La Trobe researchers describe DNH 127, the first adult Homo erectus fossil from South Africa's Drimolen cave, dated to 2 million years ago. It is 200,000 years older than adult specimens found elsewhere and supports a first-appearance date that had rested on a child's skull from the same cave.
Reality
- Evidence68
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence62
Bearded capuchins turn predator when fruit thins, and the clearest evidence comes from a second group that was fed daily for an unrelated project and hunted roughly half as often.
Perspective Coverage
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Reality
- Evidence68
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence65
A Nature screen of 561,410 human-derived variants in cartilage cells, cross-checked in human-ape hybrid cells, traces that gap to suppressed glycosaminoglycan biosynthesis, and the authors argue it helps explain human joint disease.
Reality
- Evidence68
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives45
- Confidence62
A Kyoto and Weizmann team screened 561,000 human-specific regulatory changes in cartilage cells. The survivors were then read inside cells carrying both human and gorilla chromosomes, where glycosaminoglycan genes ran lower on the human copies.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
The forthcoming PaleoAnthropology paper argues that pacing oxygen across repeated shallow dives built the cardiorespiratory stamina later used for running, with a two-hour recording of one Ama diver's shift supplying the measurements.
Reality
- Evidence36
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives58
- Confidence55
A USC-led team scanned seven fossil skeletons and read each one's arm strength against its own leg bones. The split they found puts a change in how our ancestors moved at about two million years ago.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives55
- Confidence55
Male newborns are the heavier sex in most placental mammals the authors surveyed, which makes birth risk unequal for sons and daughters. Whether that inequality causes obstructed labour is still untested outside humans and farm animals.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
Ohio State researchers filmed sooty mangabeys in Ivory Coast and measured midfoot flexion that matches a climbing chimpanzee's ankle, which means a fossil foot that looks monkey-like cannot by itself rule out vertical climbing.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+24
- Incentives66
- Confidence46
LB 1's hip bones group statistically with Pleistocene Homo and away from the australopiths. That retires the convenient reading that the hobbit's odd skeleton is simply primitive. Its ancestry stays as open as before.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption25
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives35
- Confidence55
A Monash researcher argues Australopithecus and Paranthropus belong inside Homo because the traits that once separated them no longer hold. The fossils do not change; every label on them would.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives66
- Confidence58
A Tel Aviv University team reports that male Neanderthal pelvises track modern human females, not males, inverting a baseline used for decades to read hominin hips.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives64
- Confidence42