Origin of modern humanity pushed back 260,000 years BP (?)
The above figure is from a preprint, Ancient genomes from southern Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago. The title and abstract are pretty clear: Southern Africa is consistently placed as one of the potential regions for the evolution of Homo sapiens. To examine the region’s human prehistory prior to the arrival of […]
The Cape Coloureds are a mix of everything
A Cape Coloured family
I’ve mentioned the Cape Coloureds of South Africa on this weblog before. Culturally they’re Afrikaans in language and Dutch Reformed in religion (the possibly related Cape Malay group is Muslim, though also Afrikaan…
Ostrich shell art in South Africa 60,000 years ago
There’s a new paper in PNAS reviewing the tradition of etching on ostrich shells. Since it’s PNAS, the paper isn’t on the website, but Edward Edmund Yong is able to cover the major points thanks to his access. This stuff is of interest because there was a long time lag between the emergence of anatomically […]