John Hawksさんのイラストまとめ

So many people used to ask me whether Homo naledi was using the Rising Star cave as some kind of quarantine zone. I think the last few weeks will give many people a better idea of the social complexity of coordinated action against disease. (HT @neandertalgenes for the image)

I guess you never know who will end up together at last call...

More than three years of meticulous preparation revealed dozens of bones attributable to the MH1 skeleton of Australopithecus sediba, from Malapa, South Africa. #FossilFriday On exhibit at the @PerotMuseumCEHJ

Evolving the human foot was a 3D affair: "Here we show that the transverse tarsal arch, acting through the inter-metatarsal tissues, is responsible for more than 40% of the longitudinal stiffness of the foot." https://t.co/rdtLqAfBIn

With an estimated date of 259,000 years ago, the hominin specimen from Florisbad poses a biogeographic problem: Was a Homo sapiens-like population present as close as 400 km from Homo naledi in the Rising Star cave system, at the same time?

I also shared a lot from this classic @sciam article by Theya Molleson, "The eloquent bones of Abu Hureyra." Still one of the best-written and illustrated series of examples of activity traces in ancient bones. https://t.co/2gRyvu4hWf

New preprint by @RobertMBeyer and coworkers trying to match paleoclimate records to out-of-Africa dispersal opportunities. https://t.co/2RXzRdAr7B Personally, I think it's likely now that Africa-Eurasia migration and contact was frequent and stochastic, not climate-limited.

I'll point people back to the paper by Nathan Upham and coworkers that just came out last month -- it's the best and newest species-level phylogeny for mammals available, but most of the comparisons are based on a set of 31 genes. Genome-wide datasets are going to shift things!

A new large review by Nathan Upham, Esseltyn, and Walter Jetz puts Chiroptera on its own (HT @ed_hagen). (https://t.co/HH5Xp8ruwl) So maybe we'll have to "tapir" that sister-grouping down a bit. The tree from Upham and coworker's paper is massive!

#inktober fourth is KNM-ER 17400. This is a skull, eroded on the front, that has been attributed to Paranthropus boisei. The individual lived around 1.8 million years ago. At around 390 ml, its brain is one of the smallest in the hominin fossil record. #FossilFriday