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When you gather and organize your family history records, there are guidelines for recording names, dates, relationships, and places. There are also standard.
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• Account Options
• 'Missing link' in human history confirmed after long debate
• This Face Changes the Human Story. But How?
• Hunter-Gatherers

We now have hominid remains dating as far back as 5. We see the deep past here through narrow temporal and spatial windows—walk a mile in any direction and you are either hundreds of thousands of years earlier or later because you are walking on eroding sediments from different slices of time.

Was Ardi a true biped? White and his collaborators looked to the remains of her upper leg and pelvis for clues. In contrast, the upper part of the hip, the ilium, was surprisingly broad—a humanlike adaptation for walking on the ground. As far as Lovejoy is concerned, Ardi is the perfectly logical precursor to Lucy, a small-bodied human ancestor that lived more than a million years after Ardi.

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For years, Australopithecus afarensis , the species to which Lucy belonged, was regarded as the first truly bipedal hominid. No longer. For the team at Middle Awash, the part of the rift where Ardi was found, A. Their canines are short and blunt, a signature human trait, one carried over much later by Lucy as well. Lovejoy was startled to see that such a crucial marker of aggression disappeared so early in human evolution.

He now suspects this happened because A. Instead, the males traveled long distances to seek out food for their chosen females, then walked back on their hind legs, carrying provisions in their hands. Bringing females extra food elicited sexual loyalty, and the steady food supply led to reproductive success and expansion on a new scale. As White and his team analyzed their evidence, they realized that Ardi must have lived in the woods.

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In that case, bipedalism must have emerged for different reasons. It may never be found. The long-favored view is that the last common ancestor must have been similar to a chimp, with more evolutionary change occurring subsequently on the human branch of the family. Their anatomy contains bony structures that would have allowed her to walk comfortably on her palms, more like monkeys than like living apes. Not everyone likes these surprises.

'Missing link' in human history confirmed after long debate

University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun is one of the skeptics. Ardi is a spectacular discovery, but it may actually be an early side branch of hominids that is not even directly related to Lucy or humans. Others question whether Ardi was truly a biped. That description also fits modern chimps, gibbons, and even capuchin monkeys.

Jungers also questions the idea that male food-gathering turned A. Even the savanna hypothesis is not dead yet. Cerling reexamined the soil and tooth enamel data provided by White and concluded instead that Ardi lived in a bush-savanna, with less than a quarter of the area providing canopy cover.

White heatedly disagrees. Ardi has been hit with one potshot after another since she was unveiled to the world. Relative to our ancestors and most of our primate cousins, we have large bodies, long limbs, and oversize brains. It seemed that only in our bigness could we stride out of Africa and across the planet. But maybe bigness was unnecessary. That is the message from a strange Indonesian fossil belonging to a previously unknown species of the human family: Homo floresiensis , the hobbit people.

If Ardipithecus has utterly upset our notions about early human origins, the hobbits have altered our thinking about late human evolution by showing us, among other things, that small might be just as adept. More amazing, hobbits seem to have survived into modern times alongside modern humans; they fashioned stone tools , hunted cooperatively, and even cooked with fire—all with a brain just one-third the size of that of a typical Homo sapiens adult.

The key hobbit skeleton is an adult female named LB1 for the place where it was found: a vast, open, sun-drenched limestone cave called Liang Bua, on Flores. In the tradition of giving notable hominid fossils familiar names, LB1 was nicknamed Flo. In addition to Flo, archaeologist Michael Morwood of the University of Wollongong in Australia found partial remains of as many as 14 other individuals in the same cave, all of them presented to the world in the journal Nature in Flo and her species lived on Flores from about 90, years ago until about 14, years ago, when they were wiped out—perhaps by a volcanic eruption, or perhaps by competition with modern humans.

She walked upright on large, flat feet unsuited to running and had a prominent brow, primitive teeth, no chin, short legs, and mysteriously long arms.

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But it was her small head and brain that prompted the most fascination, fury, and often derision. Critics swiftly objected, saying that the specimen was not what it seemed. Some suggested Flo was a diseased modern human , related to pygmies but suffering from a condition like microcephaly, which causes the brain and head to be pathologically small. Others proposed she was simply a late form of Homo erectus , a tall, strong human ancestor that spread into Southeast Asia at least 1.

Morwood and other experts have dismissed each of these explanations in turn. Such arguments quickly established who Flo is not. Establishing exactly who she is has taken a lot longer, but slowly a consensus has emerged. Using CAT scans, digital imaging, statistical analysis, and computer reconstructions of the brain, anthropologists have determined that the little hobbit is most likely a normal, nondiseased human, albeit one with a very unusual form.

If so, homo floresiensis crushes our cherished notions about the key human trait of bigness, both in body and in brain. Jungers is not surprised.



Jungers speculates that a giant tsunami like the one that hit the region in swept them out to sea. Survivors clinging to trees could have been washed ashore on Sulawesi, only to migrate to nearby Flores after that. This early hominid species was small, and on Flores it might have become even smaller in response to the limited resources. In their extreme focus on early human evolution in Africa, scientists may have missed major clues about our ancestry still buried in other parts of the world.



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That is another message from Flo. Asia in particular could be full of surprises, Jungers believes. What about early man in the Indian subcontinent? In remote areas of China? The fabrication methods did not change significantly over time, however. Those simplest of stone tools had far-ranging consequences.

A whole world opened up for humanity with the use of simple stone tools. So how did Flo and her kin manage such big achievements using their little heads? Through resculpting the brain itself, it seems.

This Face Changes the Human Story. But How?

The first evidence of this trend came as long ago as , when South African anthropologist Raymond Dart published controversial findings in Nature on the first known australopithecus, called the Taung child. Dart argued that a brain structure called the lunate sulcus had been thrust back into a human position and that parts of the brain linked with higher cognitive functions had expanded. Biological anthropologist Dean Falk did not expect to see anything like that when she got to work on models of hobbit skulls at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

The scans show that the hobbit brain was uniquely folded and unusually complex. In the size-matters world of anthropology, these studies were a revelation. Because there are still so few complete fossils and so many gaps in the overall fossil record, interpretations abound. But now that increasingly powerful genomic technology can definitively identify a species from a fragment of bone or uncover Neanderthal genes embedded in the DNA of modern humans, there is less room for debate.

Hunter-Gatherers

When paleontologists study fossils through bone shape alone, they can only broadly infer the relationship between two hominids, no matter how many fossils they collect. By going inside those bones and siphoning DNA—the genetic essence of long-dead ancestors—scientists can now use sequencing technology to make exact measurements of the similarities between groups. Hominid paleogenomics has advanced quickly since biologists started analyzing the Neanderthal genome in Today, DNA can be sequenced from bone bits that a few years ago were regarded as far too eroded and contaminated to yield relevant results.

The latest gene-sequencing technologies developed by biotech companies Life Sciences and Illumina can analyze several million DNA fragments at a time. Last year they announced that modern humans outside Africa carry 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal genes. They found that the Neanderthal genome shows more similarity with non-African modern humans throughout Europe and Asia than with African modern humans, suggesting that the gene flow between us and Neanderthals most likely occurred outside Africa as humans were en route to Europe, Asia, and New Guinea.

This pattern of gene flow means humans and Neanderthals must have mated at some point. The notion of such interspecies trysts had long been only a theory. But when placed under genetic scrutiny, the bones tell a different tale.