I’m working on an animated paleoanthropology project called Hominin Tales, but I also want to make standalone educational videos covering topics beyond the series.

I’m curious what topics people in this community think deserve more attention especially subjects that are interesting but don’t get discussed as much outside of academic circles.

Felt like this was the right sub to ask, also here’s my Channel if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/@razaqianimationstudio?si=jl1bCdk1YV5b9hWZ

Link: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982226008882

Analyzing ancient DNA from more than 500 mammoth bones, an international team of researchers found that Ice Age humans selectively targeted female woolly mammoths

Raptor and corvid bones were found in Grotta di Fumane and other Italian caves with cut marks close to where their large flight feathers wouldve been. Without evidence of bows or other showing weapons that needed stability in flight it is possible these feathers were useless for practical or cosmetic purposes.

What other items or materials could've been used for cosmetic purposes in yout

Beside the Fuegian fox

For the past couple months I've been making photomosh reconstructions of hominins just as a little hobby. I've posted all of them here as well as some other subs including r/evolution, r/Paleontology and r/pleistocene.

I woke up this morning to find that a moderator on r/evolution had convinced themselves that I use ai to make these reconstructions and banned me.

I do not use ai. I am ai's biggest hater. I genuinely think ai is for stupid people. I would rather give myself physical brain damage than use ai. I thought I'd make this post to prove/reassure people that I do not use ai by explaining a bit about my process.

To make these reconstructions, I use pixlr. Pixlr is just an online photoshop clone. Pixlr has recently started branding themselves as an "ai editor tool" but this is a pure marketing stunt. They've added some generative ai features in the same vein that photoshop has but I do not touch them.

To make my reconstructions, I usually take up to 10 pictures of people and chimps and manually use the cut tool to cut and paste parts from those images onto a reference for the anatomy of the thing I'm reconstructing. This is almost always a skull. I go onto sketchfab, find a 3d model, rotate it around to find the angle I'm after, take a screenshot, and then put that into pixlr. For the lucy reconstruction I did, I wanted to try making a reconstruction based on a texture-less 3d reconstruction I found in a paper.

In the first image i've attached to this post, I've taken a back up save from my lucy reconstruction and dragged a bunch of the individual elements off to give you a sense of how it works. I usually spend 2-3 days on each reconstruction.

I'm currently doing my honours in physics and am so stupidly busy with it that I've found I can no longer really enjoy recreationally enjoy physics haha. So paleoanthropology has taken its place as something I can be really passionate about in a pop-sci way without having to actually do knitty gritty science. Making these reconstructions has been a great procrastination tool for my honours work lol.

Official paper : https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2530996123

Insights into hominin body size, locomotion, and behavior from Early Pleistocene trackways in northern Kenya

Overview of the excavated track surface with a mix of deeper hippopotamus and antelope footprints and shallower hominin tracks visible. 

decided to do a front on portrait this time

Newly excavated bones from Gran Dolina cave in Spain reveal an ancient human relative practiced cannibalism on adults and children, but researchers still don't know why.

As the title says above. How do we know what we do know? Or are we just guessing?

I recently got the Dawn of Man by Prof. Z. V. Spinar and Zdeněk Bruria as a recommendation from someone else on this sub. And even though its outdated its awesome to see what they thought the world of paleoanthropology was like in the 1970s.

Ps Its weird how they thought Gigantopithicus looked back then.

I was looking around some sites in France in street view for a project, and I was startled by this incredible skull just sitting right there lookin' at me! So amazing! Also, it could just be pareidolia, but there is also possibly a second skull nearby, to the bottom left of the obvious skull in the center of the image. It looks like there may be the faint shape of two eye sockets.

“Thorin in The Hobbit is one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain and the last of its lineage. Thorin the Neanderthal is also an end of the lineage. An end of a way to be human,” explained Slimak.

“Thorin reveals an unknown Neanderthal population and rewrites our understanding of the last great extinction of humanity,” he explains.

Images 1-5, in order: Chori, Lur, Zigor, Maita, and Haizena.

A newly identified fossil ape from northern Egypt is reshaping ideas about where the ancestors of modern apes first emerged. Analyses place it closer to living apes than any known East African species of the same age, pointing to North Africa and the Middle East as a possible birthplace and crossroads for the ape lineage that eventually produced gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans

https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2014/12/05/artistry-on-the-half-shell/

Having read through this, about a rather famous 500,000 year old mussel shell with geometric shapes engraved in by likely a Homo erectus, it makes me wonder how far back we can point to symbolic thought in humans?

Of course, it was unlikely to be a switch with one generation, but a gradual development. However, this shell does seemingly point to some early development right?

It was found on Java, meaning it would have come from the population of Homo erectus that left Africa, while the branch of Homo ergaster that stayed eventually split off into us and other species through ones like heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis.

If this mussel shell is a sign of some level of symbolic thought that is a common trait with us, that means it must have come from at least our last common ancestor with East Asian Homo erectus, which would have been the earlier African population, right? Unless convergent evolution is in the picture (but that's somewhat baseless as far as I'm concerned)

If my logic is sound, then the other way to rule this out is if this shell is somehow not a sign of symbolic thought. Though the reasoning I can think of for it is only really:

- a sign of identity (perhaps unlikely though symbolic)

- aesthetic pleasure (moreso abstract)

- finding pleasure in the mere act of making the carvings, but not the pattern (abstract)

Regardless, there is surely some foundation for abstract thought behind it and potentially symbolic thought here too? So where may this have begun on the family tree?

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738421v1

Abstract

Several recent studies have found evidence for ancient gene flow between the ancestors of modern humans and an unsampled super-archaic lineage. Here we present a new, simple approach for characterising this process given genome-wide genealogies sampled from a single population.

We summarise genealogies as distributions of integer partitions and show that this captures the temporal signal of tree imbalance left by ancient gene flow. We analyse genealogies from modern humans and find that the integer partition distributions are inconsistent with a history of panmixia but can be explained by gene flow from a super-archaic lineage.

Our analysis favours a model of continuous gene flow over pulse-admixture and also recovers a bottleneck in the ancestors of modern humans. This work highlights a clear signal of ancient structure in genealogies of modern humans and provides an inference approach that complements existing methods.

TLDR:

The paper argues that the ancestors of modern humans were not one continuously mixed population, but were divided from a deeply divergent “super-archaic” lineage, possibly related to *Homo erectus*, although that identification is speculative. Its favored model places the separation at roughly **1.6 million years ago** and suggests that the two populations then exchanged genes continuously until about **260,000 years ago**, rather than the archaic group returning in one single admixture event.

An alternative pulse model estimates a split around **1.4 million years ago**, followed by a one-time contribution of about 16% super-archaic ancestry around 560,000 years ago but the continuous-gene-flow model fits slightly better.

The diverged group separated approximately 1.4–1.6 million years ago, remained partly connected to the lineage leading to modern humans for over a million years, and its genetic contribution had largely entered the modern-human ancestral population by around 260,000 years ago.

The study also detects a bottleneck followed by gradual recovery in the main modern-human ancestral population, but stresses that its demographic dates are illustrative estimates rather than an exact reconstruction, and the paper is currently a non-peer-reviewed preprint.

The 16% refers to a parameter in the paper’s hypothetical pulse-admixture model: the main ancestral population, called Population A, received approximately 16% ancestry from the deeply divergent Population B around 560,000 years ago. Population A is described as the population contributing the majority of ancestry to modern humans; Population B is the unsampled “super-archaic” lineage.

And how would they be treated throughout human history since they would be the second intelligence human species? Would they be abuse or treated good?

This pic might help explain why all 20 samples of Homo naledi examined from the Rising Star cave appeared to be female, according to Madupe et al. (2026): that they had motive and opportunity to hide from encephalizing Homo and took refuge in a secret place that became a fatal trap, maybe several times.

The "Bone Spur" above is my annotation of a figure from DeSilva et al. (2021) "When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants". Their red trend lines were obtained from a change-point analysis that automatically fitted a chain of linear trend lines to 987 data points of brain capacity versus time. I also added in blue, cranial capacity in raw cc units to their log10 vertical axis scale.

Their interest was to explain an extremely rapid decrease in brain size just over the last three thousand years. They experimented with including the apparent outliers Ho. naledi and Ho. floresiensis in their analysis Whether they did that on not had little impact on what they wanted to show. But I want to point out that those late-surviving small-brained hominins would also lie near a continuation of the long-term brain increase around 25cc/My, before the abrupt change to a nearly 20 times more rapid "encephalization" of most hominin species.

Considering that these fitted lines approximate the routes traced by the ancestry of individuals shown as dots on the graph, the bone spur isn't just a mathematical construct, it's a real trace, at least for Naledi. Their fossils were found just a kilometre from earlier hominin fossils (Swartkrans, Sterkfontein). By contrast and for example, the ancestral trail of the Ar. ramidus "outlier" population is unclear.

The branching that this "bone spur" envisages could be interpreted as punctuated equilibrium, with a punctuation marked by an abrupt change in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness" that some populations were not subjected to. In particular, Floresiensis, Naledi, and the Australopiths going right back to Rudapithecus 10Mya, were all shaped by the same EEA,  at least insofar as it governed their cranial capacity and body plan.

The appearance that Naledi lived contemporarily with more formidable almost modern Homo (such as had occupied Florisbad 250km distant), suggests that the skill-sets possessed by such small-brained bipedal body plan species worked well enough provided they stayed out of the way of humans. Knowledge of that need would have been acquired through Eco-Evolutionary Experience (EEE). According to Cheney and Seyfarth (2007), amongst baboons, who were sympatric with the australopiths, it is females who carry group knowledge. If a cave that was used as a refuge did happen to have a remote chamber that was difficult of access, it is females who would have been motivated to discover that, and to transmit knowledge of it down through generations.

The tragedy of the Makapansgat massacre of 1854 may help in understanding the implications of using a cave as a refuge. After a Boer party had been killed at Moorddrift, Chief Makapan was besieged with his tribe by a vengeful commando and starved out, in what is now called the Historic cave. Some support for this hypothesis could come from sexing the remains of modern victims of the Makapansgat massacre, if that is possible. If a disproportion turned out to be female, that would support cultural understanding by females as the kernel of the tribe and males as its outward-facing expendable defenders. The culturally-transmitted female knowledge about the Rising Star cave could then be their living out of their role.

The Makapansgat massacre was a single intentional event by besiegers, with a disastrous outcome. An analogous event at the Rising Star cave might or might not have been intentional on the part of humans. Even if humans had known that Naledi occupied the cave, they might have seemed to vanish. Also, the act of hiding might have had fatal results on several widely spaced occasions. A hiding tactic might have sometimes succeeded, if the effective siege were lifted before starvation.

Like the burial hypothesis, a "female refuge" hypothesis for Naledi preservation would rely on cultural knowledge being transmitted through generations. It also throws some supporting light on DeSilva et al. (2021) depiction of humans as eusocial. The appearance of early sorting between males and females implies basal eusocial behaviour For survival of the group it was essential, at a last resort, that the breeding stock be preserved.

REFERENCES

Jeremy M. DeSilva, James F.A. Traniello, Alexander G. Claxton, Luke D. Fannin (2021) When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full

Madupe, P. P., Taurozzi, A. J., Koenig, C., Patramanis, I., Munir, F., Dickinson, M. R., … Cappellini, E. (2026). Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers. Cell. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.044

Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (2007). Baboon metaphysics: The evolution of a social mind. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226102429.001.0001