Australia’s epic story: a tale of amazing people, amazing creatures and rising seas

The Australian continent has a remarkable history — a story of isolation, desiccation and resilience on an ark at the edge of the world. It is a story of survival, ingenuity, and awe-inspiring achievements over many years

Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains.

After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repatriation very difficult or impossible. To determine whether DNA-based methods could resolve this important problem, we sequenced 10 nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1540 years before the present) of known provenance and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes, also of known provenance. We report substantial ancient population structure showing strong genetic affinities between ancient and contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals from the same geographic location. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods

Human Remains from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition of Southwest China Suggest a Complex Evolutionary History for East Asians

BACKGROUND: Later Pleistocene human evolution in East Asia remains poorly understood owing to a scarcity of well described, reliably classified and accurately dated fossils. Southwest China has been identified from genetic research as a hotspot of human diversity, containing ancient mtDNA and Y-DNA lineages, and has yielded a number of human remains thought to derive from Pleistocene deposits. We have prepared, reconstructed, described and dated a new partial skull from a consolidated sediment block collected in 1979 from the site of Longlin Cave (Guangxi Province). We also undertook new excavations at Maludong (Yunnan Province) to clarify the stratigraphy and dating of a large sample of mostly undescribed human remains from the site. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We undertook a detailed comparison of cranial, including a virtual endocast for the Maludong calotte, mandibular and dental remains from these two localities. Both samples probably derive from the same population, exhibiting an unusual mixture of modern human traits, characters probably plesiomorphic for later Homo, and some unusual features. We dated charcoal with AMS radiocarbon dating and speleothem with the Uranium-series technique and the results show both samples to be from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition: ∼14.3-11.5 ka. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our analysis suggests two plausible explanations for the morphology sampled at Longlin Cave and Maludong. First, it may represent a late-surviving archaic population, perhaps paralleling the situation seen in North Africa as indicated by remains from Dar-es-Soltane and Temara, and maybe also in southern China at Zhirendong. Alternatively, East Asia may have been colonised during multiple waves during the Pleistocene, with the Longlin-Maludong morphology possibly reflecting deep population substructure in Africa prior to modern humans dispersing into Eurasia

A contribution to the question of early Homo in southern Africa : researches into dating, taxonomy and phylogeny reconstruction

The origin of genus Homo is a core problem in contemporary palaeoanthropology. Most research in early hominid studies has hitherto focussed on the bearing of East African hominids on this problem. This dissertation examines the importance of southern African early Homo to this question, and provides a comprehensive assessment of the age, morphology, taxonomic status and evolutionary relationships of these fossils. This study establishes the reliability of electron spin resonance (ESR) dating of tooth enamel for samples from South African early hominid cave sites. These sites are characterised by a number of geological and geochemical factors, including low sample uranium concentrations, which allow for the dating of Upper Pliocene and Lower Pleistocene samples with this method. Given sufficient understanding o f the depositional history and provenance of fossil teeth, age estimates can be derived which are consistent with established views of the antiquity of early hominids from these deposits. This study marks the first comprehensive numerical dating of the sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, and experimental dating of Kromdraai and Gladysvale. It also combines the first direct dating of australopithecine remains to provide the first chronological framework for early hominid evolution in southern Africa based on numerical dating. Remains from Sterkfontein previously attributed to A. africanus, but H. africanus in this study, are dated from around 3.0 to 2.0 Ma. Homo habilis from Sterkfontein, or Homo sp. nov. in this study, is dated around 1.6-1.7 Ma. Paranthropus robustus (SKW 11) from the “Hanging Remnant” of Member 1 of the Swartkrans Formation has been directly dated in this study to around 2.0-2.1 Ma. The estimated age of SKW 11, and faunal samples from this unit, provide an inferential age for early Homo from the “Hanging Remnant” of around 2.0 Ma. ESR dating of the hominid bearing unit of the Kromdraai B cave site suggests P. robustus survived well into the Middle Pleistocene. If the single tooth dated in this study is representative of the stratigraphic unit as a whole, then Paranthropus may have gone extinct after 1.0 Ma, and possibly as late as 800 ka. ESR dates for Kromdraai A suggest an age of around 1.6 to 2.0 Ma, which is consistent with faunal estimates for this site (Vrba, 1985a; Delson, 1984, 1988). A ‘blind’ ESR dating study of the Gladysvale cave site provides an internally consistent chronology, suggesting an age range of around 320 ka to 2.2 Ma. Considerable support has been found in this study for the inclusion of fossils previously assigned to the taxon A. africanus to Homo. This has a number of important implications for contemporary views of hominid evolution, including a Southern African origin for genus Homo, an origin of Homo greater than 3.0 Ma, and invalidity of genus Australopithecus. Early Homo from southern Africa appears to be very distinct from taxa sampled in East Africa during the same time period. The southern African sample appears to be taxonomically heterogenous, containing separate Homo taxa at Sterkfontein and Swartkrans. It also appears to contain the ancestor of H. habilis, Homo aff. H. habilis, a taxon which includes SK 847 and SK 15 from Swartkrans. The Sterkfontein Homo remains Stw 53 are herein assigned to Homo sp. nov., and possess a morphology consistent with ancestral status to Homo aff. H. habilis. The bearing of southern Africa on questions of fundamental importance to contemporary palaeoanthropology is immense. The results of this study suggest Homo first appeared in this region; that it provided the ancestor of H habilis from Olduvai Gorge, a species which appears to be the ancestor of H. ergaster and H. erectus\ and it documents the survival of australopithecines well into the Middle Pleistocene. Many important questions about the origins and subsequent diversification of Homo, the human genus, and our australopithecine cousins, may ultimately be resolved in southern Africa

Number of ancestral human species: a molecular perspective

Despite the remarkable developments m molecular biology over the past three decades, anthropological genetics has had only limited impact on systematics in human evolution. Genetics offers the opportunity to objectively test taxonomies based on morphology and may be used to supplement conventional approaches to hominid systematics. Our analyses, examining chromosomes and 46 estimates of genetic distance, indicate there may have been only around 4 species on the direct line to modern humans and 5 species in total. This contrasts with current taxonomies recognising up to 23 species. The genetic proximity of humans and chimpanzees has been used to suggest these species are con-generic. Our analysis of genetic distances between them is consistent with this proposal. It is time that chimpanzees, living humans and all fossil humans be classified m Homo. The creation of new genera can no longer be a solution to the complexities of fossil morphologies. Published genetic distances between common chimpanzees and bonobos, along with evidence for interbreeding, suggest they should be assigned to a single species. The short distance between humans and chimpanzees also places a strict limit on the number of possible evolutionary 〈side branches〉 that might be recognised on the human lineage. All fossil taxa were genetically very close to each other and likely to have been below congeneric genetic distances seen for many mammals. Our estimates of genetic divergence suggest that periods of around 2 million years are required to produce sufficient genetic distance to represent speciation. Therefore, Neanderthals and so-called H. erectus were genetically so close to contemporary H. sapiens they were unlikely to have been separate species. Thus, it is likely there was only one species of human (H. sapiens) for most of the last 2 million years. We estimate the divergence time of H. sapiens from 16 generic distances to be around 1.7 Ma which is consistent with evidence for the earliest migration out of Africa. These findings call into question the mitochondrial «African Eve» hypothesis based on a far more recent origin for H. sapiens and show that humans did not go through a bottleneck in their recent evolutionary history. Given the large offset in evolutionary rates of molecules and morphology seen in human evolution, Homo species are likely to be characterised by high levels of morphological variation and low levels of genetic variability. Thus, molecular data suggest the limits for intraspecific morphological variation used by many palaeoanthropologists have been set too low. The role of phenotypic plasticity has been greatly underestimated in human evolution. We call into question the use of mtDNA for studies of human evolution. This DNA is under strong selection, which violates the assumption of selective neutrality. This issue should be addressed by geneticists, including a reassessment of its use for molecular clocks. There is a need for greater cooperation between palaeoanthropologists and anthropological geneticists to better understand human evolution and to bring palaeoanthropology into the mainstream of evolutionary biology