Our Prehistoric Ancestors

Are viruses our oldest ancestors?

Humans have a skewed view of viruses because we only notice them if they cause disease. In reality, however, viruses are much more than pathogens. HIV and influenza cause frightening health threats, but 1019 HIV particles worldwide are basically nothing compared to 1033 total number of viruses on our planet. Viruses are present in every species and every ecological niche, and affect every organ...

What did our ancestors eat?

Over the millennia various hominoids and hominids have subsisted on very different dietaries, depending on climate, hunting proficiency, food-processing technology, and available foods. The Australopithecines were not browsers and fruit-eaters with very high intakes of vitamin C; rather they were scavengers of kills made by other animals. The hominids who followed did include some cold-climate ...

Paleolithic nutrition : what did our ancestors eat ?

Capturing climate variability during our ancestors' earliest days.

C limate’s role in shaping the environmental and evolutionary history of our earliest ancestors remains an actively debated topic. In PNAS, Magill et al. (1, 2) present records of terrestrial habitat and hydroclimate variation and pacing from Olduvai Gorge sediments during a key interval of our ancestors’ divergence and dispersal approximately 2.0 Ma. Although there is general consensus that ec...

Cosmopolitan ancestors: Simulations calibrated with genetic and ethnographic data show that prehistoric populations were not small and isolated

The prehistoric populations of humans are an important source of information to analyze some aspects of the modern human societies. Thinking about the human ancestors it is important because it is possible to understand some of the characteristics of humans nowadays. For instance, human behavior or languages structures are some of the elements that could be studied by looking to human evolution...