Biological anthropology articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    An analysis of models of human populations in Africa, using some newly sequenced genomes, finds that human origins in the continent can best be described by a weakly structured stem model.

    • Aaron P. Ragsdale
    • , Timothy D. Weaver
    •  & Simon Gravel

  • Review Article |

    This Review examines the palaeobiology of Australopithecus in terms of morphology, phylogeny, diet, tool use, locomotor behaviour and other characteristics, and considers the role of this genus of hominins in human evolution.

    • Zeresenay Alemseged

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Combined analysis of new genomic data from 116 ancient hunter-gatherer individuals together with previously published data provides insights into the genetic structure and demographic shifts of west Eurasian forager populations over a period of 30,000 years.

    • Cosimo Posth
    • , He Yu
    •  & Johannes Krause

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Around 31,000 years ago, a young individual from Borneo had part of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, and lived for another 6–9 years after amputation.

    • Tim Ryan Maloney
    • , India Ella Dilkes-Hall
    •  & Maxime Aubert

  • Article |

    Analyses of a thigh bone and a pair of elbow bones from Sahelanthropus tchadensis discovered in Chad suggest that the earliest hominin exhibited bipedalism with substantial arboreal clambering.

    • G. Daver
    • , F. Guy
    •  & N. D. Clarisse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    DNA analysis of 6 individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years, and of 28 previously published ancient individuals, provides genetic evidence supporting hypotheses of increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene.

    • Mark Lipson
    • , Elizabeth A. Sawchuk
    •  & Mary E. Prendergast

  • Article |

    The earliest known human burial in Africa, that of a young child, is dated to around 78,000 years ago.

    • María Martinón-Torres
    • , Francesco d’Errico
    •  & Michael D. Petraglia

  • Article |

    Genomic analyses of DNA from modern individuals show that, about 800 years ago, pre-European contact occurred between Polynesian individuals and Native American individuals from near present-day Colombia, while remote Pacific islands were still being settled.

    • Alexander G. Ioannidis
    • , Javier Blanco-Portillo
    •  & Andrés Moreno-Estrada

  • Article |

    Analyses of the proteomes of dental enamel from Homo antecessor and Homo erectus demonstrate that the Early Pleistocene H. antecessor is a close sister lineage of later Homo sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovan populations in Eurasia.

    • Frido Welker
    • , Jazmín Ramos-Madrigal
    •  & Enrico Cappellini

  • Article |

    The transverse tarsal arch, acting through the inter-metatarsal tissues, is important for the longitudinal stiffness of the foot and its appearance is a key step in the evolution of human bipedalism.

    • Madhusudhan Venkadesan
    • , Ali Yawar
    •  & Shreyas Mandre

  • Article |

    Danuvius guggenmosi moved using extended limb clambering, thus combining adaptations of bipeds and suspensory apes and providing evidence of the evolution of bipedalism and suspension climbing in the common ancestor of great apes and humans.

    • Madelaine Böhme
    • , Nikolai Spassov
    •  & David R. Begun

  • Letter |

    Fossil evidence indicates that Denisovans occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene epoch and successfully adapted to this high-altitude hypoxic environments long before the regional arrival of modern Homo sapiens.

    • Fahu Chen
    • , Frido Welker
    •  & Jean-Jacques Hublin

  • Letter |

    Using estimates of metabolic costs of the brain and body, mathematical predictions suggest that the evolution of adult Homo sapiens-sized brains and bodies is driven by ecological rather than social challenges and is perhaps strongly promoted by culture.

    • Mauricio González-Forero
    •  & Andy Gardner

  • Perspective |

    The recognition of adolescence as a distinctive period for biological embedding of culture, and mass education, are features of the globalization of cultures that are driven by transformations in labour, livelihood and lifestyle.

    • Carol M. Worthman
    •  & Kathy Trang

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Xiao Dong
    • , Brandon Milholland
    •  & Jan Vijg

  • Letter |

    Analysis of calcified dental plaque (calculus) specimens from Neanderthals shows marked regional differences in diet and microbiota and evidence of self-medication in one individual, and identifies prevalent microorganisms and their divergence between Neanderthals and modern humans.

    • Laura S. Weyrich
    • , Sebastian Duchene
    •  & Alan Cooper

  • Letter |

    The percentage of human deaths caused by interpersonal violence reflects our membership of a particularly violent clade of mammals, although changes in socio-political organization have led to marked variations in this proportion.

    • José María Gómez
    • , Miguel Verdú
    •  & Marcos Méndez

  • Letter |

    Whole-genome sequencing of individuals from 125 populations provides insight into patterns of genetic diversity, natural selection and human demographic history during the peopling of Eurasia and finds evidence for genetic vestiges of an early expansion of modern humans out of Africa in Papuans.

    • Luca Pagani
    • , Daniel John Lawson
    •  & Mait Metspalu

  • Letter |

    Compared to other apes, humans live longer, reproduce faster and have larger brains; here, total energy expenditure is studied in humans and all species of great ape, and is shown to be significantly higher in humans, demonstrating that the human lineage has experienced an energy-boosting acceleration in metabolic rate.

    • Herman Pontzer
    • , Mary H. Brown
    •  & Stephen R. Ross

  • Letter |

    A collection of 47 unequivocally modern human teeth from a cave in southern China shows that modern humans were in the region at least 80,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 120,000 years ago, which is twice as long as the earliest known modern humans in Europe; the population exhibited more derived features than contemporaneous hominins in northern and central China, adding to the complexity of the human story.

    • Wu Liu
    • , María Martinón-Torres
    •  & Xiu-jie Wu

  • Article |

    A new hominin species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, which lived between 3.5 and 3.3 million years ago, at around the same time as species such as Au. afarensis (‘Lucy’), is discovered in Ethiopia; its morphology suggests that some dental features traditionally associated with later genera such as Paranthropus and Homo emerged earlier than previously thought.

    • Yohannes Haile-Selassie
    • , Luis Gibert
    •  & Beverly Z. Saylor

  • Article |

    The high-quality genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from Siberia reveals that gene flow from Neanderthals into the ancestors of this individual had already occurred about 7,000 to 13,000 years earlier; genomic comparisons show that he belonged to a population that lived close in time to the separation of populations in east and west Eurasia and that may represent an early modern human radiation out of Africa that has no direct descendants today.

    • Qiaomei Fu
    • , Heng Li
    •  & Svante Pääbo

  • Letter |

    Humans are able to throw projectiles with high speed and accuracy largely as a result of anatomical features that enable elastic energy storage and release at the shoulder; features that first appear together approximately 2 million years ago in Homo erectus, possibly as a means to hunt.

    • Neil T. Roach
    • , Madhusudhan Venkadesan
    •  & Daniel E. Lieberman

  • Letter |

    Molecular evidence suggests that the evolutionary split between hominoids and cercopithecoids occurred between 25 and 30 Myr ago, but fossil evidence for crown-group catarrhines (cercopithecoids and hominoids) before 20 Myr ago has been lacking; newly described fossils of a stem hominoid and a stem cercopithecoid precisely dated to 25.2 Myr ago help to fill this gap in the fossil record.

    • Nancy J. Stevens
    • , Erik R. Seiffert
    •  & Joseph Temu

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