A look at how a 500-million-year-old “mistake” led to humans. The dawn of humanity is illuminated in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, 50 years after the Leakeys. New fossils recast a flat-faced oddity as a star species in the first chapter of the human story — perhaps even as our oldest known truly human ancestor. The Paranthropines were to our Australopithecine ancestors (such as Lucy) what neanderthals are to you and me: a closely related sister lineage that ultimately died out — however, they’re interesting for the opposite reason neanderthals are. Was human technology superior to neanderthals’? James Miller on an economic rationale for resurrecting Neanderthals. Futurist Stewart Brand wants to revive extinct species. What we really know about our evolutionary past and what we don’t: A review of Evolving: The Human Effect and Why it Matters by Daniel J Fairbanks, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall, and Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature by David P Barash. David Barash on a short list of just a few human evolutionary mysteries, puzzles of human nature that are as yet unsolved. Paleolithic diets have become all the rage, but are they getting our ancestral diet all wrong? (and more)
