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
Ohio State researchers filmed wild sooty mangabeys climbing thin trunks in Ivory Coast. The measurement removes ankle anatomy as a clean way to sort what the human-chimp ancestor did in trees.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence60
Fu Qiaomei's team could not get DNA out of the Bianfu Cave bones, so protein variants had to carry the identification, and a morphological pre-screen had to make the mass spectrometry affordable at a site holding more than 64,000 fragments.
Perspective Coverage
7 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 48%
- Operator
- Operator 45%
- Investor
- Investor 7%
Reality
- Evidence80
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives35
- Confidence72
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
Gabriele Russo's team re-read fossils excavated in Lebanon more than a century ago, dating Ras el-Kelb to about 400,000 years and Nahr Ibrahim to about 250,000, and finding forests unlike the southern Levant's.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives55
- Confidence62
A Quaternary Science Reviews study redates Jebel Katefeh-1 to 60,000-50,000 years ago and reads its prepared flakes as Neanderthal work, at a median likelihood of 78 percent.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives32
- Confidence52
Digital reconstructions of two Neanderthal pelvises put the childbirth-versus-bipedalism trade-off under strain, and point at the pelvic floor instead.
Reality
- Evidence56
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives24
- Confidence46
Stature estimates of 1.8 and 1.9 metres come from an incomplete femur and a tibia pulled off the seabed, undated and with no recorded find-spot. The anatomy is fine; the sample is the problem.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+38
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence48
A statistical study of tool shapes puts Neanderthals in the Saudi desert about 55,000 years ago. The inference is careful, the climate story is tidy, and the skeletal evidence is nonexistent.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives42
- Confidence55
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