SCIENCE: 29. 4. 2013

When Early Hominins Got a Grip

Ann Gibbons

Paleoanthropologists announced a modern feature in a rare, 1.4-million-year-old hand bone from Kenya, filling a 1-million-year gap in the fossil record and showing when key adaptations to toolmaking arose.

Human ancestors were handy, crafting stone tools as early as 2.7 million years ago. But back then their hands lacked the crucial adaptations for tool use seen in living people. About 1.7 million years ago, hominins found a way to make a better tool, and anthropologists have long suspected that they needed a different kind of hand to match. But the fragile bones of the hand are rarely preserved in the fossil record. At the meetings, paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia, announced a modern feature in a rare 1.4-million-year-old hand bone from Kenya, filling a 1-million-year gap in the fossil record and showing when key adaptations to toolmaking arose. "The changes in the hand seem to be occurring much earlier in time [than fossils showed before] and are associated with the evolution of Homo erectus," Ward said in her talk.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6131/427.full.pdf

Paleoanthropology Society | 2–3 April | Honolulu

Following the Males' Trail, 1.5 Million Years Later

Michael Balter

A team described 1.5-million-year-old footprints of at least six individuals walking together across the sand at Ileret, Kenya. Coupled with experiments with living people, the researchers concluded that the size and direction of the prints suggest a party of males out hunting or on patrol, an example of male coalitionary behavior also seen in chimpanzees.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6131/426.2.full.pdf

DNA: Celebrate the unknowns

On the 60th anniversary of the double helix, we should admit that we don't fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level, suggests Philip Ball.

www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7446/full/496419a.html