Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Paleolithic Papers #6: The Ancient Ancestry of the Hobbit

Genus Homo:

Did Human-like intelligence develop to take care of helpless infants?

Or some other source?

Why Humans may have bigger brains than apes.

Modern human ancestry is complicated by extinct hominins interbreeding with modern populations.

Modern Humans (Homo sapiens):

There was immigration back to Africa during the Paleolithic.

A significant find of cave art dating from around the end of the Pleistocene was found in Spain.

Human remains from the Late Pleistocene have been found in Congo.

A potential pre Clovis site in South Carolina has been found.   Given its claimed age, this might fall into the extraordinary claim territory.


Paleogenetics in Australia gets more controversial with claims Mungo Man did NOT have earlier populations contributing to its genome.


Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis):

Neandertals are getting a revision

How Neandertals grew.

The Mousterian still appears to be chronological.


Hobbits (Homo floresiensis):

Hobbit fossils dating from 700k years ago during the Middle Pleistocene have been found.  This pushes back the dawn of H. floresiensis by hundreds of thousands of years ago. The bit that needs a big flashing neon sign for this is the Hobbit predates modern humanity.  It may be the Hobbits are from a very early expansion of Homo erectus.

The research helps prove that the Hobbit is NOT suffering from Down's Syndrome.

Genus Australopithecus:

There were multiple species of hominin running around at the time of Lucy. 

Are more fossils just complicating things?

META:

Stronger evidence that hominins did evolve on the grasslands.

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