. In humans and our extinct relatives, it has been linked to everything from brain expansion and walking efficiency to metabolism, hunting behavior, and the ability to travel across increasingly large landscapes. Understanding when body size changed, therefore, helps researchers reconstruct not only what our ancestors looked like, but how they lived.
Yet despite decades of fossil findings, scientists have struggled to agree on the evolutionary pattern behind those changes.
Some previous studies suggested that hominins simply became larger over time. Some contended that body size remained relatively stable until the emergence of Homo. Still others have proposed that the real transformation arose only after early species such as Homo habilis, often regarded as one of the first members of our genus.
According to researchers, one reason for the disagreement is that earlier analyses typically examined these competing ideas independently. They also often failed to account for uncertainties inherent in the fossil record, including disagreements over species classification, differences in body mass estimation methods, and uncertainties in evolutionary relationships among fossil species.
To address those limitations, researchers compiled one of the largest hominin body-size datasets assembled to date, incorporating body mass assessments from 386 fossil specimens representing 21 different taxa.
They then analyzed the data using Bayesian phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models—a statistical approach that accounts for evolutionary relationships while encompassing multiple layers of uncertainty.
The team repeated its analyses across 1,000 different phylogenetic trees and 1,000 separate datasets, allowing them to test whether the overall pattern remained consistent despite uncertainties.
The results pointed to two simultaneous trends.
The first was a modest but persistent increase in body size across the hominin family as a whole. On average, body mass increased by roughly 2 pounds (0.9 kilograms) every million years, suggesting that larger bodies gradually became more common throughout human evolution.
However, the second trend proved far more dramatic.
Instead of all members of Homo becoming substantially larger, the researchers found the strongest evidence for a distinct jump in body size among later members of the genus, particularly species that appeared after Homo habilis. That pattern regularly emerged regardless of how the fossil data were analyzed.
In other words, early members of Homo may not have represented the major biological turning point scientists once assumed.
This finding disputes a common assumption that simply belonging to the genus Homo meant possessing a significantly larger body. Instead, the study suggests that some hallmark features traditionally associated with humans, including larger body size, may have evolved after the genus’s origin.
That interpretation also corresponds to broader changes that occurred later in human evolution.
Researchers note that this period coincides with evidence for more efficient upright walking, greater reliance on meat consumption, and expanding home ranges. Larger bodies may have been both a consequence of and a contributor to those behavioral and ecological shifts.
The study likewise reinforces another growing theme that evolution rarely follows a straight line.
Species such as Homo floresiensis, often nicknamed the “Hobbit” because of its diminutive stature, and Homo Naledi frequently appeared as outliers with unusually small body sizes despite belonging to relatively recent branches of the human family tree. Their existence demonstrates that body size did not simply increase in a uniform march toward modern humans.
Instead, evolution repeatedly experimented with different solutions depending on local environments and ecological constraints.
The researchers also argue that part of the longstanding disagreement over body-size evolution stems from the fossil record itself. Different studies have estimated fossil body masses using different skeletal elements, comparison populations, and statistical techniques, sometimes producing substantially different results for the same individual.
By expressly incorporating those uncertainties into their analysis, rather than treating them as fixed values, the new framework seeks to capture the range of plausible evolutionary scenarios rather than relying on a single interpretation.
Even so, researchers caution that important questions remain unresolved.
Improved fossil discoveries, more accurate body-mass estimation methods, and a better understanding of species relationships could all further refine the picture. The study also does not explicitly account for sexual size differences between males and females, which may have been greater in some early hominin species than in modern humans.
Nevertheless, the wider conclusion is intriguing.
Rather than choosing between competing theories, the evidence suggests both contain elements of the truth.
Body size did increase gradually across the hominin lineage. But the most considerable leap appears to have occurred later, after the earliest representatives of Homo had already evolved.
That conclusion may help settle one of paleoanthropology’s longest-running debates while showing how advances in statistical methods are transforming scientists’ ability to extract new insights from fossils that have often been studied for decades.
“Overall, these findings bring clarity to a fundamental question in human evolution and show how the application of rigorous phylogenetic comparative tools can unlock patterns previously hidden in the fossil record while accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty,” researchers write. “By reconciling conflicting findings within a single framework, our results clarify key evolutionary transitions and highlight the complex nature of body size change in human evolution.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Homo erectus may have left a detectable genetic trace in living humans through ancient interbreeding with Denisovans. For much of the 20th century, human evolution was often pictured as a branching tree. One trunk split into separate limbs, and each ancient human relative, or hominin, occupied its own tidy branch. That was the version many [...]
Ancient DNA from Shimao reveals local origins, broad prehistoric connections, a patrilineal social structure, and gender-specific patterns of human sacrifice. At Shimao, a vast stone-walled settlement in northern China, ancient DNA is filling in details that archaeology alone could not fully resolve. The genetic evidence is helping trace where the people of this late Neolithic [...]
Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.
Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was the Komodo dragons that were the hunters, while the Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.
If Veatch and her colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa.
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Üçağızlı II Cave on Türkiye’s Mediterranean coast has yielded a rare and detailed record of two Homo species living the same way of life, one after the other, over more than 20,000 years, offering new evidence that the transition from Neanderthals to modern humans in the region was far more culturally seamless than previously understood.
The post Ancient Turkish Cave Reveals Neanderthals and Homo sapiens Shared Same Way of Life appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
For decades, paleoanthropologists assumed that hominins -- the lineage leading to modern humans -- gradually grew larger over millions of years.
The post New Study Challenges Long-Held Idea that Our Ancestors Simply Got Bigger Over Time appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Scientists have uncovered compelling new evidence that early human ancestors, likely Homo erectus, were deliberately bringing fire into Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa as far back as 1.79 million years ago.
The post Evidence of Fire Use by Early Humans May Date Back Nearly 1.8 Million Years appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Geochemical analysis of 780,000-year-old stone tools from Israel suggests Acheulean (or Acheulian) hominins repeatedly sought specific basalt sources, revealing sophisticated planning and deep knowledge of their landscape.
The post Acheulean Toolmakers Chose Their Stone with Surprising Precision appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology. Normally, that involves making stone tools, butchering deer, or distilling birch tar. But in a new study, it meant doing very destructive things to teeth from one of the world’s most carefully protected animals.
That's because the archeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhino teeth as tools. By using the teeth to make stone tools, the researchers demonstrated that Neanderthals probably did the same thing, adding to what we know about the wide range of items in their toolkits.
Some Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe and Asia seem to have many more rhinoceros teeth lying around than you’d expect. We know Neanderthals hunted a now-extinct species of rhinoceros in Europe and eastern Asia, but the people who had inhabited these sites looked like they had been collecting rhino teeth for some reason.
© By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE - White Rhino Skull, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55453022
New research from the University of Oxford and the University of Reading suggests bipedalism and expanding brain size helped drive the overwhelming dominance of right-handedness in humans.
The post Upright Walking and Larger Brains May Explain Why 90% of Humans Favor Their Right Hand appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
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