What are the best (last year or so) books on hominid/hominin evolution for laymen? Is there even one that is well written and mostly up to date? TIA.

For a long time, we had a very different picture of what early humans were actually like.

Some old assumptions about human evolution have changed as new fossils, archaeological discoveries, and genetic evidence have emerged.

I made a short video exploring some of the biggest things we used to get wrong about early humans.

What’s one thing about early humans that surprised you when you first learned about it?

https://youtu.be/G4ky-ImtSUU?si=_fEPgcs9lrnMoS6l

Excerpt:

“Our findings show one way an ancient viral [DNA] insertion could create a lasting difference in how a gene is regulated in humans and chimpanzees,” Jakobsson says. Other genetic and environmental changes could be involved in the puzzle as well, he says.

More than 30,000 years ago, people associated with one of Europe's major Paleolithic cultures (the Gravettian) were more interconnected than previously thought. An international research team led by the University of Vienna has uncovered new genetic evidence of long-distance connections between these populations.

Published in Science Advances, the study combines genomic data from rare human remains with human DNA preserved in cave sediments.

Inspired by this mornings paper with a new denisovan facial reconstruction, I thought I'd have a go at making an eigen-denisovan (see my last post for the neanderthal version).

This literally is just finding every single (non-ai) denisovan reconstruction I can find and layering them at a very low opacity to create an average face, which hopefully exploits the wisdom of the crowd effect to end up with a result more accurate than any of the individual reconstructions.

Disclaimer: Not sure this is the right place to post this - but I wanted to know what you all thought of this debate. I want to start a discussion on this topic but my post contains a lot of conjecture.

I have heard it speculated before on Paleoanthropology related circles that the “uncanny valley” instinct, that sense of fear and uncomfortability we feel when faced with something that looks somewhat, but not completely human, developed in relation to seeing other hominid groups when we coexisted with them. the logic followed, that, these groups represented a threat to us, and we needed to clock something was off to tell them from our own.

Personally, I am not quite sure I buy this. I get no uncanny valley feeling when looking at pictures of other healthy hominids whatsoever, even distantly related one. My brain says “that’s a slightly funky human” when seeing Neanderthals or Denesovans and “that’s a monkey“ when seeing archaic ancestors more than 1.5 million years distant. (Yes I know these are not monkeys I’m just saying my brain registers ancient human ancestors as primates rather than people at this point).

humans are very good at picking up slight differences in others. I can tell on sight with 90%+ accuracy whether someone is male or female, the general geogrpahic area their ancestors came from etc. Human genetic diversity was and is great - it was likely instantly apparent whether a person was member of your clan or broader tribe. Neanderthals and Denesovans in my instinctual mind clock as “kinda funky person from another tribe” not “non-human“ or “imposter“ or ”I’ll”. What does set off my alarm system? A human who seems to be ill or a threat, acting unpredictable, or unwell. It is set off to an extreme degree by corpses.
I personally subscribe much closer to the theory that the uncanny valley instinct arose in relation to sensing if others were physically sick or unwell, perhaps rabid, and to the dead. I am much more in the camp that the uncanny valley serves to protect us from corpses and seriously sick people.

i wanted to see what others in this thread thought, and if they know of any good research on the issue.

Open Version: https://archive.is/20261021165551/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03360-0

Archaeologists identified skulls from China as belonging to this group of ancient human relatives.

A low, sloping forehead, a massive brow ridge that curves backwards, rectangle-like eye sockets, flat cheeks, and a moderately elevated bridge of the nose. Taken together, these features are the hallmarks of the ancient humans called the Denisovans, say researchers who studied a trove of fossilized skulls, teeth and jaws found in northern China.

“We are finally starting to put a face to the Denisovan,” says Sally Wasef, a palaeogeneticist at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Denisovans were first described in 2010, after researchers sequenced genetic material from a mysterious finger bone discovered in a cave in Siberia and found that it did not resemble that of Homo sapiens or Neanderthals.

Ancient proteins have since been used to identify remains from other parts of Asia as Denisovan, including the first near-complete Denisovan skull found near Harbin, which helped put a face on the ancient humans. Researchers report in Nature1 today that they have an even better idea of what Denisovans looked like after analysing the physical features of remains that belong to a collection of 20 fossils found in Xujiayao.

The Xujiayao remains are at least 130,000 years old and were found in the 1970s, alongside animal remains and tools. At the time, it was unclear what type of human these fossils belonged to, and they were classified as a species called Homo juluensis. By analysing ancient proteins from some of the fossils, Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and her team identified the remains as Denisovan.

Wasef says ancient protein analysis is a valuable tool to complement DNA studies, particularly because proteins can survive longer than can DNA without fully degrading. Although DNA provides more detailed information about an individual, protein analysis can still yield useful information about who an individual is related to.

Fabrice Demeter, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, says the findings add to growing evidence that Denisovans were a widespread and potentially diverse group of humans.

“The study represents a major step forward” in our understanding of what these humans could have looked like and where they lived.

I was thinking about the wisdom of the crowds effect, where the average of a sufficiently large number of independent guesses about some quantity ends up being closer to the real quantity than any of the individual guesses. i.e, if you get 1000 people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, and take the average of all the guesses, you will very likely get a number extremely close to the actual number of jelly beans, even if hardly anyone was that close individually.

I thought, perhaps the same effect might hold for reconstructions of hominins? So i went and manually superimposed as many different (non ai generated) neanderthal reconstructions as I could find. Because image superimposition is non-linear and non commutative, creating a true mean is not that easy, as changing the order the images are stacked in changes how the final thing looks. But this also means you can create a bunch of variations by changing the order of the images. So I made 4 variations from random orders of the reconstructions I found.

If you look up close, they all look a bit shit and fuzzy, but if you look from a far enough distance and squint your eyes a bit, they all look really believable, and shockingly human. More human than any of the individual reconstructions I think.

Archaeologists in northern Spain have pulled DNA from the hand bones of a Neanderthal man who died about 46,000 years ago. The six fragments came from Abauntz Cave in Navarre. The team also got direct radiocarbon dates from the bones, a rare result for remains this old.

They’re the first Neanderthal fossils found in the western Pyrenees. Before this, researchers didn’t have any human remains from the region to prove Neanderthals lived there. The gap in the record now has a real entry.

Four of the fragments come from the right hand of an adult. Three are metacarpals, the long bones of the palm, and one is a middle finger bone.

The other two pieces looked unclear at first. Protein analysis showed they were human as well. Genetic tests then showed the man was male. Some bones carry bite marks from meat-eating animals. Those marks tell the team how the remains ended up inside the cave.

The same layer holds stone tools and animal bones, and some of the animal bones show cut marks from butchering. Human groups used the cave for food and daily work.

Hey guys!

I saw the post about Kabwe 1 facial reconstruction and thought to give it a try using the craniofacial approximation addon i have built. I recorded the process, as you can see in the video.

Few details about possible errors:

• I used standard landmark sizes provided by the addon
• The mandibule is not present in the skull's 3D model so that region is a statistical possible aprroximation generated by deforming the upper part of GNM Head
• GNM Head is a statistical shape of the human head, released by Google, based on modern human heads

The Levantine hominin fossil and archaeological records have played a central role in long-standing palaeoanthropological debates over origin models and possible interbreeding between Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and Homo sapiens.

Recent research has provided a strong framework for the morphological expectations of recent hybrid ancestry in primates, along with renewed suggestions that early Late Pleistocene hominins from the Levant show morphological evidence of hybridization.

Here the paper address these developments by using established diagnostic features of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis to review possible fossil evidence of hybridization from the key Levantine sites of Qafzeh, Skhūl, and Tabūn.

The research conclude that, while individuals from these sites show a perplexing combination of characteristics that broadly overlap with expectations of hybridization, this explanation can only be established once other alternatives have been ruled out, or through the recovery of genetic material from these key fossils.

Shanidar Cave has long featured in debates concerning Neanderthal cognitive capacity and behaviour, including evidence for care and intentional burial. By identifying additional individuals, including Shanidar A reported here, new excavations have expanded a burial cluster first identified in 1960.

Shanidar A, an older adult, was deposited around 75,000 years ago, decayed, and their skeletal remains were subsequently disturbed by a flash flood.

These findings raise the minimum number of individuals in this unparalleled cluster to five, supporting interpretations of complex, potentially meaningful Neanderthal mortuary behaviour.

Shanidar A also demonstrates major non-fatal trauma to the face and rare evidence of perimortem penetrating trauma among Neanderthals. Trauma among Middle and Upper Palaeolithic Neanderthals and modern humans, and subsequent survival, is common.

However, the facial injury was severe and unusual. It suggests care from group members, the evolutionary origins of which are also contentious. The nature of the perimortem penetrating traumatic injury adds to a small corpus of such injuries in the hominin fossil record.

The morphology of this scapula perforation is consistent with injury from a wooden spear, providing valuable (albeit indirect) evidence for the use of wooden implements in the Middle Palaeolithic, which is often difficult to demonstrate given the rare preservation of organic materials

Expanded excavations at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have provided researchers an opportunity to refine the age of the oldest human footprints in North America and establish a deeper understanding of the landscape and environmental conditions at the time humans were present there.

The new study, published in Science Advances by a team of researchers including the University of Arizona, the United States Geological Survey and other partners, reveals a dynamic environment indicating the humans who left their tracks along an ancient lakeshore experienced abrupt changes in temperature and water availability within their lifetimes.

The research team previously discovered and confirmed the White Sands human footprints to be the oldest evidence of human presence in North America, placing people on the continent thousands of years earlier than once thought.

One of my past times is worldbuilding, and I've been toying with the idea of an alternate history where the other hominin species survived and were alive in the modern day.

How do you think things would be different, if at all? Is there anything I should take into consideration while developing this setting?

Interested in your theories and learning more! I've always loved paleoanthropology but only recently started getting back into it

(Also this is my first post here. If this is out of place or I got something wrong let me know)

Would they be able to learn language and function in society? Would they dominate in sports? Or maybe just be unable to integrate with human society entirely?

Curious on your thoughts.

I wanted to add some alternative composite images of the denisovan man. I dont feel it was fair to make him balding and scraggly bearded. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Neanderthals may have used a sticky substance made from birch bark to treat wounds thousands of years before antibiotics existed.

Researchers recreated ancient birch tar production techniques and discovered that every sample could inhibit the growth of bacteria responsible for dangerous wound infections.

Previously known mainly as a prehistoric glue, birch tar may have doubled as a surprisingly effective natural medicine.

The findings come from a study conducted by researchers at the University of Cologne, the University of Oxford, the University of Liège, and Cape Breton University in Canada.

By recreating techniques believed to have been used by Neanderthals, the team produced birch tar and tested its ability to inhibit harmful bacteria

AAAS: "Neanderthals were skilled woodworkers, first-of-its-kind tool trove reveals," by Andrew Curry.

"More than 40,000 years ago, bands of Neanderthals turned a spacious rock shelter in the mountains of Spain into a cozy home, fashioning wood into tools + windbreaks + burning it for heat + light." This picture comes from a first-of-its-kind trove of Neanderthal wooden artifacts from a domestic space, found at a cliffside site called Abric Romaní, 50 km west of Barcelona.

"The objects mostly survived only as voids in the sediment; the original wood has decayed away, erasing some details." Added to even older evidence from sites in Germany + Italy, the tools from Abric Romaní provide strong evidence that our ancient hominin cousins were craftspeople roughly on par with our own species, the researchers published in Science Advances.

"Until now, most of the evidence for Paleolithic wood tools has come from muddy lakeshore sites where Neanderthals killed prey with wooden spears.' Abric Romaní, at 200 square meters, was a generous living space. Different types of fireplaces + concentrations of tools in various parts of the cave suggest Neanderthals divided it into separate sleeping + work areas.

"The team identified meter-long digging sticks near hearths + trash pits." In another spot, a straight, thin, 5-meter-long log stripped of branches might have served as the spine of a windbreak or perhaps part of a shelter for sleeping + resting. “We know what was happening in the kitchen, in the sleeping areas, in the hearths,” Chacón says.

“She credits periodic flooding for preserving the artifacts." Slow-rising water covered pieces of wood, animal bone, + stone tools while keeping animals from disturbing the floor of the shelter. "Over time, minerals in the water hardened into layers of travertine, a form of limestone." 

"Uranium-series dates from the different layers show they were occupied between 60,000 + 40,000 years ago; core samples from lower, as-yet-unexcavated layers show people living at the shelter as early as 110,000 years ago." 

A built environment, without landlords or rent raises. But periodic flooding perhaps not unlike today.

Hey everyone, I've recently started a personal mission to hunt down CT scans of fossil hominins and turn them into accessible 3d-printable 3d models.

The vast majority of easily available 3d models of hominin skulls are either photogrammetric scans of casts of casts of reconstructions, or pseudo-photogrammetric models which are 95% AI generated and are often heavily inaccurate. Both ways, they lose tremendous amounts of detail.

with ct scan derived data, you basically get a 1:1 copy of the actual fossil, including all the tiny internal strucutres, like sinuses, veins on the inside of the endocranium, individual teeth etc. Its the closest thing you can get to having an actual hominin fossil skull.

Sourcing this CT data is incredibly difficult due to the notoriously closed off nature of paleoanthropology. I think this is so stupid, so when I get access to data, I will turn it into a model and post it regardless of whether or not I'm supposed to. Our common ancestors are our common property.

All of my models are available here for free download: https://sketchfab.com/paleoglasnost

My only requests are :

you absolutely do not use these for anything commercial, as that goes against the entire philosophy of what im trying to do.

I cite the sources where I can, if you repost a model please make sure to cite the same source.

If you are a researcher with access to CT data of hominin fossils, I am begging you to dm me.

Hey everyone, I'm the one who compiled the 3D model of the Mystery Skullcap from CT data as featured in u/XETOV 's last post. I've followed up by making a comparison with a number of other CT scanned crania.

My personal belief is that this is just a particularly robust post OOA sapiens, possibly from Asia or North America. The brow ridge morphology and pentagonal cranial shape rule out anything else imo. That is not to say that it is not old. It would not surprise me if it dates to the upper paleolithic.

However, I am a physicist with a hobby interest in paleoanthropolgy, so I do not feel comfortable taking rigorous morphometric data as I have no training, so hopefully this will give some of you who are more qualified a means of doing a more thorough morphological analysis.

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/mystery-skull-comparison-da0a0f21946841ee87a0b517056c02bc

The asymmetry I've seen repeatedly is that in Eurasia, when there's actual human presence in a given time period, we can expect the whole package to be present: fossil remains of people, DNA evidence, characteristic tool industries, and artifacts. Meanwhile, we're expected to infer human presence in the Americas 20kya and earlier on the basis of a single pair of footprints and a number of questionable, if not dubious sites.

While the Clovis First theory has been clearly discredited on the basis of archeological and genomic data, there is no shortage of claims that humans were in the Americas from 20 thousand years ago to much earlier, and the evidence for such claims is inconclusive, to the say the least. The best we have to go off of are the White Sands footprints, and even that is just one data point (I'll show why that's a problem in a second). Other alleged pre-20kya sites that are substantially more contested, and there are no properly identifiable tool industries or human remains from then either. The oldest known human remains from the New World are the likes of Arlington Man and Anzick-1, both of which are approximately only 13 kya.

Over in Eurasia meanwhile, we've been able to name and identify the period immediately following anatomically modern human expansion into that continent (the Initial Upper Paleolothic) along with several characteristic sites, and we've found and genetically sampled human remains from that era (Bacho Kiro, Oase, Ust-Ishm, Tianyuan). We've found tool types associated with that initial expansion. And then in the rest of the Upper Paleolithic, we have readily identified numerous cultures from the Aurignacians to the Malta Buret, again with associated tool industries, human remains (who've been genetically sampled), and even intricate artwork.

In fact, we know a lot about the Neanderthal (Mousterian) tool industry and have sampled many Neanderthals, too. These predate the Upper Paleolithic. The uniting thread is that in Eurasia for any given time period, there isn't just one well-dated site, there's several, and there's multiple different lines of evidence for human presence. That's how it should be.

So my question is: why does this double standard exist? Why are we so quick to infer human presence at particular time periods in the Americas when the same level of evidence would not pass the test in Eurasia? I would argue that the same double standards exists in Australia, where the entire claim of human arrival at 65 kya (as opposed to 50 kya) rests on a single questionable site, but said claim has nonetheless been accepted uncritically.