The Middle to Later Stone Age transition marks a major change in how Late Pleistocene African populations produced and used stone tool kits, but is manifest in various ways, places and times across the continent. Alongside changing patterns of raw ma...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
33097671
Taxonomic resolution is a major challenge in palynology, largely limiting the ecological and evolutionary interpretations possible with deep-time fossil pollen data. We present an approach for fossil pollen analysis that uses optical superresolution ...
Bone surface modifications are foundational to the correct identification of hominin butchery traces in the archaeological record. Until present, no analytical technique existed that could provide objectivity, high accuracy, and an estimate of probab...
The hypothesis that destructive mass extinctions enable creative evolutionary radiations (creative destruction) is central to classic concepts of macroevolution. However, the relative impacts of extinction and radiation on the co-occurrence of specie...
Anatomically modern humans evolved around 300 thousand years ago in Africa. They started to appear in the fossil record outside of Africa as early as 100 thousand years ago, although other hominins existed throughout Eurasia much earlier. Recently, s...
Some of the most extensive terrestrial biomes today consist of open vegetation, including temperate grasslands and tropical savannas. These biomes originated relatively recently in Earth's history, likely replacing forested habitats in the second hal...
Fossil identification is an essential and fundamental task for conducting palaeontological research. Because the manual identification of fossils requires extensive experience and is time-consuming, automatic identification methods are proposed. Howe...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
37804072
Objective analytical identification methods are still a minority in the praxis of paleobiological sciences. Subjective interpretation of fossils and their modifications remains a nonreplicable expert endeavor. Identification of African bovids is a cr...
Dental evolutionary studies in hominins are key to understanding how our ancestors and close fossil relatives grew from the early stages of embryogenesis into adults. In a sense, teeth are like an airplane's 'black box' as they record important varia...