Sacral Orientation in Hominin Evolution

The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project: High-Resolution Paleoclimate Records from the East African Rift System and Their Implications for Understanding the Environmental Context of Hominin Evolution

Astronomically forced climate change in the Kenyan Rift Valley 2.7-2.55 Ma: implications for the evolution of early hominin ecosystems.

Global climate change, linked to astronomical forcing factors, has been implicated in faunal evolutionary change in equatorial Africa, including the origin and diversification of hominin lineages. Empirical terrestrial data demonstrating that orbital forcing has a significant effect, or is detectable, at early hominin sites in equatorial continental interiors during the Pliocene, however, remai...

Interpretation of footprints from Site S confirms human-like bipedal biomechanics in Laetoli hominins.

The recent discovery of additional hominin footprints at Laetoli (Masao et al., 2016) offers a rare opportunity to revisit the biomechanics of bipedalism in early hominins, a trait that was a defining event in the evolution of the human lineage (Darwin,1871).While a great deal of work has explored how and why this hallmark trait evolved, recent debates have often focused on how best to reconstr...

Archaeogenomic insights into the adaptation of plants to the human environment: pushing plant-hominin co-evolution back to the Pliocene.

The colonization of the human environment by plants, and the consequent evolution of domesticated forms is increasingly being viewed as a co-evolutionary plant-human process that occurred over a long time period, with evidence for the co-evolutionary relationship between plants and humans reaching ever deeper into the hominin past. This developing view is characterized by a change in emphasis o...

Hominin paleoneurology: where are we now?

Hominin paleoneurology is the subfield of paleoanthropology that investigates brain evolution in human ancestors. For over a century, paleoneurologists have focused on analyses of cranial capacities (as surrogates for brain size) and endocranial casts (endocasts), which are prepared from the interiors of fossilized braincases and reproduce details of external brain morphology. This review discu...