Human evolution

Scientists say they've found the remains of a prehistoric female whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father belonged to another extinct group of human relatives known as Denisovans.

AFP - Denny was an inter-species love child.

Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Neanderthals survived at least 3,000 years longer than we thought in Southern Iberia — what is now Spain — long after they had died out everywhere else, according to new research published in Heliyon.

According to a report in Seeker, a new genetic study indicates that most of today’s Europeans still carry hunter-gatherer DNA. Mark Lipson and David Reich of Harvard Medical School and their team of international colleagues analyzed samples taken from the remains of 180 people who lived in what are now Hungary, Germany, and Spain between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago.

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered a 9.7 million-year-old set of fossilised teeth they say could trigger the “rewriting” of human history.
The dental remains were found by scientists sifting through gravel and sand in a former bed of the Rhine river near the town of Eppelsheim.

Human-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.
They shouldn’t be there.
Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.
That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.
And they lived in Africa.

With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity’s beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater.

A new examination of two 7.2 million-year-old fossils from southern Europe suggests that humans split off from the great apes several hundred thousand years earlier than we thought.

The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on June 7 with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.

Anthropologists have long sought to pin down the exact location of the proverbial “Garden of Eden” — the region of our planet where the earliest Homo sapiensemerged.
Over the last two decades, a combination of genetic evidence and data from the fossil record led scientists to conclude that the first members of our species evolved in Eastern Africa about 200,000 years ago.