Will our technology kill humanity?
Fred Guterl tries to kill off humankind in a series of apocalyptic thought experiments in The Fate...
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Author: Colin
The scars of size in Australopithecus
The 2.5-million-year-old Taung Child skull is small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. All that’s left of it are a face, jaw and an internal cast of the braincase that formed when sediment replaced its rotting brain. The cast gives us an idea of what the brain of a young Australopithecus africanus looked like. Image: M. Ponce de León and Ch. Zollikofer, University of Zurich
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Hints of how early humans ditched tree-sleeping
Where did early humans bed down for the night? Evidence that some chimps routinely eschew the safety of treetops to sleep on the ground raises the possibility that some early hominins did too – and that could have implications for our forerunners’ cognitive development. Image: Martin Pettitt
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Ash traces hint at cave cuisine 1 million years ago
You could call it the original baptism of fire: the moment hominins first began controlling flames. There is now evidence that moment came at least 1 million years ago, a finding that will reignite the debate over whether human anatomy was changed forever by cooking. Image: M. Chazan
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Fossil raindrops reveal Earth’s early atmosphere
Some things never change. An analysis of a fossilised rain shower suggests air density on early Earth was broadly similar to today’s – and that makes it difficult to explain why Earth was warmer than it is now when the sun shone less brightly. Image: John-Morgan
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