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Palaeoanthropology

Homing in on early Homo

Nature volume 449, pages 291–292 (2007)Cite this article

Newly described fossils from Georgia in Eurasia and from Kenya shed more light on the earliest members of the genus Homo. These finds indicate that there was considerable variability in their size and shape.

The fossil record of human evolution is like a pointillist painting: one sees a different picture close up from when one stands back. For years, students of human evolution have tended to prefer standing back when considering the evolution of the genus Homo from the genus Australopithecus, by contrasting what came before with what came after. Two sets of discoveries now help us to look more closely at the complex transition from Australopithecus to Homo. One of the papers concerned is by Lordkipanidze and colleagues (page 305 of this issue)1, and deals with postcranial bones (those other than the cranium) from Georgia, Eurasia. The other, by Spoor and colleagues2, was published in Nature on 9 August and describes cranial material from Kenya.

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Figure 1: The wide range of brain sizes in early Homo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Daniel E. Lieberman is in the Departments of Anthropology, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. danlieb@fas.harvard.edu,

    Daniel E. Lieberman

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  1. Daniel E. Lieberman
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Lieberman, D. Homing in on early Homo. Nature 449, 291–292 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/449291a

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