Human origins news from Chicago

While I hold the front in Paris, my human evolution team colleagues Elizabeth Culotta and Ann Gibbons are in Chicago reporting from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Their adventures, along with those of our other colleagues at the meeting, can be found on Science's Findings blog. Among the highlights I have seen so far: The latest about the earliest known humans out of Africa at Dmanisi (dated 1.8 million years ago), an update on the latest Hobbit news from William Jungers at Stony Brook University (still looking a lot like a new species), a suggestion from University of Michigan anthropologist Milford Wolpoff that the just-sequenced Neandertal genome could be that of a modern human (a notion not taken too seriously by others), and a podcast about the origins of the human diet with Northwestern University anthropologist William Leonard.

I will update this post if any other human evolution news comes out of the meeting.

More findings: Ann Gibbons on "A Matter of Taste." She licks a strip of paper. Click to find out why.

Neandertals die young. Elizabeth Culotta tells us why.