Archaeologists and paleontologists have been finding more ancient footprint trackways of hominins lately. These discoveries have sped up partly because researchers have learned better how to spot them, and partly because more scientists are seeing how much can be learned from these trace fossils. M…
November 24, 2024 is the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the “Lucy” skeleton. I gave a presentation for local sixth-graders this week and as we ran through the different human relatives, I let them know about this special anniversary. They all knew who Lucy was. Many of them remembered the…
Near the small city of Altamura in southern Italy is a cave system known as the Lamalunga karst. In 1993 speleologists exploring the karst removed a column that obstructed entry into a part of the cave system, leading them to discover a skeleton that was soon identified as a Neanderthal. This is pe…
This week, Cell Genomics published the manuscript describing the “Thorin”genome from Grotte Mandrin, France, which Ludovic Slimak and coworkers released on biorXiv back in April, 2023. The preprint included some valuable observations which I've been incorporating in my own work and presentations si…
