Jumbo human origins roundup

There's been a lot of interesting stories regarding human origins this year (and last year), small bits and pieces that are worth chatting about but maybe not in a full blog post.  I've been busy with a lot of other things, but rather than let all these interesting stories go to waste, I'm doing a giant story dump right here, right now.  As always, my focus is physical anthro and archaeology.  Not much genetics here.  Merry Christmas!

Homo naledi?  The biggest story in my view is the continued absence of further research on the claims from Rising Star.  We're now on the second anniversary of Berger's announcement of fire evidence in the cave where remains of Homo naledi were found.  Still no paper.  That was followed by additional announcements of burials, engravings, and putative tools, this time with papers.  Those claims were met with skepticism and some (evidently) powerful rebuttals, which have to date not been answered.  The promised scans of material related to the purported "burials" have also not materialized, as far as I'm aware.  I'm sure the wheels are in motion and things are coming, but I'm growing antsy.

Neandertal humanity.  The big news here is a Neandertal bone that shows signs of Down syndrome.  Fascinatingly, in pre-modern populations, Down syndrome individuals have a very short life expectancy, and this Neandertal bone came from an individual who surpassed that much earlier age. This is yet more evidence in my book of their basic humanity, in that they cared for the disadvantaged.  Related to this, we have two reports of Neandertal art.  Marquet et al. report Neandertal cave art from La Roche-Cotard in France.  Płonka et al. report additional evidence of Neandertal art in the form of a carved bear bone.  They also enjoyed collecting shells.

Did Sahelanthropus walk upright?  Four years ago I wrote about the femur of the very "early" hominin Sahelanthropus.  A couple years after that, a different paper appeared claiming that the femur supported the upright walking of Sahelanthropus, but they completely ignored the earlier paper's findings.  So that was very odd.  The problem, as I see it, is that the femur is only preserved as a shaft or diaphysis as the anthropologists would say.  The interesting and informative bits at the ends of the femur are missing.  So these researchers are trying to get a lot out of very little, and it's just not very conclusive.  Last year, another study appeared, this time of the ulna of Sahelanthropus.  The ulna is one of the bones from your elbow to your wrist (it makes up the pointy part of your elbow).  In African great apes that walk on all fours, the ulna is twisted in a very distinct way, and the authors of the new study claim that this is what we see in the Sahelanthropus ulna.  That makes two studies in favor of knucklewalking in Sahelanthropus.

New prints at Schöningen.  You might recognize the name Schöningen from a set of magnificent spears discovered there that date to nearly 400,000 years ago on the conventional calendar.  New research from last summer revealed footprints nearby from a period a bit younger than the spears.  These are great prints attributed to Homo heidelbergensis, but still much younger than the tracks found at Happisburgh, UK.

Baltic Amber in Assur.  This one's interesting to me primarily for the geology and timing.  Beads from the second millennium BC found in excavations of the ziggurat of Assur were identified as Baltic amber, which has been conventionally dated to the Eocene. Because we creationists have a shortened timeframe for early human activities after the Flood, this indicates that Baltic Amber had already formed and solidified, people had discovered it and shaped it into beads, these beads were traded across Europe and had reached the middle east by the time of Isaac or Jacob.  That's impressive.

Dating early human tracks.  A study from 2023 indicates that putative human tracks from South Africa might be as old as 150,000 years on the conventional timeline.  I'm not sure why these tracks must be Homo sapiens and not some other closely related hominin.

Ancient Proteins from Paranthropus.  Now this is interesting in that it extends our ability to discover informative biomolecules from putatively "old" material (in this case 2 Ma on the conventional calendar).  In a preprint posted last summer, researchers announced the recovery of enamel proteins from Paranthopus teeth from South Africa.  The proteins indicated that Paranthropus was more similar to humans than either were to chimpanzees, which is not exactly an earth-shattering discovery.  They still aren't human though.  We can see that from lots of other lines of evidence.

What constitutes evidence of cannibalism?  A human tibia shaft dated to about 1.45 Ma on the conventional calendar was found to have cut marks on it from a stone tool.  That's remarkably "early" for such evidence, which is surprisingly common among Neandertals.  The question remains: Why was the bone cut?  For some reason, we in the west immediately imagine the darkest reasons: conflict, violence, or even cannibalism.  But culturally, excarnation is also a common practice, whereby flesh is removed from dead bodies for purposes other than consumption.  Cut marks are provocative to be sure, but maybe not conclusive about cannibalism.

New dates from White Sands.  This is fun.  Conventional model puts the human settlement of the Americas around 15-ish ka, give or take a couple millennia.  There have been a host of sites claimed to be "pre-Clovis," that is, pre-dating the earliest culture thought to have settled America, places like Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Gault.  There's still a lot of resistance to the idea that there were people here prior to the Clovis culture.  In 2021, fossil footprints from White Sands, NM were announced to be about 20,000 years old, and predictably that was met with some resistance.  A new paper from 2023 claims to have confirmed that original date with independent methods.  So maybe there were pre-Clovis people after all?

More before Clovis.  Speaking of pre-Clovis culture, an article from the Washington Post this summer sparked discussion of Darrin Lowery's discoveries on Parsons Island, MD.  He claims to have found stone tools in situ with carbon dating fixing their age to >20,000 years bp on the conventional timeline.  I found this paper from 2016 that describes some of his findings, but otherwise, they are apparently not well-documented in the literature.

The First Geologists.  Earlier this year, GSA Today published an interesting piece from Jon Spencer on the selectivity of early hominins when making stone tools.  They were opportunistic, mostly using materials readily at hand, but they were also picky about the types of rocks they used, and favored different sorts of rocks for different sorts of tasks.  This selectivity is yet another evidence of the sophistication of the makers of these early stone tools.

How much do we really know?  I constantly drone on about how much we still don't know about origins.  So I was naturally interested in this paper from Barr and Wood describing how fossil hotspots might distort our understanding of human origins.  It's called "Spatial sampling bias influences our understanding of early hominin evolution in eastern Africa."  Yeah, no kidding.

Hominins in India.  We've got hominin remains from east Asia.  We have hominin remains in Africa.  But what about India?  Bhat et al. report an elephant butchery site in Pampore, Kashmir, India is from Palaeoloxodon, the straight tusked elephant that is also known from a Neandertal butchery site in Europe.

Other Discoveries

• Braga et al. describe new fossils of juvenile Paranthropus faces. These hominins are putative bipeds with heavy skulls with big jaws marked by strong muscles.
  
• Gicqueau et al. describe remains of Homo sapiens from a Châtelperronian site in France.  The Châtelperronian technology is thought of as a transitional technology between the earlier Neandertal stone tools and the later tools of Homo sapiens.  This new discovery implicates Homo sapiens as the makers.
• Wu et al. report that a really interesting mandible from China, dated on the conventional timeline at 300 ka, exhibits a mosaic of "primitive" and "advanced" traits, which the authors take to indicate the presence of sapiens-like morphology in early China.
• Another Miocene ape fossil from Türkiye called Anadoluvius, supposed to "challenge the story of human origins."  It doesn't.  Interesting fossil, but it's very deceptive to claim this is part of some major challenge to the conventional model.
• A hominin site dated to 400,000 years bp on the conventional timeline has been found near Diring Yuriakh in Siberian Russia was announced at a press conference this past summer.  The only coverage of this I can find is from New Scientist.
• Litov & Barkai report stone tools from Israel that date to 400,000 years ago on the conventional timeline.  These aren't as old as Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, but they're pretty cool.  Definitely pre-date Homo sapiens if the oldest Homo sapiens are 300,000 years ago from Jebel Irhoud.
• Gibert et al. date the earliest hominin sites in Spain at 1.3 Ma on the conventional calendar. If correct, this is among the earliest evidence of human occupation in Europe.
• Zaidner and Kurbanov report a new Paleolithic site from Tajikistan.
• Barzilai et al. report a ritual site in a cave in Israel associated with very early Homo sapiens.
  

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