Many people mistakenly think of evolution as progress. But humans, despite their ability to manipulate objects and change their environment, are not “on top” of the world’s species. Research by Lynn Isbell, chair of the UC Davis Department of Anthropology, suggests that ancestral humans and other primates developed different strategies to find food and avoid predators.
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.
The FOXP2 gene has been associated with uniquely human language abilities. But a UC Davis scientist and colleagues did a study with a wider variety of people and found no evidence of selection for FOXP2 in modern humans, challenging previous of how we think humans acquired language.
New fossil finds from the Jebel Irhoud archaeological site in Morocco do more than push back the origins of our species by 100,000 years. They also reveal what was on the menu for our oldest-known Homo sapiens ancestors 300,000 years ago
UC Davis anthropologist Alexander Harcourt sums up the latest research on early human migration around the planet, saying that Homo sapiens left Africa earlier than previously thought and our diverse cultures have been heavily influenced by geography.
