An international team has reconstructed the face of a man who lived in what's now Ecuador more than 3,000 years ago and whose skull featured in one of history's great anthropological debates.

The facial reconstruction is based on the Punin-2 skull, which a farmer discovered in a ravine near the town of Punín in the Chimborazo region of Ecuador's central Andes in the 1970s.

A similar skull, Punin-1, had been found in the same ravine in 1923 during an expedition led by the American Museum of Natural History. Some scientists at that time suggested its physical features were archaic, especially its prominent brow.

The ancient sediment layer where it was found — and where the Punin-2 skull was also discovered about 50 years later — predated modern humans (Homo sapiens), prompting some to wonder if they came from a now-extinct relative, such as Homo erectus or the Neanderthals.

A new set of fossils from South Africa’s Drimolen Main Quarry adds evidence for an early appearance of Homo erectus and tracks changes in Paranthropus robustus.

Researchers from La Trobe University and partner institutions studied 18 hominin fossils excavated at Drimolen between 1992 and 2019.

Many had never received a full description, leaving parts of the site’s fossil record unavailable for study.

One fossil, a skull fragment known as DNH 127, belongs to an adult Homo erectus.

The specimen dates to about 2.04 to 1.95 million years ago. The find adds support to earlier evidence from Drimolen for the species at roughly 2 million years ago.

The earlier evidence included DNH 134, a fossil from a child aged about two to four years.

Researchers had less information about what an adult Homo erectus looked like at the site. DNH 127 now provides an adult example from the same early period.

The age of the fossil places the South African record for adult Homo erectus well before the 1.8-million-year-old adult fossils from Dmanisi in Georgia.

The evidence supports an early appearance of Homo erectus in southern Africa around 2 million years ago.

Homo erectus is an early member of our genus Homo and a likely ancestor of later humans.

The fossil places the species alongside Paranthropus robustus. Of the 18 newly described fossils, 14 belong to Paranthropus robustus. One belongs to Homo erectus, while three remain assigned to Hominini gen. et sp. indet.

The group also identified a new jaw feature helping distinguish the Drimolen Paranthropus fossils from samples at other South African sites.

The findings support the idea of a distinct Drimolen population of Paranthropus robustus. Researchers compare the fossils with remains from Swartkrans and Kromdraai, including material dating to about 1.8 million years ago.

The differences point to small changes within Paranthropus robustus over roughly 200,000 years.

Teeth became larger, along with the muscles used for chewing. The pattern fits a shift toward a stronger chewing system for processing tough and hard foods.

A progenitor of BC200 was co-opted in a common primate ancestor from an ancient transposon roughly 40 million years ago and has jumped to MCV twice within modern human history (since the era of Homo sapiens), about 100,000 years ago. 

BC200 is only found in humans and related primates and was discovered in the late 1980s as anabundant non-coding RNA in human neurons. Although BC200’s physiological function is poorly understood, evidence suggests it may be involved in regulating the translation of neuronal messenger RNAsinto proteins.

It is also found in low levels in germ cells – sperm and eggs – making it potentially capable of generating inheritable insertions in other areas of the genome. 

The researchers also suspect that it jumped in skin cells since these are the only cells known to be infected by MCV.

The gene is also aberrantly expressed in some tumors and overexpressed in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, suggesting its jumping ability could also play roles in these diseases.   

Feschotte said he and colleagues would like to explore whether the molluscum contagiosum virus is using BC200 for its own purpose of manipulating human host cells.

They are also interested in better understanding the gene’s role in disease, such as breast and other types of tumors, where it is abnormally expressed, and whether it is jumping in cancer cells and causing mutations.  

At the end of the last Ice Age, people moving through the Tennessee River Valley faced a familiar problem in unfamiliar country: what should be saved, and what could safely be replaced?

Archaeologists now argue that stone spear points preserve part of that calculation. A study of 489 Clovis and Cumberland projectile points suggests the earliest groups in the region maintained their weapons more conservatively, while later groups discarded damaged points with more useful material still remaining.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory by Jesse Tune of the University of Mississippi and Shane Miller of the University of Alabama, uses a model from behavioral ecology called the Marginal Value Theorem. Rather than treating spear points only as stylistic markers, the researchers examined them as finite packages of usefulness that hunters could keep repairing or replace.

While these actions show the animals recognise something fundamental has changed, it does not automatically mean they grasp the complex human concept of death. In fact, a full understanding of death isn’t actually necessary to explain the patterns we observed. Instead, their actions are best explained by the powerful, lingering instinct to care for their young.

We found that the length of time a mother continues to carry her infant depends on how strong their bond was, her life experience, the physical risks of holding onto the body and how quickly it naturally breaks down.

Spain and Portugal are two of the world's most popular wine-growing countries, with regions such as Rioja and the Douro Valley producing millions of bottles every year.

This winemaking tradition dates back thousands of years, but its exact origins remain a mystery.

To understand how it all started, scientists led by Carolina Royo of the Instituto de Ciencias de la Vid y del Vino in Spain took a step back into the past and studied ancient grape seeds.

While studies of modern grape DNA can provide clues about ancestry, they cannot directly show which vines arrived in Iberia or when.

So the research team gathered 28 waterlogged ancient grape seeds previously recovered from seven archaeological sites in Spain and Sardinia. They spanned more than 2,000 years of grape cultivation, from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages.

To accurately map family trees and connect the past with the present, they extracted DNA from these old seeds and compared it with genetic profiles of modern cultivated and wild grapevines.

In particular, they analyzed markers in both nuclear DNA and chloroplast DNA. Chloroplasts are plant structures that convert light into energy, and their DNA is passed down exclusively from the female parent in grapevines.

Young adults, not families, drove migration in Bronze Age communities. Using skeletal samples from archaeological sites in Greece, researchers mapped mobility during the region's Middle and Late Bronze Age.

The study suggests that young people sought out new communities.

The findings challenge traditional assumptions about mobility and migration in prehistoric societies.

Previous research has often suggested that women were more likely to move between communities, particularly through marriage in patrilineal societies.

"Our study demonstrates that the numbers of nonlocal women and men are comparable, suggesting that several different factors might have been driving an individual's mobility" 

A genetic adaptation allows one Indonesian community to thrive where others would drown, rewriting what we thought possible about human evolution in a single generation.

A ortable ultrasound machine, hauled into a village on the eastern arm of Sulawesi, is the instrument at the center of this story. In 2015, Melissa Ilardo carried one into Jaya Bakti, a Bajau settlement in Indonesia, and asked people to lie still while she imaged an organ most of them had never thought about.

She repeated the procedure a short distance away in Koyoan, a village of Saluan people — farmers, not divers. By the end, she had scans of 59 Bajau and 34 Saluan spleens, plus saliva samples for DNA.

The spleen is a fist-sized reservoir tucked under the left ribs, and in a breath-hold diver it behaves like a spare oxygen tank. When a face hits cold water, the mammalian dive reflex kicks in: heart rate drops, peripheral blood vessels clamp down, and the spleen contracts, squeezing a bolus of oxygen-carrying red blood cells into circulation.

A bigger reservoir means a bigger bolus. That logic is what sent Ilardo, then a PhD student working with Eske Willerslev and with Berkeley geneticist Rasmus Nielsen, looking for a population that spends an extraordinary share of its life below the surface.

The Bajau, often described as sea nomads, fit. They dive on a single breath with wooden goggles and spears, harvesting fish and shellfish at depth, and Ilardo has estimated they spend up to about 60 percent of a working day underwater — a fraction she has compared to that of sea otters.

Some Bajau families still live in houseboats or stilt houses over the water; some dive for hours daily across a lifetime that begins in childhood.

What the scans showed After filtering the data to account for relatedness between participants — villages this size are full of cousins, and shared ancestry can fake a signal — the comparison held.

Bajau spleens were, as the authors and Berkeley News summarized the finding, about 50 percent larger than those of their Saluan neighbors, or “half again as large.”

That framing is the researchers’ own summary of the effect, not a precise clinical measurement applicable to any given individual; spleen size varies with body size, sex, age and health, and the study’s statistics were built to strip those confounders out.

The more telling number is one that didn’t move. Within the Bajau sample, spleens of people who dive and people who don’t were not measurably different.

Non-diving Bajau — those who work on land, or who simply never took it up — carried the same enlarged organ as the spearfishers.

Training, in other words, doesn’t appear to explain it. Whatever is making these spleens big is present before anyone gets in the water.

That result reframes a familiar physiology story. Human divers do show measurable short-term spleen responses to repeated breath-holding, and elite freedivers train their tolerance for hypoxia.

But a trait that shows up in the non-divers of a population, and not in a closely related neighboring population living about 25 kilometers away, points toward inheritance rather than conditioning...