The pelvis of Homo floresiensis was more human-like than earlier studies suggested, according to a new study of the species’ hip bones. The finding adds detail about how these small human relatives walked and deepens the debate over their origins.

The study focuses on LB 1, an adult female whose remains date to between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. Her skeleton has a mix of traits linked with modern humans and much older human relatives.

The team measured features linked with walking, including the angle of the ilium and the length of the lower ilium.

They also created a new way to measure iliac flare, which describes how far the upper hip bones spread outward from the body. Iliac flare has drawn close attention in studies of Homo floresiensis.

A wide flare is more common in australopiths, including Australopithecus afarensis, the species known from the fossil Lucy. Such a shape is linked with less efficient upright walking than the pattern seen in modern humans

Decades of archaeological discoveries have shown that Neanderthals were capable toolmakers with complex technologies and behaviors once thought unique to Homo sapiens. Sometimes, the evidence is very easy to miss. Take, for instance, a rock shelter in Romania’s Eastern Carpathians.

Archaeologists now examined more than 10,000 animal-bone fragments and found 83 which seemed to have been used as tools. They suggest that prehistoric people turned ordinary scraps of bone into tools for maintaining stone implements, working hides and possibly processing plants.

Prefacing this by saying absolutely no AI was used for this, this is all direct from the dome. 

Additionally, I will not be adding any pictures, as images of deceased ancestors are incredibly taboo in Aboriginal culture. But I will provide references so you can find the images I’m referring to yourselves. 

I also thoroughly recommend reading the blog of Peter Brown, the discoverer of Homo Floresiensis, which is where I sourced a lot of my info: https://www.peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net

I, as an Australian, a physicist with a hobby interest in paleoanthropology, and a staunch rationalist progressive, am very frustrated by the state of the paleoanthropological history of australia. 

This is long so I’ll start with a TL:DR 

TL:DR:

Australian paleoanthropology is very fascinating, particularly because of the potential for denisovan admixture to actually be visible in facial features of modern aboriginal australians. 

Research has stagnated for the past couple of decades due to unethically sourced human remains finally being returned to their people. This is a very good thing.

However, this has led to our knowledge of australian pre history being incredibly incomplete, dated and broadly incompatible with our modern understanding of human evolution in a way that borders on racism. 

Additionally, it is so immensely frustrating and saddening to me that the only other people I see who care about australian paleoanthropology are more or less faceless racist alt right pseuds who genuinely perceive aboriginal people as subhuman. It sickens me. 

Okay heres the full thing: 

Australian Paleoanthropology is so incredibly interesting and rich and I feel like its virtually unknown both internationally and domestically and I really wanna talk about some very important and sensitive elements of it. 

Indigenous Australians have suffered immensely since European colonisation. 

Archaeological research into the history of Indigenous Australians has historically happened without the consent or consultation of actual indigenous people at all. 

On one hand graves of ages ranging from modern to prehistoric were intentionally dug up in spite of vocal opposition from the local people and the bones were treated as purely scientific specimens. 

Some aboriginal people who had died/were killed in modern times had their bones displayed as anthropological curiosities. 

Non-buried human fossils were given the same treatment. Again, this was all in spite of vocal wishes by aboriginal people for the bones of their people to not be treated like this. 

Over the past couple of decades, many of these bones have finally been returned to the local people. This is an incredible step forward for returning the ability to self determine to aboriginal people. 

However, this has also caused the most up to date accessible research on Aboriginal origins to be extremely dated and inconsistent with modern historical knowledge. If you google basically any australian human remains at all you will get wikipedia articles and papers talking about “multi regional continuity between homo erectus and aboriginal australians” and “affinity between aboriginal australian crania and Ngadong” and “multiple migrations” which are often written in the framework if a multiregional origin of homo sapiens, before recent ooa was unambiguous as it is today. 

These are the most recent papers and are usually from between 1980-2010. 

Papers earlier than that will often matter of factly claim aboriginal australians are “the most primitive race” and use terms like “neanderthaloid”. 

Pseudo-archaeology is still one of the most widely used tactics in the oppression of aboriginal australians. For the most part it is used to claim that contemporary aboriginal australians are not descendants of historical populations, and thus they dont have legitimate claims to their land or human remains found on them. The complete lack of up to date publications on Australian Aboriginal origins adds a lot of fuel to this. 

Now, what really frustrates me is how fascinating the real history of aboriginal australia certainly is, especially within the context of denisovan introgression. 

In general, Aboriginal Australians have a lot of facial morphology otherwise completely unique to neanderthals and denisovans, in combination with sapiens features. 

In common with all modern homo sapiens, they have a globular braincase with a high forehead, a bipartite brow ridge that tapers towards the edges, and a reduced mandible with a chin. 

However, Aboriginal Australians (and Papuans) have a lot of robust morphology that is only otherwise seen in neanderthals and denisovans. 

These include massive, wide brow ridges, a large, wide nose, midfacial prognathism, a mouth that is wide and a fair bit lower than the nose, an occipital bun, and a reduced chin. (See https://insidestory.org.au/how-the-world-spins/) 

This is certainly only skin deep and is no indication of any differences in cognition, as is claimed by many racists. 

Aboriginal australians have the oldest continuous symbolic and spiritual culture in the world, have proto-agriculture and iconographic proto-writing from before europe and the middle east, and in the cases where they have managed to escape from the effects of generational trauma caused by centuries of genocide and cultural destruction, fit into modern Australian society without issue. 

We now know from limited DNA studies that aboriginal australians and papuans have some of the the highest Denisovan DNA introgression in the world, indicating multiple recent large scale interbreeding events. 

I think it is worth emphasising the limited scope of these studies. Not many dna samples have been taken, and many have been taken from “westernised” aboriginal people who have substantial european admixture. The purely aboriginal australian components have had to be manually isolated, which increases the uncertainty of the results. 

Many more isolated aboriginal communities who live more traditionally are rightfully unwilling to participate given the historic precedent set by white men coming to their communities and doing tests on them. 

Because of this, I think its possible aboriginal australians could have a higher percentage of denisovan dna than is currently established. 

We also know that the oldest human fossils we see in australia are not robust looking in the same way later bone remains are(ie WLH50), and in fact look more or less identical to african and european modern sapiens skulls from the same time. (See: Mungo Man).

My running hypothesis is that the ancestors of aboriginal australians left africa with conventionally sapiens features, encountered denisovans in East and South East Asia and interbred on a large scale. 

At this point in history papua, Australia and much of south east asia were one continent called Sahul, meaning Australian sapiens living in the more southern regions of Sahul could continue breeding freely with the Northern Sahulian Denisovans until the denisovans were entirely absorbed or out competed. 

Read more here: https://www.peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net/AusOrigins.html

I think over time, Denisovan genes encoding for facial robusticity were naturally selected for in Aboriginal Australians,  which is why the robustness of ancient aboriginal remains increases over time. 

I think there is a fear that even acknowledging the plesiomorphies of aboriginal australians would somehow legitimise racists’ claims of their genetic inferiority, and thus there is little impetus any more to do research into  it. But I think this is partially based on our dated understanding of the cognition of our extinct close relatives, and also with the historic, racist subconscious idea that phenotype determines genotype, ie that “primitive” traits must indicate that someone truly is more primitive. 

At the same time, I see absolutely zero people on the internet coming at this from the same perspective as me. The only vocal person is this anonymous guy called “Mungo Manic” who runs a twitter page and a youtube page where he posts about this stuff. 

Although I have not seen him say anything overtly racist, he certainly has no problem associating with really bizarre racist human biodiversity types, even going as far as to write an article for an alt right magazine where he is critical of returning Indigenous remains to local communities, and questions the rights of people with european admixture to identify as aboriginal. 

I think the objectively correct, rational and kind thing to do is to first undo the harm that has been done to indigenous communities over the past 250 years. 

This includes returning remains to them. 

Only then can we start collaborating with them to do research on their history on their terms. This is something that has been happening recently (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03122417.2024.2317553)

I hope this trend continues and we can learn about the origin of Aboriginal Australians in a way that is not harmful.

I just finished writing something I've been working on for quite a while on my website.

A two-part, eight-article series on human evolution.

What started as an idea to explain evolution to master's students gradually turned into a much bigger journey.

From the basic principles of evolution and natural selection, through our ancient hominins, the emergence of Homo sapiens, the evolution of our physical and behavioral traits, and finally, the story of human migration out of Africa and across the globe.

You start with our ancestors in Africa millions of years ago, follow the different branches of the human family tree, watch different human species appear and disappear, and eventually arrive at… us.

We're all part of the same incredibly long story that began in Africa.

So yeah… eight articles later, I'm calling the Evolution Series complete.

It's been one hell of a journey to research and write.

If anyone's interested in reading the whole thing, I'll leave the series here: https://biodiaries.com/category/students-corner/msc/evolution/page/2/

And for those who've followed along while I was working on it- thank you. ❤️

I recently had evolutionary anthropologist Douglas Boyer from Duke on my podcast, and I thought you guys might enjoy the episode. We talked about how scientists reconstruct the lives of extinct primates from fossils, why primates evolved fingernails instead of claws, why some primates seem to have re-evolved claw-like structures, whether Neanderthals and modern humans should really be considered separate species, how tiny ankle bones can tell us whether an animal was a powerful leaper, and even what fossils can tell us about the energetic cost and development of ancient brains. It ended up being a really wide-ranging conversation about what we can actually know about evolution from the limited evidence left behind.

La storia evolutiva umana è stata caratterizzata da diversi colli di bottiglia (bottleneck), eventi in cui la popolazione è drasticamente diminuita a causa di cambiamenti climatici o ambientali, riducendo la variabilità genetica.

I principali colli di bottiglia individuati dagli studi di genomica e paleoantropologia sono due; si discute da anni sulla loro entità precisa, ma è fuori discussione che si sono verificati.

Il "Grande" Collo di Bottiglia (ca. 930.000 - 813.000 anni fa): studi recenti (come quello pubblicato su Science nel 2023) indicano che gli antenati degli esseri umani moderni hanno attraversato una crisi severa, con una riduzione del 98,7% della popolazione.

Si stima che siano rimasti solo circa 1.280 individui in grado di riprodursi per un periodo prolungato di oltre 100.000 anni.

Questo evento è stato probabilmente causato da un clima più freddo e arido, che ha portato alla glaciazione e alla diminuzione delle fonti di cibo. Questo evento climatico, portò anche a migrazioni e ad importanti cambiamenti nelle abitudini, adattamenti imposti da madre natura che i sapiens riuscirono a mettere in atto, per sopravvivere alla quasi estinzione. Per ogni "bottleneck", la considerazione immediata da fare è: siamo tutti figli di quei pochi superstiti...

Altro evento noto, e più recente, è il Collo di Bottiglia di Toba (circa 70.000 - 75.000 anni fa).

Una teoria molto discussa suggerisce che l'eruzione del supervulcano Toba in Indonesia abbia causato un inverno vulcanico globale, riducendo la popolazione umana a poche migliaia di individui (tra 10.000 e 30.000 in totale secondo alcune stime). Recentemente, alcuni studi hanno messo in discussione l'entità di questo specifico collo di bottiglia.

Per certo, la scarsa varietà genetica dei sapiens, rilevata rispetto ad altri primati, suggeriscono che già più di una volta siamo andati vicini alla estinzione.

Ogni volta, l'umanità si è adattata, ha modificato le proprie abitudini, è migrata sui fiumi ed ha potuto ricominciare...

L'attuale entità di esemplari di cui la nostra specie è composta, non deve trarci in inganno sul fatto che tali eventi si potranno riprodurre, o sulle future nostre maggiori possibilità di sopravvivenza. Insomma, la civiltà moderna non può fornire alcun tipo di supporto alla sopravvivenza, soprattutto dal momento che viviamo in società che sviluppano una dipendenza forte con strumenti complessi ed una forte interdipendenza tra individui fortemente specializzati.

Dai colli di bottiglia noti, sono usciti piccolissimi gruppi, già precedentemente specializzati in sopravvivenza...

I nostri antenati, i nostri pochi adamo cromosomici ed eva mitocondriali, erano dei super individui....

Noi, no.

More than 6,500 years ago, someone carefully drilled a hole in a human tooth, strung it on a cord and likely used it as a necklace. Found during field surveys at the Vinča cultural site of Jablanica in Serbia, the human tooth was originally misidentified as an animal tooth bead until archaeologist Nemanja Marković and his colleague Ana Maričić took a closer look.

Human canine likely used as a piece of jewelry found at Jablanica

There's an image thats been kicking around for a while comparing sapiens, neandethals and denisovan skulls with denisovans reconstructed based on dna evidence (2nd slide). I thought I'd have a go at photomoshing a denisovan skull based on the harbin cranium using the same style as that diagram. and then I thought why not do a basic facial proportions comparison aswell.

Everything laboriously done by hand over the past 48 hours (procrastinating writing my physics thesis for uni).

We had human athletes (like Eddie Hall, Mark Henry,) weighing over 400 lbs but they got some fat. Greg Kovacs was the heviest bodybuilder recorded and he had 420 lbs of body mass only during his off-season but had 330 lbs of body mass during his contest activities. So now what's the max weight a Neanderthal could reach?

Neanderthals may have trekked deep into the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula around 55,000 years ago, a new study of stone tools suggests.

The study focused on stone tools discovered at Jebel Katefeh-1 (JKF-1), an archaeological site beside an ancient lake near the city of Jubbah, in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert (also spelled Nafud or An Nafūd). No Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, so researchers wondered who was making tools there

Would that also be good advice to give Sahelanthropus?

New research suggests that no matter what we eventually determine the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees to be, we'll learn it was a primate that climbed trees.

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2608183123