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Today Nutcracker Man turns… 1 year-old!

Today 5/5/15 this blog celebrates its first year. As quick summary, I will not give boring details but just a brief list of what was the best of the year and what can be improved… (in my opinion)

I count on you all for this second year that starts today !!!

The best

Top 5 most read posts in English

  1. A summary of AAPA annual meeting 2015 (in 101 tweets!)
  2. The oldest human footprints by continent
  3. The 9 oldest artworks in Europe
  4. Meet Bodo and Herto
  5. Focus on the Sima de los Huesos

Top 5 most read posts in Spanish

  1. Desde cuándo los hombres son diestros y por qué
  2. Una caja de herramientas de 2 millones de años
  3. Bastones perforados: ejemplar de la cueva El Castillo
  4. ¿Qué nos falta por saber de Lucy?
  5. Las evidencias más antiguas de control del fuego

Achievements

  • 14th position in the 2014 Bitácoras Awards in the category of Science blogs [see Final ranking].
  • Top 5% most read presentations in SlideShare, thanks to the posts with embedded slides.

The worst 

The series of posts

I like them much as a concept, and I would like to write more series of posts, but I am not fully convinced yet… It is said that ‘sequels are never any good’. This first year I have posted 3 series:

News highlights

On September 2014 I started writing quarterly or monthly summaries of the latest news. Fortunately, the ‘boom’ of news in the field of human evolution is spectacular in the last times, but unfortunately… I could not keep up!

Two posts with few visits (but I like them much!)

– And finally a BIG THANK YOU to all who read me –

Nutcracker Man vs. Roberto Sáez

Nutcracker Man vs. Roberto Sáez

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Meet Bodo and Herto

Who are Bodo and Herto? Or first of all -should we say- where are Bodo and Herto?

Bodo is a hominin fossil named after its site of discovery (in 1976): Bodo d’Ar in the Middle Awash Valley of Ethiopia. Herto is one of the earliest-know anatomically modern humans (AMH), named after the Herto Bouri Formation where it was found (in 1997) also in the middle Awash Valley.

Bodo and Herto are key fossils to understand the emergence of our species Homo sapiens. Probably the ancient populations of Bodo (archaic Homo sapiens) could have been distant relatives of the Herto modern humans populations in the same area.

Skulls of Herto and Bodo. Credit: Roberto Sáez

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A summary of AAPA annual meeting 2015 (in 101 tweets!)

arco-gateway-6The American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) had its 84th annual meeting last week in St. Louis, Missouri. The AAPA is the world’s leading professional organization for physical anthropologists. Its annual meetings draw 1,000+ scientists and students.

I followed most of the event on twitter and really enjoyed this experience, thanks to 20+ attendees who were tweeting live the key moments of the meetings. Therefore I decided to add another small contribution by sorting and posting the 101 tweets I collected during the event.

Thank you very much @HermanPontzer @johnhawks @HumanOrigins @APV2600 @Fidydvm @thewildniche  @GPOrangutans  @Paleophile @AAAGenetics  @Anthro_Austin @mitoPR @LittleMsFossil @AlesiaAlesiaki @lancegravlee @darcy_shapiro @osteo_jo @DrKillgrove @rgairnelson @lancegravlee @ZThrockmorton @LoVUMass  — Sorry if I’m missing someone – and happy to receive any correction or further contribution!

The post structure is:  [ Session | Presenter: Summary ]

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Hidden treasures at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History

The Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, located in South Africa, contains some of the most important hominid fossils to understand Human Evolution in the range of 1.5-2.8 million years.

They are housed in the Broom room, named after Dr Robert Broom, which has public access to any visitor of the museum!

The following slides have great pics of the Broom room’s original fossils (source: Ted C. MacRae 2011)

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All the hominin type specimens

The type specimen of a species is the particular fossil to which the species name was first applied. The following table lists the type specimens of all the hominin species which have a wide acceptance by the Paleoanthropology community. It indicates the name of the species, the fossil record number, and the date & location of the specimen discovery.  Sigue leyendo →