Italian police uncovered a 2,000-year-old mausoleum near Naples that had been buried under tons of illegally dumped garbage. 

Markings on fossilized front teeth indicate that right-handedness has dominated in Europeans for at least 500,000 years. “These marks were produced when a stone tool was accidentally dragged across the labial face in an activity performed at the front of the mouth. The heavy scoring on some of the teeth indicates the marks were produced over the lifetime of the individual and are not the result of a single cutting episode,” said anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas. 

John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado Boulder thinks that humans living in Africa evolved a “collective mind” able to communicate complex information no later than 75,000 years ago. “With the appearance of symbols and language—and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain—the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force,” he said. 

Recent research in the evolution of language suggests that it evolved along “varied, complicated paths.” “Each language family is evolving according to its own set of rules. Some were similar, but none were the same. There is much more diversity, in terms of evolutionary processes, than anybody ever expected,” said Michael Dunn of Germany’s Max Planck Institute. 

It had been thought that only Homo sapiens give birth to babies that face backwards, but researchers from the Great Ape Research Institute of Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories in Tamano, Japan, have observed the birth of backwards-facing chimp babies. Human mothers, however, routinely seek assistance when giving birth, but chimp mothers prefer to give birth alone. 

Science Now has more information on Australopithecus sediba. “We really have found something very, very odd and very unexpected,” said Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, April 20, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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