David Lordkipanidze Summary

The infamous event of the Piltdown hoax is one that continues to draw speculative attention over a century after the initial announcement of the paleoanthropological findings. Although many scientists, especially those involved in the field of paleoanthropology, would like to forget the incident entirely, the Piltdown man—taxonomically referred to as Eoanthropus dawsoni—is perhaps the greatest hoax in anthropological history. By 1912, British archaeologists and paleontologists were desperate for a significant paleoanthropological finding that would provide the missing link between humans and apes in hominin evolution (Prosser, 2009). The Piltdown man was originally a famous finding that straddled the human-animal boundary, dichotomously

For years, it had been widely accepted “that small bands of humans carrying a generalized Upper Paleolithic tool kit entered the Americas around 11,500 radiocarbon years before the present” (Waters 1122); and that “Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s” (Curry 13). However, the “peopling” of the Americas and their presumptive date of arrival is a topic of great debate within the field of Archeology; and the discovery of the Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon has thrown a wrench in the once widely accepted hypothesis that the “Clovis complex is considered to be the oldest unequivocal evidence of humans in the

In the Article “Redrawing Humanity’s Family Tree” by John Noble Wilford, describes how two different skulls challenge the theories of human origins and migrations. The Central African skull, that dates back to nearly 7 million years ago, was assigned to a whole new genus and species because of its apelike and evolved hominid species. The 1.75-million-year-old Georgian skull shows evidence that the first hominids may have been intercontinental travelers who set motion the migrations that occupied the whole planet. Finally a third skull was found that is the same age and shares a resemblance but, the size of the skull suggests that the brain was smaller than expected for H. erectus.

This article shows how Paleoanthropologist David Lordkipanidze and his group of archeologist discovered a 1.8 million-year-old skull fossil that could lead to knowing more about the earliest known ancestors of humans that ventured outside of Africa. Lordkipanidze’s excavation in the Georgia site known as Dmanisi. With this archeology find, it has been concluded that all early fossil humans belong to the same species known as Homo erectus. The article explains that the Dmanisi hominins had brains less than half the size of a modern human’s, and are key to understand the evolution and expansion these ancestors experienced from Africa to Eurasia. Genetic studies indicate that their expansion began from Africa about 1.9 million years ago. The article also mentions that with these new findings there can be a better ground from where to start to understand these ancestors as how they lived and socialized. Lordkipanidze does mention that the Dmanisi “were very primitive, we think there were social groups that connected with each other and learned from each other”.

“How old is the oldest human fossil?,” If you had said about 700,000 years, you would probably have been right until just recently that is, “The September 1998 issue of Discover magazine”, reports that Ernesto Abbate, a geology professor from Florence, Italy, has just discovered the fossilized skull and teeth of a humanlike creature who might have lived, as far back as, one million years ago. Calling this creature Buia Man after the city in northeastern Africa where the remains were found. Prof. Abbate thinks he has discovered the earliest fossil that displays physical features associated with Homo sapiens, the species to which modern humans belong. Moreover, Buia Man says, Prof. Abbate also shows physical

As recently as only five years ago, anthropology researchers found that humans and Neanderthals had interbred at some point in time simply based on the shapes of skulls found in caves buried beneath thousands of years of soil. This mirrors a 2010 study that has uncovered the first proven

The Calico early man site is a located in North America near a town known as Yermo (Patterson, 1987). This place is known for stone made structures whom individuals claimed were made by humans 200,000 years ago, instead of being created by nature (Patterson, 1987). What these findings suggest is that people lived in America earlier than what people had previously thought, due to artifact findings of manmade tools (Duvall & Venner, 1979). Furthermore, I will provide information on the Calico stone tools and why I believe they were created by nature, and then changed by man.

Scientists have been able to discover things about our past that are almost inconceivable over 150 years ago when Charles Darwin was releasing his book, “The Origin of Species” (Gibbons, 2009a). Fossils from different australopith species have been found that lived between 4 million and 2 million years ago that show the clearer transition to human. The author, Kate Wong (2013) believes the Australopithecus sediba is the most important human ancestor discovered. Even though the discovery of Au. sediba allowed anthropologists to see human species a long time ago, there are opinions on whether it was the most important human ancestor discovered. This essay will explore how hominids have gone through many changes to get from Ardipithecus to Homo habilis and the important discoveries by scientists and what I think is the most important to the study of human origins.

According to physical evidence, and theories, scholars have concluded upon a whole hypothesis. Based on their knowledge and belief, modern humans diverged from Homo sapiens between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago specifically in Africa, that between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago members of Homo sapiens left Africa, and that these

The first Neanderthal fossils found in Europe, a fragmented child’s cranium in Belgium in 1830, and an adult cranium in Gibraltar, were not immediately recognized as a divergent kind of human. Only in 1856 after a partial skeleton was found in a cave in the Neander Valley in Germany it became clear that these fossils belonged to an extinct human and our closest evolutionary relative (Hublin and Pääbo, 2006). Since then, questions about their relationship with modern humans have been fiercely debated between anthropologists. But what attracts most interest from scientists and popular media is the possibility of hybridization between Neanderthals and modern humans if, in other words, they were a genetically different specie or a

Modern humans, who belong to a specie named Homo sapiens, continue to be until today the only living species in our genus. But 20,000 years ago there were other species of the genus Homo that are now referred as “hominins”. The discovering of Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, describe an unusual collection of hominins

The discovery of molecular data of various human species has allowed for a clearer picture of the lineage that led to the modern human species. An article called The Hybrid Origin

Human evolution is the gradual process in which people, or Homo sapiens, originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence, particularly in the form of fossils and secondary remains, show that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people evolved over a period of approximately six million years. Humans are primates. Both genetic and physical similarities show that humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa, chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. The volume of fossils found in Africa suggests that most evolution occurred there and is likely the place of origin for early humans. This brings to fruition the “out of Africa” theory, also called the “single-origin hypothesis.”

There has been a great deal of heated debate for the last few decades about where modern Homo sapiens originated. From the battle grounds, two main theories emerged. One theory, labeled “Out-of-Africa” or “population replacement” explains that all modern Homo sapiens evolved from a common Homo erectus ancestor in Africa 100,000 years ago. The species began to spread and replace all other archaic human-like populations around 35,000 to 89,000 years ago. The rivaling opinion, entitled the “regional continuity” theory or “multiregional evolution” model refutes this theory and states modern humans evolved from various species of Homo erectus who interbred with others that lived in

Human evolution according to research started over 6 million years ago. The outcome of the evolution process is the current human beings. Scientific studies have revealed over the years a remarkable affinity between the chimpanzees/Apes and human beings. Even though this reality is not a definitive prove that human beings evolved from apes, it does show that the human beings are in one way or another related to other primates. Scientists suppose that the humans and the primates shared a common ancestor. The subject of what makes humans what they are and their origin has been the exclusive purpose leading to many scientific studies globally (Coolidge & Wynn, 2011). Studies believe that Africa was the origin of evolution millions of years ago. Fossil remains have been discovered in different parts of Africa as well as other regions of the world. Different hominins have been discovered around the world in the last 1 million years. Thus, the different discoveries have led to comparisons between the various species of hominins to clarify on their similarities as well as differences. This essay seeks to explain whether they were distinctively different species or regional versions of the same species.