Here's an Interesting Idea: Modern Humans Teamed with Dogs to Outlast Neandertals

National Geographic is reporting on a study done by Pat Shipman for a new book titled The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction.  As Shipman relates: 

Předmostí is one of a series of archaeological sites in Central and Eastern Europe. They're really weird sites because they're full of dead mammals. Before modern humans came into Eurasia, there was little evidence that Neanderthals were killing mammoths on a regular basis. They're huge! Attacking them with handheld weapons was probably too intimidating, unless you came across a baby mammoth.

But once modern humans arrive on the scene, you start finding these sites with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dead mammoths. At some, the bones are so concentrated that if the mammoths were alive they couldn't stand in the territory where their bones are.


These mammoth megasites, as they became known, contain an outrageous amount of mammoths. So what's changed that is going to enable modern humans to kill all these animals? Neanderthals couldn't, and they weren't inept. Distance weapons of the kind that humans had might have been helpful, but you had to track the darn thing as it died.

And that's where wolf dogs come in, because wolf dogs are found with lots of mammoth bones. Some of these sites even have beautiful tent-shaped huts made out of mammoth bone. This suggests people were there for a long time. They were living there and building these settlements where the animals died.

Pat Shipman is married to Alan Walker, who was part of the team that excavated and described the Lake Turkana Homo erectus boy, an almost complete skeleton that changed much of what we thought about Homo erectus at the time.  This would be a good read.  Not sure I buy the argument yet, but it is certainly worth consideration.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Au. sediba Now Considered Possible Ancestor to Homo

New research is suggesting that the overall anatomy of Australopithecus sediba makes it the best candidate for being ancestral to Homo.  The article in Science Daily is quite long and delves into the specific traits that Lee Berger suggests are thought to evolving in the direction of Homo.  They write:

Lee Berger, the project leader from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, explains what these new findings mean for modern humans. "The many advanced features found in the brain and body, along with the earlier date, make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus -- the genus Homo -- more so than previous discoveries, such as Homo habilis"
The age of the Au. sediba fossils has been constrained to about 1.977 million years, which predates the earliest appearances of Homo-specific traits in the fossil record. Until now, fossils dated to 1.90 million years ago -- and mostly attributed to Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis -- have been considered ancestral to Homo erectus, the earliest undisputed human ancestor. But, the older age of these Au. sediba fossils raises the possibility of a separate, older lineage from which Homo erectus may have evolved.

This position seemed odd to me at first because there is already evidence of “early Homo” dating back to 2.3 million years ago. Then it occurred to me that this article makes a tacit assumption that is not stated: Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not really Homo, but are Australopithecus. This is an argument that has been made by Alan Walker and Bernard Wood who suggest that, despite the size differential between H. rudolfensis and the late australopithecines, they are more similar than different.This levels the playing field and then Au. sediba simply becomes the branch of Australopithecus from which Homo sprung.

Taxonomy is a black art and we run the risk of tying too much significance to our taxonomic designations.  If we argue that Au. sediba gave rise to H. ergaster, despite the fact that there are already two species of Homo running around, it conjures up ideas of convergent evolution where an earlier australopithecine gave rise to Homo habilis and Au. sediba gave rise to Homo ergaster.  If, however we demote earliest Homo down to australopithecine status, the difficulties vanish “like the snows of yesteryear” as Isaac Asimov would say.  Look for this to be challenged as well.