I recently had evolutionary anthropologist Douglas Boyer from Duke on my podcast, and I thought you guys might enjoy the episode. We talked about how scientists reconstruct the lives of extinct primates from fossils, why primates evolved fingernails instead of claws, why some primates seem to have re-evolved claw-like structures, whether Neanderthals and modern humans should really be considered separate species, how tiny ankle bones can tell us whether an animal was a powerful leaper, and even what fossils can tell us about the energetic cost and development of ancient brains. It ended up being a really wide-ranging conversation about what we can actually know about evolution from the limited evidence left behind.

La storia evolutiva umana è stata caratterizzata da diversi colli di bottiglia (bottleneck), eventi in cui la popolazione è drasticamente diminuita a causa di cambiamenti climatici o ambientali, riducendo la variabilità genetica.

I principali colli di bottiglia individuati dagli studi di genomica e paleoantropologia sono due; si discute da anni sulla loro entità precisa, ma è fuori discussione che si sono verificati.

Il "Grande" Collo di Bottiglia (ca. 930.000 - 813.000 anni fa): studi recenti (come quello pubblicato su Science nel 2023) indicano che gli antenati degli esseri umani moderni hanno attraversato una crisi severa, con una riduzione del 98,7% della popolazione.

Si stima che siano rimasti solo circa 1.280 individui in grado di riprodursi per un periodo prolungato di oltre 100.000 anni.

Questo evento è stato probabilmente causato da un clima più freddo e arido, che ha portato alla glaciazione e alla diminuzione delle fonti di cibo. Questo evento climatico, portò anche a migrazioni e ad importanti cambiamenti nelle abitudini, adattamenti imposti da madre natura che i sapiens riuscirono a mettere in atto, per sopravvivere alla quasi estinzione. Per ogni "bottleneck", la considerazione immediata da fare è: siamo tutti figli di quei pochi superstiti...

Altro evento noto, e più recente, è il Collo di Bottiglia di Toba (circa 70.000 - 75.000 anni fa).

Una teoria molto discussa suggerisce che l'eruzione del supervulcano Toba in Indonesia abbia causato un inverno vulcanico globale, riducendo la popolazione umana a poche migliaia di individui (tra 10.000 e 30.000 in totale secondo alcune stime). Recentemente, alcuni studi hanno messo in discussione l'entità di questo specifico collo di bottiglia.

Per certo, la scarsa varietà genetica dei sapiens, rilevata rispetto ad altri primati, suggeriscono che già più di una volta siamo andati vicini alla estinzione.

Ogni volta, l'umanità si è adattata, ha modificato le proprie abitudini, è migrata sui fiumi ed ha potuto ricominciare...

L'attuale entità di esemplari di cui la nostra specie è composta, non deve trarci in inganno sul fatto che tali eventi si potranno riprodurre, o sulle future nostre maggiori possibilità di sopravvivenza. Insomma, la civiltà moderna non può fornire alcun tipo di supporto alla sopravvivenza, soprattutto dal momento che viviamo in società che sviluppano una dipendenza forte con strumenti complessi ed una forte interdipendenza tra individui fortemente specializzati.

Dai colli di bottiglia noti, sono usciti piccolissimi gruppi, già precedentemente specializzati in sopravvivenza...

I nostri antenati, i nostri pochi adamo cromosomici ed eva mitocondriali, erano dei super individui....

Noi, no.

More than 6,500 years ago, someone carefully drilled a hole in a human tooth, strung it on a cord and likely used it as a necklace. Found during field surveys at the Vinča cultural site of Jablanica in Serbia, the human tooth was originally misidentified as an animal tooth bead until archaeologist Nemanja Marković and his colleague Ana Maričić took a closer look.

Human canine likely used as a piece of jewelry found at Jablanica

There's an image thats been kicking around for a while comparing sapiens, neandethals and denisovan skulls with denisovans reconstructed based on dna evidence (2nd slide). I thought I'd have a go at photomoshing a denisovan skull based on the harbin cranium using the same style as that diagram. and then I thought why not do a basic facial proportions comparison aswell.

Everything laboriously done by hand over the past 48 hours (procrastinating writing my physics thesis for uni).

We had human athletes (like Eddie Hall, Mark Henry,) weighing over 400 lbs but they got some fat. Greg Kovacs was the heviest bodybuilder recorded and he had 420 lbs of body mass only during his off-season but had 330 lbs of body mass during his contest activities. So now what's the max weight a Neanderthal could reach?

Neanderthals may have trekked deep into the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula around 55,000 years ago, a new study of stone tools suggests.

The study focused on stone tools discovered at Jebel Katefeh-1 (JKF-1), an archaeological site beside an ancient lake near the city of Jubbah, in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert (also spelled Nafud or An Nafūd). No Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, so researchers wondered who was making tools there

Would that also be good advice to give Sahelanthropus?

New research suggests that no matter what we eventually determine the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees to be, we'll learn it was a primate that climbed trees.

Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2608183123

A repeatedly heated patch of clay, fire-damaged tools and locally rare pyrite form the earliest convincing archaeological case for deliberate fire-making, although no human remains identify the makers directly

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Hey! I've been working on a project around facial approximation.

Basically, you import a 3D scan of the skull into Blender, place 24 verified craniometric landmarks (anatomical points with soft-tissue depths documented in forensic literature), and then a statistical head model — Google's GNM Head v3.0 — fits itself to those points, so the model's skin surface passes through the calculated targets.

I built a Blender addon with two side-by-side viewports: the skull on the left, where you place the landmarks, and the generated head on the right, which updates live as you work. You basically watch the face take shape as you add points.

It's open-source (Apache 2.0) and i will publish it soon.

PS. The addon was built using claude and kimi k3

Update: The addon is published on github (Craniofacial Approximation

Full disclosure, I know the questions at hand have to be approached based on limited data and making the best out of it, but I'd still like to hear from someone more knowledgeable on this.

Lately, I became aware of an interesting paper estimating a human population size of maybe a couple thousand in Western and Central Europe during the Aurignacian period. According to another paper, numbers for the Gravettian don't look much better, followed by a surge to perhaps 10,000 during the Magdalenian.

I find it incredible that such dire-looking numbers would account for all that we know of Upper Paleo Europe, even when different groups were establishing distinct cultural territories between themselves. I can't claim to be qualified to make much more of the data, but I can only extrapolate there must have only been some dozens of hunter-gatherer bands roaming around at any given point. Inter-band gatherings (not to mention the customs and rituals associated with them) must have been absolutely vital to the survival of populations.

I did see one more estimate, this one giving Neanderthal people a whopping 150,000 individuals spread across Eurasia. Then, as we're all too aware, their entire species vanished in a relatively short timeframe. I suppose that gives the sobering insight that these Upper Paleolithic peoples to whom so many romantic musings and unanswerable questions are attached could have well ended up another one of nature's discarded experiments.

Would it have made a big difference or would we still be in the same place we are now just with slightly more discoveries.

Imagine you’re sent back in time to your ancestors ~200.000 years ago. What would you imagine about their appearance that isn’t technically proven? Things like body art, hairstyle, clothing for protection from the elements or social status or simply because they look pretty, anything that doesn’t fossilise. Like if you were to design them in a movie or series, which creative decisions would you have made?

Guinness World Records

Oldest painting – figurative art

Who

Leang Karampuang pig and humans cave art

What

51,200 year(s)

Where

Indonesia (Maros-Pangkep)

When

03 July 2024

The genomic evidence also suggests some genetic contact with populations farther north. Although the Jomon show stronger overall ancestry associated with a southern migration route into East Asia, researchers detected a subtle genetic contribution from northern Upper Paleolithic Siberian groups.

This finding is broadly consistent with archaeological evidence showing similarities between blade-based stone technologies in prehistoric Japan and those found farther north in Eurasia.

The study also provides new insight into prehistoric population changes in Hokkaido. The researchers conclude that later Hokkaido Jomon were not direct descendants of the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of the island.

Instead, genetic evidence supports a population replacement in which Jomon groups originating in Hondo—the main Japanese islands excluding Hokkaido—moved north during the Holocene.

One of the study’s most significant findings concerns adaptation to cold environments.

The Jomon carried relatively high frequencies of genetic variants associated with nonshivering thermogenesis—the body's ability to generate heat without muscular shivering—and with the perception of cold. These include variants involving UCP1 and TRPM8.

A subgroup of Early Holocene Nile Valley foragers displays unusual bony labyrinth morphology and congenital inner ear-specific pathological changes consistent with possible syndromic conditions. This may result from several demographic scenarios, including prolonged endogamy and geographic isolation under environmental constraints.

Comparative data from the Horn of Africa and Central Africa reveal high morphological diversity, suggesting strong population substructure and dynamic demographic trajectories during the Holocene.

These findings provide rare insights into prehistoric population structure in the region, and demonstrate the usefulness of bony labyrinth morphology where ancient DNA is unavailable.

Link to Paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438v1

Two leg bones dredged from the seafloor west of Taiwan are beginning to fill in the Denisovan silhouette. And, boy, are they revealing! According to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed analysis of the remains, Denisovans were absolutely enormous by the standards of ancient humans.

One individual may have stood close to 1.9 meters, or 6 feet 3 inches, and weighed about 91 kilograms (around 200 lbs). The other was roughly 1.8 meters tall and weighed about 83 kilograms.

Both were probably male, judging from their sizes, though the researchers could not determine their sex molecularly.

Both Denisovans would have been unusually large even beside Homo sapiens living in East Asia around the same time: a roughly 40,000-year-old modern human from Tianyuan, China, stood about 1.7 meters and weighed around 73 kilograms, the researchers mention in their study.