One of my favorite things in science is when two different sources of information contradict each other. In such cases, a close look at both sides of the evidence often results in better understanding of nature. Last year, two studies of Neandertal mixture into ancestral humans placed the tightest-…
On the shelf in my office I have a 3D print of the Maba 1 hominin skull. What is preserved from this individual is not that much: only part of the right parietal and temporal, the adjoining part of the occipital bone, a bit more than half the frontal bone, and pieces of the right zygomatic and inte…
Genomes of people around the world are much alike at the small scale, when you compare them one nucleotide to the next. But as you open the scope to wider sections of chromosomes, people sometimes have large portions that are duplicated, inverted, or deleted. A large chunk of one chromosome may clo…
The small town of Steinheim an der Murr is around 20 km north of Stuttgart, Germany. On July 21, 1933, Karl Sigrist, Jr., was working in the gravel pit his father owned near the town, when he uncovered a skull. At the time of its discovery it was one of the very few pieces of evidence of human evol…
