Your cells look young for their age, compared to a chimp’s
While advances in medicine and nutrition in the last 200 years have added years to human lifespans, a new Leakey Foundation-supported study suggests there could be a more ancient explanation for why humans live longer than our closest relatives do.
Prehistoric desert footprints are earliest evidence for Homo sapiens on Arabian Peninsula
A team of researchers, including Leakey Foundation grantees, discovered human and other animal footprints embedded on an ancient lake surface in the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia that are around 120,000 years old. These findings represent the earliest evidence for Homo sapiens on the Arabian Peninsula, and demonstrates the importance of Arabia for understanding human prehistory.
Male chimpanzees hang out as friends, but most social ties remain a mystery
Strong social ties are a key driver of cooperation in many species and are associated with adaptive benefits in several of them, including humans, feral horses and dolphins. Although such bonds are widely observed, it is not always known why any two particular animals become friends (just as in humans).
New fossil ape discovered in India
A 13-million-year-old fossil unearthed in northern India comes from a newly discovered ape, the earliest known ancestor of the modern-day gibbon. The discovery was made by Leakey Foundation grantee Christopher C. Gilbert, Hunter College. It fills a major void in the ape fossil record and provides important new evidence about when the ancestors of today’s gibbon migrated to Asia from Africa.
Boxgrove: how we found Europe’s oldest bone tools – and what we learned about their makers
Boxgrove in Sussex, England, is an iconic, old stone age site. This is where the oldest human remains in Britain have been discovered – fossils of Homo heidelbergensis. Part of an exceptionally preserved 26km-wide ancient landscape of stone, it provides a virtually untouched record of early humans almost half a million years ago.