Functional Morphology of Homo habilis

Olduvai hominid (O.H.) fossils 7, 8, and 35 represent the earliest species of the genus Homo dated at 1.76 million years. The O.H. 7 hand, jaw, and skull and the O.H. 8 foot come from one subadult individual, and the O.H. 35 leg are also those of Homo habilis. The skeleton represents a mosaic of primitive and derived features, indicating an early hominid which walked bipedally and could fabricate stone tools but also retained the generalized hominoid capacity to climb trees.     

A new skull of early Homo from Dmanisi,Georgia

Another hominid skull has been recovered at Dmanisi (Republic of Georgia) from the same strata in which hominid remains have been reported previously. The Dmanisi site dated to approximately 1.75 million years ago has now produced craniofacial portions of several hominid individuals, along with many well-preserved animal fossils and quantities of stone artifacts. Although there are certain anatomical differences among the Dmanisi specimens, the hominids do not clearly represent more than one taxon. We assign the new skull provisionally to Homo erectus (=ergaster). The Dmanisi specimens are the most primitive and small-brained fossils to be grouped with this species or any taxon linked unequivocally with genus Homo and also the ones most similar to the presumed habilis-like stem. We suggest that the ancestors of the Dmanisi population dispersed from Africa before the emergence of humans identified broadly with the H. erectus grade.     

The human genus

A general problem in biology is how to incorporate information about evolutionary history and adaptation into taxonomy. The problem is exemplified in attempts to define our own genus, Homo. Here conventional criteria for allocating fossil species to Homo are reviewed and are found to be either inappropriate or inoperable. We present a revised definition, based on verifiable criteria, for Homo and conclude that two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, do not belong in the genus. The earliest taxon to satisfy the criteria is Homo ergaster, or early African Homo erectus, which currently appears in the fossil record at about 1.9 million years ago.     

Comment on "The Brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis"

Endocast analysis of the brain Homo floresiensis by Falk et al. (Reports, 8 April 2005, p. 242) implies that the hominid is an insular dwarf derived from H. erectus, but its tiny cranial capacity cannot result from normal dwarfing. Consideration of more appropriate microcephalic syndromes and specimens supports the hypothesis of modern human microcephaly.     

Australopithecus garhi: a new species of early hominid from Ethiopia

The lack of an adequate hominid fossil record in eastern Africa between 2 and 3 million years ago (Ma) has hampered investigations of early hominid phylogeny. Discovery of 2.5 Ma hominid cranial and dental remains from the Hata beds of Ethiopia's Middle Awash allows recognition of a new species of Australopithecus. This species is descended from Australopithecus afarensis and is a candidate ancestor for early Homo. Contemporary postcranial remains feature a derived humanlike humeral/femoral ratio and an apelike upper arm-to-lower arm ratio.     

Age of bed v, olduvai gorge, Tanzania

Various finds of hominid remains in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, have focused interest upon the age of the deposits in the sequence of six beds. After bed I was dated by the potassium-argon decay method, an absolute date of 10,400 years has now been obtained with the radiocarbon method from a sample of mammalian bones for bed V.     

Earliest Pleistocene hominid cranial remains from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia: taxonomy, geological setting, and age

Archaeological excavations at the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia have uncovered two partial early Pleistocene hominid crania. The new fossils consist of a relatively complete cranium and a second relatively complete calvaria from the same site and stratigraphic unit that yielded a hominid mandible in 1991. In contrast with the uncertain taxonomic affinity of the mandible, the new fossils are comparable in size and morphology with Homo ergaster from Koobi Fora, Kenya. Paleontological, archaeological, geochronological, and paleomagnetic data from Dmanisi all indicate an earliest Pleistocene age of about 1.7 million years ago, supporting correlation of the new specimens with the Koobi Fora fossils. The Dmanisi fossils, in contrast with Pleistocene hominids from Western Europe and Eastern Asia, show clear African affinity and may represent the species that first migrated out of Africa.     

Hominid humeral fragment from early Pleistocene of northwestern Kenya

The distal end of a hominoid humerus was recovered from early Pleistocene sediments in the Kanapoi drainage near the southern end of Lake Rudolf. Lava capping the sediments yielded a potassium/argon date of 2.5 million years. The fragment can be distinguished on inspection from gorilla and orangutan; discriminate analysis of humeri of Homo and Pan assigns it as hominid. From other evidence we consider it more likely to represent Australopithecus s.s. than Paranthropus.     

Genetic and fossil evidence for the origin of modern humans

The origin of living Homo sapiens has once again been the subject of much debate. Genetic data on present human population relationships and data from the Pleistocene fossil hominid record are used to compare two contrasting models for the origin of modern humans. Both genetics and paleontology support a recent African origin for modern humans rather than a long period of multiregional evolution accompanied by gene flow.     

Environment and behavior of 2.5-million-year-old Bouri hominids

The Hata Member of the Bouri Formation is defined for Pliocene sedimentary outcrops in the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia. The Hata Member is dated to 2.5 million years ago and has produced a new species of Australopithecus and hominid postcranial remains not currently assigned to species. Spatially associated zooarchaeological remains show that hominids acquired meat and marrow by 2.5 million years ago and that they are the near contemporary of Oldowan artifacts at nearby Gona. The combined evidence suggests that behavioral changes associated with lithic technology and enhanced carnivory may have been coincident with the emergence of the Homo clade from Australopithecus afarensis in eastern Africa.     

The ecology of early man in southern Africa

It is not possible at present to demonstrate hominid occupation of southern Africa prior to the middle or late Pliocene, perhaps 3 million years ago. It may be the case that much, if not most, of the subcontinent was in fact uninhabited before that. The earliest hominid known to have lived in southern Africa is Australopithecus africanus. It was apparently replaced by Homo (?evolved into Homo) by 2 million years ago, at approximately the same time as A. robustus is first recorded locally. Homo and A. robustus then coexisted until perhaps 1 million years ago, after which Homo survived alone. There is no solid evidence that either of the southern African australopithecines made tools or accumulated bones. In fact, at the known sites, it now seems more likely that the bones, including those of the australopithecines themselves, were accumulated by carnivores. The known archeological record of southern Africa begins 2 million to 1.5 million years ago and the oldest stone tools may belong to the Oldowan Industry. Far better documentation exists for the succeeding Acheulean Industrial Complex, which was present in southern Africa almost certainly before 1 million years ago and persisted with modifications probably until sometime between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago. Although it is known that Acheulean peoples made handaxes, cleavers, and other stone tools, very little else is known about the activities of Acheuleans in southern Africa. Far more is known about their Middle and Later Stone Age successors. Southern African MSA peoples were perhaps among the earliest anywhere to take systematic advantage of aquatic resources for their subsistence, although they apparently did so far less effectively than did the LSA peoples who followed them. There are also contrasts between the ways in which MSA and LSA peoples dealt with terrestrial prey and between the contents of MSA and LSA artifact assemblages. The LSA peoples, for example, seem to have made much more extensive use of bone as a raw material, and they were the first to manufacture articles that are clearly interpretable as ornaments or art objects. From an evolutionary perspective, the LSA may represent a quantum advance over the MSA, perhaps correlated with the replacement of an archaic human physical type by the modem one. However, this must remain only a working hypothesis until much more is learned about the earliest LSA, dating to 35,000 to 40,000 years ago or more, and until there are adequate samples of well-provenienced MSA and early LSA physical remains. The later LSA, postdating 20,000 to 18,000 years ago, is reasonably well known. Later LSA peoples were probably at least partly responsible for the extinction of several large mammals in southern Africa about 10,000 years ago. By that date or shortly thereafter, at least some LSA peoples established basic hunting-gathering adaptations, which continued until the introduction and spread of agriculture and pastoralism, beginning roughly 2000 years ago. Thereafter, hunters and gatherers became progressively restricted in numbers and distribution, such that today only a very few exist, restricted to some of the most marginal environments of the subcontinent. It remains a major goal of southern African archeology to shed more light on the evolution and operation of hunting-gathering cultures during the vast time span when they covered all of southern Africa.     

Sequencing and analysis of Neanderthal genomic DNA

Our knowledge of Neanderthals is based on a limited number of remains and artifacts from which we must make inferences about their biology, behavior, and relationship to ourselves. Here, we describe the characterization of these extinct hominids from a new perspective, based on the development of a Neanderthal metagenomic library and its high-throughput sequencing and analysis. Several lines of evidence indicate that the 65,250 base pairs of hominid sequence so far identified in the library are of Neanderthal origin, the strongest being the ascertainment of sequence identities between Neanderthal and chimpanzee at sites where the human genomic sequence is different. These results enabled us to calculate the human-Neanderthal divergence time based on multiple randomly distributed autosomal loci. Our analyses suggest that on average the Neanderthal genomic sequence we obtained and the reference human genome sequence share a most recent common ancestor approximately 706,000 years ago, and that the human and Neanderthal ancestral populations split approximately 370,000 years ago, before the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Our finding that the Neanderthal and human genomes are at least 99.5% identical led us to develop and successfully implement a targeted method for recovering specific ancient DNA sequences from metagenomic libraries. This initial analysis of the Neanderthal genome advances our understanding of the evolutionary relationship of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis and signifies the dawn of Neanderthal genomics.     

An inward-facing conformation of a putative metal-chelate-type ABC transporter

The crystal structure of a putative metal-chelate-type adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-binding cassette (ABC) transporter encoded by genes HI1470 and HI1471 of Haemophilus influenzae has been solved at 2.4 angstrom resolution. The permeation pathway exhibits an inward-facing conformation, in contrast to the outward-facing state previously observed for the homologous vitamin B12 importer BtuCD. Although the structures of both HI1470/1 and BtuCD have been solved in nucleotide-free states, the pairs of ABC subunits in these two structures differ by a translational shift in the plane of the membrane that coincides with a repositioning of the membrane-spanning subunits. The differences observed between these ABC transporters involve relatively modest rearrangements and may serve as structural models for inward- and outward-facing conformations relevant to the alternating access mechanism of substrate translocation.     

A gorilla-sized ape from the miocene of India

A large ape existed in India at the close of the Miocene or the beginning of the Pliocene epochs; this ape shows a complex of anatomical structures at the opposite pole from its contemporary, Ramapithecus. Although found in the same beds, the two seldom occur at the same exact sites and levels. Considering the thickness of these beds, recovery close to Haritalyangar does not, of itself, prove sympatry of these two different kinds of Hominoidea. However, both are definitely present at one recently located site representing, most probably, a death assemblage. Observations by the authors on scores of chimpanzees suggest that, at least in this ape, wear gradients on molar crowns exist, but that the wear differential between adjacent molars is almost never raised to the degree seen in most Ramapithecus. Dryopithecus itdicus and D. fontani (from southern France), in contrast, show almost no wear gradient at all; that is, whether an individual is dentally young or old, wear on all three molars and the two premolars has proceeded to about the same degree. It is of considerable importance in understanding hominid phylogeny to be able to stress that an ape known to be contemporary with Ramapithecus shows far less differential wear than does the hominid. This, in turn, strongly suggests that the molar eruption sequence of D. indicus was rapid, while that of the hominid was delayed. The implication is that, as far back as the late Miocene, the hominid maturation period was lengthened, relative to that of apes. A further fact which emerges is that the rate of interstitial wear was faster in the Haritalyangar ape than in the hominid contemporary with it. This, together with its large size, flatness of unworn tooth crowns, and other associated characters, suggests that D. indicus is in, or close to, the ancestry of Gigantopithecus. From this emerges yet another object lesson, emphasizing the caution one has to observe in the manner and method by which ancient and modern apes are compared and contrasted. None of the species of Hominoidea dealt with here, whether pongid (D. indicus and Pan troglodytes) or hominid (R. punjabicus), accumulates either interstitial or crown wear at the same rate or in the same manner.     

Pentaborate Polyanion in the Crystal Structure of Ulexite, NaCaB5O6(OH)6{middle dot}5H2O

Triclinic ulexite crystals contain isolated borate polyanions [B(5)O(6)(OH)(6)](3-) related to the well known pentaborate polyanion [B(5)O(6)(OH)(4)](-) by addition of two hydroxyl groups to two opposite B-O triangles. The isolated ulexite polyanions form the [B(5)O(7)(OH)(4)](n)(3n-) chains previously found in crystals of the related mineral probertite, NaCaB(5)O(7)(OH)(4).3H(2)O.     

Primitive hominid canine from Tanzania

A primitive hominid canine recovered at Laetoli by Louis Leakey in 1935 and stored at the British Museum of Natural History adds to our knowledge of dental anatomy in Australopithecus. The specimen was the first adult Australopithecus recovered and the first ancient hominid discovered in eastern Africa.     

Pliocene and pleistocene hominid-bearing sites from west of lake turkana, kenya

Pliocene and Pleistocene fossil localities near the western shoreline of Lake Turkana, ranging in age between 1 million and 3.5 million years in age, have produced important new hominid specimens including most of a Homo erectus skeleton and a relatively complete early robust australopithecine cranium. The lacustrine, fluviatile, and terrestrial strata are designated the Nachukui Formation, which is subdivided into eight members. The distribution of sedimentary facies within the Nachukui Formation suggests that, as today, the Labur and Murua Rith ranges formed the western margin of the basin and were drained by eastward-flowing rivers that fed into the forerunner of the present lake or a major river system. There is also stratigraphic evidence for tectonic movement during the deposition of these sediments. Twenty-three of the tuffs observed in the succession occur also in the Koobi Fora Formation east of the lake and in the Shungura Formation of the lower Omo Valley and permit precise correlation among these three localities. Fortyseven fossiliferous sites from West Turkana have yielded more than 1000 specimens of 93 mammalian species. The mammalian fossils represent nine sequential assemblages that augment information about faunal and environmental change from elsewhere in the basin.     

Electron diffraction and imaging of uncompressed monolayers of amphiphilic molecules on vitreous and hexagonal ice

A new approach is described for probing domains of ordered self-assemblies of amphiphilic monolayers at the aqueous solution interface. The method has potential importance for the study of membrane structure, Langmuir-Blodgett films, and nucleation processes of two-and three-dimensional crystals. Electron diffraction (ED) patterns indicative of two-dimensional crystalline self-assembly were obtained from samples, which were examined by cryo-electron microscopy, of monolayers of water-insoluble amphiphiles on vitrified aqueour substrates. The apparent hexagonal symmetry of an ED pattern from a C(16)H(33)OH monolayer was interpreted in terms of multiple twinning. Monolayers of the CL(31)H(63)OH and cadmium salt of C(19)H(39)CO(2)H that were studied by dark-field techniques displayed faceted two-dimensional crystallites with a maximal size of 1 to 2 micrometers. Epitaxial nucleation of hexagonal ice by the C(31)H(63)OH monolayer has also been demonstrated by ED.     

Archeological traces of early hominid activities, East of lake Rudolf, kenya

Excavations have demonstrated that stone artifacts occur stratified within beds of Lower Pleistocene (or end Pliocene) age. At one site a low-density scatter of worked stone objects occurs together with small but significant quantities of broken-up bones. Potassium-argon dates indicate an age greater than 2 million years; thus, this may be the oldest known hominid occupation site. More than 20 hominid fossils have been recovered from various sedimentary formations in the area.     

Sequence Comparison of MHC Class Ⅱβ (Exon 2) and Phylogenetic Relationship Between Poultry and Mammalian

A fragment spanning over exon 2 and intron 2 of major histocompatibility complex B-LB Ⅱ genes was amplified using PCR,cloned and sequenced in 13 individuals from eight Chinese indigenous chicken breeds and one introduced breed. Another 41 sequences of MHC class Ⅱβ from ten vertebrate species were cited from the NCBI GenBank. Thirteen new B-LB Ⅱ alleles were found in the chicken breeds sampled. Alignment of the exon 2 sequences revealed 91.1-97.8% similarity to each other within the chickens sampled, and the chickens shared 84.1-87.0% homology to Phasianus colchicus, 78.5-81.5% similarity to Coturnixjaponica. The sequences in poultry showed 62.6-68.1% identity to HLA-DRBl, 50-61.5% similarity to DQB (HLA-, SLA- and H2-BB), 53.7-60% to HLA-DPB and 53.3-57.8% similarity to HLA-DOB. The frequency of nonsynonymous substitutions of nucleotide was higher than that of synonymous substitutions, and the frequencies of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitutions in poultry B-LB Ⅱ genes were lower than those observed in mammalian DRB1 and DQB1 genes. The deduced amino acid sequences of MHC class Ⅱβ1 domain exhibited extreme difference in conversed region and variable region patterns among the various species, but the two conserved cysteines forming disulfide-bond were shown consistent in poultry with that in mammalian species; and the carbohydrate attachment site was found more conserved in chicken, Homo sapiens, Bos taurus, Ovis aries and Capra hircus than in Sus scrofa and rodent animals. Compared with exon 2 of DQB1 genes of Homo sapiens, ruminant species and Sus scrofa, the differentia that the deletion of six nucleotides at position195 to 200 of exon 2 of DQB1 genes, and insertion of three nucleotides at position 247 to 249 of the exon 2 existed in rodent species were found, which led to the absence of three AA residues at position 65, 66,and 67 within β1 domain of DQB1 chain, and the insertion of one AA residue at position 85. The difference of the deletion of six nucleotides at position 72 to 77 of exon 2 of DPB1 genes was observed with Homo sapiens DQB1, which caused absence of three AA residues at position 24, 25, and 26 of β1 domain of DPBl chain. The phylogenetic tree revealed that the B-LB Ⅱ sequences from poultry are not orthologous to the class Ⅱ MHC β-chain genes of mammalian species. The tree indicated that genetic evolutionary relationship of chickens with Phasianus colchicus was much closer than with Coturnixjaponica, and the DQB and DPB clusters are more tightly related to each other than to the remaining clusters.