Some ideas need time to take root: a new analysis suggests it took up to 12,000 years for people in what is now China to go from eating wild plants to farming them. Chinese grinding stones from 23,000 to 19,500 years ago show residues of plants like millet which were not domesticated in the region until 11,000 years ago. Image: aivo2010
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Hollywood director James Cameron found little evidence of life when he descended nearly 11,000 metres to the deepest point in the world’s oceans last year. If only he had taken a microscope and looked just a few centimetres deeper. Researchers have discovered unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments at the site of Cameron’s dive – Challenger Deep. Image: Anni Glud
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Homo floresiensis, the human hobbit, had a skull like that of a taller hominin called Homo erectus, suggesting to some that the hobbit was a dwarf species that evolved from this larger one. But the hobbit’s teeth and brain are smaller than expected of a dwarf – the world’s tiniest monkey could explain why. Image: San Diego Shooter
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Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species. It shows that the last common male ancestor down the paternal line of our species is over twice as old as we thought, and might provide more evidence that modern humans interbred with archaic forms. Image: dctim1
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