From Science, June 18, 2121 By Ann Gibbons More than 49,000 years ago, a family of Neanderthals set up camp in a cave high in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, overlooking a river valley where bison, red deer, and wild horses roamed. In the cave’s main gallery, a teenage girl lost a tooth, perhaps while gnawing on …
CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) A. CUADRA/SCIENCE; EUROPE’S LOST FRONTIERS PROJECT/EUROPEAN RESEARCH COUNCIL; (PHOTOS, LEFT TO RIGHT) NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES (ROM) LEIDEN (1); MANON BRUININGA Article by Andrew Curry, Science 31 Jan 2020: Vol. 367, Issue 6477, pp. 499-503
Excerpt from forthcoming edition of Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind: There is paleontological evidence for sexual selection. What makes early human fossils recognizably modern has less to do with brute survival than with the attractiveness of males and females for each other. Modern human adults are more gracile and childlike, which is the result …