Last week Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm was widely reported as suggesting that people other than Aboriginal Australians may have occupied the Australian continent in the past. At a doorstop…
- Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW
How many kinds of plants and animals are there in the world? Where do humans fit within the vast fabric of life? Indeed, how did life, including humans, evolve? At the centre of questions like these is…
Amateur cook-offs like the hugely popular MasterChef series now in its seventh season in Australia have been part of our TV diet for almost two decades. These shows celebrate the remarkable lengths we…
Revolutionary developments in the study of the DNA of our fossil ancestors are forcing a major rewrite of the human evolutionary story. They hold major implications for fundamental questions that cut across…
The so-called palaeodiet, and now even the palaeo-epigenetic diet, has come under a lot of scrutiny of late for making wild and unsubstantiated claims and for being downright dangerous to our health. I…
2015 has already been an amazing year for human evolution science. We’ve witnessed an uncanny convergence of discoveries on the beginnings of the human genus, Homo, and all that it implies for understanding…
The age of early humans has just been pushed back further than first thought thanks to the discovery of an ancient jaw bone in Africa. So just how old are early humans?
We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s…
The issue of race has been in the news a lot lately with the canning of proposed amendments to Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act, attempts by extremists to commit genocide on cultural minorities in…
Most of us have experienced the overwhelming urge to yawn in response to another person yawning – but we’re not the only species to do this. Research published in PeerJ today shows bonobos – our…
Ancient remains have confirmed that the face and jaw evolved before the rest of the skull in Neanderthals and early human ancestors. Research conducted at the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of the Bones) archaeological…
One of the most important questions we can ask – and one that continues to take up much of the time of scientists, philosophers and the religious minded alike – is why are humans so different to the rest…
Research out today in leading science journals firms up estimates of interbreeding between the now extinct Neanderthals and the ancestors of living Eurasians. They also provide new explanations about the…
Accurate copies of fossilised bones can now be made from the combined use of computed tomography (CT) scans and 3D printers, according to a paper published today in the journal Radiology. The technique…
A newly discovered 1.8 million-year-old skull from Eastern Europe has been pitched as disproving a decades-old paradigm in human evolution. Its discoverers claim the find sinks more than a dozen species…
Wisdom teeth, the palmaris longis tendon, ear wiggling: these qualities were desirable millions of years ago, but due to changes in our diet and environment, are slowly disappearing. However, such features…
Scientists have uncovered what, for some couples, may be an uncomfortable truth: all people of European descent are related. Go back a few generations and even people from opposite ends of the European…
It’s probably a truism to suggest that the study of human evolution gets more that its fair share of media attention and hype. Brace yourself! There’s more on the way this week, with a set of seven papers…
To state the obvious: human evolution is not without its drama – and the latest salvo in the ongoing Hobbit, or Homo floresiensis, battle confirms this yet again. The 2004 announcement of Homo floresiensis…
In a sort-of Ice Age version of Jurassic Park, Harvard University’s Professor George Church has suggested – to much media coverage – that, one day soon, scientists somewhere will place a very unusual personal…
An Australian facial anthropologist has used forensic facial approximation techniques to show, for the first time, how the mysterious Flores ‘hobbit’ might have once looked. Homo floresiensis, as the hobbit…
Just when did our human ancestors come down from the trees to become permanent ground-dwelling apes? Did the evolution of our upright posture and two-footed (bipedal) locomotion mark the end of a life…
An article published in Science on Friday describing a newly assembled Denisovan genome, takes an ongoing debate to a whole new level, and finds this anthropologist eating a little piece of humble pie…
Did our Asian story just get more complicated? It seems so. An article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Fabrice Demeter and co-workers describes a new modern…
A paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides a compelling alternative to the idea that we Homo sapiens interbred with Neandertals or Denisovans as had previously…
