Saturday, February 22, 2020

Paleolithic Papers #34

Genus Homo:

Modern human and Neandertal relics are washing up on shore in the North Sea.

Neandertal DNA might be more common in modern humans than previously thought.

What cave art reveals about human nature.

Scientists have uncovered a ghost lineage of ancient hominins in West African genomes.

Was there evidence of a technological break or gap or evolution at a cave in Israel?

Modern Humans (H. sapiens):

Mesolithic site  remains show cooking tubers took place.

Pottery from the Amur River region from the late Pleistocene has been found.

Settling of the Americas remains complex with outliers in cranial morphology being found.

How old is the oldest H. sapiens skull?  The one from Florisbad.

A skeleton of a 30 year old woman from Mexico dating from the end Pleistocene/dawn Holocene has interesting insights to the early native American populations.

What was the climate variability like during the early expansions of modern humans out of Africa?

Neandertals (H. neanderthalensis):

The last Neandertals might have lived at Byzovaya, above the Arctic Circle in Russia.

Neandertals made an epic trek 60k years ago to the Altai Mountains.

There is evidence of two separate migrations into Asia by Neandertals.

Inbreeding might have been the doom of Neandertals.

Denisovans:

Mitochondrial DNA from Densovans has been found in modern human nuclear DNA.

Denisovans were more complex than we originally thought.

Meet the Denisovans.

H. antecessor:

Two juvenile scapula from Spain are examined.

H. erectus:

H. erectus arrived in Java 200,000 years later than originally thought.

H. erectus might have engaged in long range trade for obsidian.

Genus Australopithecus:

A. anamensis:

What ecology did A. anamensis live in?

META:

Nasty recessives aren't an obstacle to introgression between hominins.

What we have learned about human evolution and what remains to be understood?

African climate forcing simulation for the last 140,000 years and its implication for human evolution.

There's a new method for figuring out where ancient humans came from.

Human language probably evolved gradually.

When did hominins begin to understand death.

How to estimate the contamination of ancient DNA by modern.

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