Bones from a single animal lie buried within a single horizontal layer of sediment. A few million years later, erosion starts to expose the layer. Gullies are carved into the soft sediment, and part o

When Gray told the others about the discovery, he said "We've got it. We've got The Whole Thing." It sounds like the others knew what "Whole Thing" he was talking about. It is impossible for rain to u

A dream of every paleoanthropologist is to find a fossil that "can rewrite early human evolution." A lesser goal is to find a fossil that allows a paleoanthropologist to claim a new hominin species. A

Only a few hominin skeletons have ever been discovered, and they are actually collages that were constructed from pieces. In many cases, there were more pieces than those that were used in the constru

Minibuses with no air conditioning and with an extra heater were probably made for a cold climate, not a hot one. Using similar logic, human bodies, with no fur for sun protection, and with a sweat-co

It has been said that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. The history of Piltdown Man was not well known in 1974 when the fossils of Lucy were discovered. Piltdown Man was a hoax; A

DNA evidence shows us that the last common ancestor of gorillas and chimpanzees lived about 10 Ma ago. The two branches that diverged − gorillas (Gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan) − look rather similar t

Anthropogeny is the original study of human origins. During the time of Darwin, anthropogeny was the study of human origins. Then it was taken over by its sub-discipline paleoanthropology, with focus