Word: prehuman
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...very small human ancestor made a very big splash back in 2004, when researchers discovered the remains of Homo floresiensis, a 3-ft., prehuman "hobbit," in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The origin of the species and the route it took to Flores have been much discussed since then. Earlier this month, researchers presented work at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, in Chicago, suggesting that H. floresiensis may have left Africa a full million years earlier than any other hominids were thought to have ventured out from the home continent. (Read...
...Florida State University skull-morphology specialist Dean Falk and an international team of researchers compared Flo's skull not only to skulls of other prehuman species, but also to those of modern humans, some with normal development and others with microcephaly, an abnormal smallness of the head. That last comparison was critical, since some researchers have suggested that H. floresiensis represents not a separate species but is instead a modern human stricken with microcephaly or similar illnesses. But the "sick hobbit" hypothesis has been unable to gain much traction...
...fossil turned out to be a totally new prehuman species and last week re-ignited one of paleontology's greatest debates: Did we evolve in direct steps from a common apelike ancestor between 6 million and 4 million years ago? Or did the human family tree sprout several branches, some of which petered...
Whatever the evolutionary relationships between these prehuman species, paleoanthropologists know that at some point a second major shift took place. One of Lucy's descendants gave rise to a new kind of creature, the first of the genus Homo. Yet none of the known variants of Australopithecus seemed anatomically close enough to the Homo line to qualify...
...study, based on a new analysis of fossil sites, has created a tempest in the paleontological community. Now researchers not only must explain how a single prehuman population could remain frozen in evolutionary amber for so long after its species went extinct elsewhere in the world, but also must revisit two of science's most hotly debated questions: Where on the habitable continents did modern humans first emerge, and how did they come to dominate the world? "These dates will stir up a lot of controversy," says geochronologist Carl Swisher of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in Berkeley, California, who headed...