Almost all of the material in this report was covered in SR through the course of the year. However, I thought that publishing a compendium report would be a useful thing to do. It tells us, once again, that much of what we learned in school about humanity's past was wrong.
What We Learned About Humanity in 2012
Charles Choi
LiveScience, 27 December 2012
The controversial extinct human lineage known as “hobbits” gained a face this year, one of many projects that shed light in 2012 on the history of modern humans and their relatives. Other discoveries include the earliest known controlled use of fire and the possibility that Neanderthals or other extinct human lineages once sailed to the Mediterranean.
Here's a look at what we learned about ourselves through our ancestors this year.
We're not alone
A trove of discoveries this year revealed a host of other extinct relatives of modern humans. For instance, researchers unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of a hitherto unknown species that lived about the same time and place as Australopithecus afarensis, a leading candidate for the ancestor of the human lineage. In addition, fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that at least two extinct human species lived alongside Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of our species. Moreover, fossils only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old hint that a previously unknown type of human called the “Red Deer Cave People” once lived in China.
