Anthropologists probe bones, stones and molecules
Culotta, E.
Science 284(5417): 1109 1111
1999
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 10366340 Document Number: 506136
The writer discusses two highlights of the more than 500 presentations offered at the annual meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropology in Columbus, Ohio. Dean Falk of the University at Albany, New York, and colleagues suggested that, by around 2.5 million to 3 million years ago, when the genus Homo had yet to emerge, regions of the hominid Australopithecus africanus brain thought to be used in abstract thinking and language were starting to show some resemblances to those of modern humans. At a special conference on the peopling of the New World, two independent presentations of genetic data roughly indicated the same region of southern Siberia as the original homeland of the people who eventually colonized the New World.