Our fossil origins are being uncovered more completely every day, but the question still remains - when can we draw a line and say that after this point, we are "human" and before it, we were just hominids? Where did this population of recognizably-modern humans arise? What was their lifestyle like?
Some of these questions are being answered in more detail by a team of researchers working in South Africa. We have had genetic evidence of a "bottleneck" - an event during which almost all the human lineage died - for some time now, but it has been unclear exactly what happened. Now it appears that we may have survived this bottleneck event, and gone on to prosper by living on the seashore, eating easily-available seafoods from intertidal pools, and expanding our brains both by the increased input of Omega-3 fatty acids and by the challenge of calculating the monthly cycle of spring and neap tides needed to know when it was safe to venture out onto the rocks to gather mussels and other shellfish.
More information here: Water’s edge ancestors via Sciencenews.org
No comments:
Post a Comment