Australopithecus afarensis. In early 1994 National Geographic Magazine asked me to create, for the first time, a painting closer to our own ancestry, and closer to my own training (anthropology). The famous Lucy fossil had made her debut without her head twenty years earlier, and the new National Geographic story was about the discovery of the first reasonably complete skull (a large male) for the species (Australopithecus afarensis). Using the new skull, as well as a composite adult female skull and a child’s skull known for the species, I did 3D anatomical reconstructions of each, and used them for reference for this painting, depicting a social group in an open woodland setting. The biggest debate about this and related species was about locomotion. Everyone agreed that these creatures were bipeds, but were they also climbing trees? I wanted to take the issue head on in the painting, and depicted them doing both, as they begin to move out of the woodland where they had been foraging. Some of the no-climbing theorists among the experts weren’t pleased at the time to see climbing depicted. Current opinion is that they were climbing a sufficient amount of the time to influence their morphology. Prehistorical Also featured in The Art of National Geographic: a century of illustration, by Alice A. Carter, 1999. ©John Gurche
A very good illustration I haven’t seen before.
As usual, Open in new tabs to embiggen.
Archaeologists long favored the idea that our own genus, Homo, relied more on meat than earlier fossil relatives. This notion that meat was an essential ingredient for evolution of humanlike features such as large brains and cooperative behavior was as old as Charles Darwin, but it has recently been challenged on several fronts. Certainly hunter-gatherers of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene have eaten a higher fraction of hunted meat than our earliest hominin relatives, but when did this shift happen? Recent work has questioned whether early members of our genus such as Homo erectus represented any increase in carnivory compared to earlier Oldowan toolmakers.
That debate has been unfolding with a yawning gap of no information about nitrogen-15 prior to the Neandertals. That’s about to change.
John Hawks offers some new info of the diets of ancient hominins. The tech is advancing fast and questions hopefully will be resolved.