Walking With Our Ancestors

Are viruses our oldest ancestors?

Humans have a skewed view of viruses because we only notice them if they cause disease. In reality, however, viruses are much more than pathogens. HIV and influenza cause frightening health threats, but 1019 HIV particles worldwide are basically nothing compared to 1033 total number of viruses on our planet. Viruses are present in every species and every ecological niche, and affect every organ...

What did our ancestors eat?

Over the millennia various hominoids and hominids have subsisted on very different dietaries, depending on climate, hunting proficiency, food-processing technology, and available foods. The Australopithecines were not browsers and fruit-eaters with very high intakes of vitamin C; rather they were scavengers of kills made by other animals. The hominids who followed did include some cold-climate ...

News and Views Knuckle-walking hominid ancestors

Richmond & Strait (2000) have attracted much attention with a recent morphometric analysis of distal radii of anthropoids and hominid fossils, suggesting some of the latter share knuckle-walking traits. Several aspects of their treatment deserve comment. These authors show A.L. 288-1q,v and the putative hominid fossil KNM-ER 20419 falling near chimpanzees and gorillas in a canonical analysis of...

Paleolithic nutrition : what did our ancestors eat ?

Capturing climate variability during our ancestors' earliest days.

C limate’s role in shaping the environmental and evolutionary history of our earliest ancestors remains an actively debated topic. In PNAS, Magill et al. (1, 2) present records of terrestrial habitat and hydroclimate variation and pacing from Olduvai Gorge sediments during a key interval of our ancestors’ divergence and dispersal approximately 2.0 Ma. Although there is general consensus that ec...