Naserian, a giant ground pangolin, lived for about two years in Kenya’s last remaining stronghold for this animal, Nyekweri Forest. When researchers from The Pangolin Project began tracking her in…

The behaviours we observed could represent grief, but they could also reflect maternal attachment, confusion or instinctive caregiving

Human reproduction presents features that appear inefficient in isolation: gamete overproduction, mechanically demanding birth, neonatal altriciality, lactational suppression of fertility, reproducti...

PDF | On Jan 1, 2024, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy published Twenty-First-Century Convergence of Men and Babies - Chapter 12 Father Time (summary) | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

Only about seven per cent of Aboriginal people survived colonisation

The research looked at 18 "Venus" models discovered in Ukraine and thought to be 18,000 years old.

The research looked at 18 "Venus" models discovered in Ukraine and thought to be 18,000 years old.

New evidence from fossils representing two groups of human ancestors—Australopithecus and early Homo—adds an important piece to the puzzle about when our ancestors transitioned from a life often spent in trees to a life spent almost exclusively on the ground. An international research team led by the Keck School of Medicine of USC analyzed fossil data from seven human ancestors ranging from about 1.5 million to 3.7 million years old. The researchers measured the strength of arm and thigh bones, which adapt to the forces placed on them during life, to learn about how human ancestors used their bodies and moved through their environments. Animals that spend more time moving in trees tend to have relatively strong arm bones, while humans who walk upright on the ground tend to have stronger thigh bones. The team found that Australopithecus, an early ancestor that lived roughly two to four million years ago, had a distinct approach that resembles both modern apes and humans. These individuals had strong arms, suggesting they spent substantial time in trees, while the strength of their leg bones showed a more human-like pattern, suggesting they walked like humans on the ground. The early Homo individuals, descendants of Australopithecus that lived about 1.8 to 2.3 million years ago, had relatively strong leg bones and weaker arm bones—a pattern more similar to modern humans. The findings suggest that the transition from Australopithecus to Homo included a major shift in how human ancestors moved and lived. The team proposes that that relative limb strength is a ‘threshold trait,” a difference that marks an important and fundamental shift in behavior between Australopithecus and Homo.

A broken piece of forearm bone, **barely 4.5 centimeters long** , has given scientists something they never had before: **a Denisovan radius**. Found alongside skull fragments, teeth, stone tools, and tens of thousands of animal bones in a cave in southwestern China, the fossil belonged to an adult or near-adult who lived roughly **134,000 to 142,000 years ago**. Denisovans have always been an odd case in human evolution, a lineage identified not from a skeleton, but from DNA pulled out of a single pinky bone back in 2010. Since then, the fossil record has grown only slowly. Most of it comes through **teeth** and**jaw fragments** , with a **skull** and**two leg bones** added just last month. Those leg bones suggested the Denisovans were remarkably tall, with one individual estimated at close to **1.9 meters and about 91 kilograms**. In two new studies, both published in _**Nature**_ , researchers add a forearm bone, cranial fragments, and an entire archaeological assemblage from Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province to that slowly growing picture. Together they start to sketch out how Denisovans moved, hunted, and lived. ## A Forearm Caught Between Two Human Lineages The radius fragment includes the radial head, where the bone meets the elbow, and the radial tuberosity, where the biceps tendon attaches. According to the researchers, its joint surface is unusually large, a trait more reminiscent of Neanderthals, while its outer shape and the geometry of its neck look closer to modern humans. The location of the biceps attachment also stood out. Positioned differently from where it sits in most modern humans, the configuration could boost the biceps’ leverage during supination, the rotating motion that turns the palm upward. That doesn’t mean the individual necessarily had unusually powerful arms, the fragment simply can’t speak to muscle mass. Geographic distribution of Bianfu Cave and other Denisovan fossil sites in Asia. Credit: ZME Science What it does show is that**Denisovan limb anatomy** followed its own path rather than mirroring that of Neanderthals, their closest known relatives. It’s a pattern that echoes an **earlier finding** of the original Denisovan pinky bone found its dimensions sat within modern human variation, distinct from Neanderthal fingers. ## Proteins Step In Where DNA Fails DNA would settle the question of which fossils belong to which lineage. Not here. Bianfu Cave’s age and warmth destroyed any genetic material in the bones. > “These conditions were unsuitable for DNA preservation,” geneticist _Qiaomei Fu_explained to **_Scientific American_**. So the team turned to ancient proteins instead, which survive far longer than DNA and can still reveal a fossil’s species and evolutionary relationships. After sorting through **more than 60,000 bone fragments** and narrowing the field down to **22 candidates worth testing** , researchers ran mass spectrometry on each one, a process that identified three fragments, the radius and two skull pieces, as human. Five newly identified Denisovan fossils from Bianfu Cave, China, including teeth, a forearm fragment, and cranial pieces. Credit: Nature Further protein analysis then tied those bones, along with two teeth, to the Denisovan lineage, since all five **carried a collagen variant** already known from other Denisovan fossils, and since protein-based evolutionary trees grouped them with Denisova 3, the Siberian individual whose genome first defined the population. ## A Hunter’s Cave, Not A Scavenger’s Beyond the fossils, the cave yielded **1,366 stone artifacts** , most of them simple flakes, scrapers, notches, and choppers, which together suggest a toolmaking style that favored speed and economy over careful shaping. The animal bones told a similar story: **deer** and **wild cattle** dominated the remains, and because so many of them bore cut marks, impact scars, and fractures consistent with deliberate butchery and marrow extraction, the evidence points toward active hunting rather than opportunistic scavenging. > “We have many sites, but we often don’t know who is the maker of these tools,” as archaeologist _Hao Li_ put it to National Geographic. Close-up views of the hominin teeth unearthed at Bianfu Cave. Credit: Nature Bianfu Cave is different, because fossils and artifacts turned up close enough together to make the Denisovan connection unusually solid. Evolutionary geneticist _Svante Pääbo_, who had no role in the research, told _National Geographic_ he found the technological insights fascinating, adding that direct evidence of how Denisovans actually lived has been a long time coming.