Beautifully said. Her passing marks the loss of another giant in the field who broke down the barrier between "sapiens" "humans" and "primates" - that some of our more sapient-obsessed palaeoanthropologists had constructed.

Am I missing something or is the date range of these skulls still between 1 million and 600,000 year ago? The pseudoscience fans are really latching onto this. Hurray, civilization must be even older than thought. I don't see that this changes much.

DNA?

Education is supposed to help us become smart enough to understand ideas without necessarily agreeing with them or believing them to be true. That’s required of living in a society among others! If your religion is against people living in society then maybe rethink your religion or fully realize it

I colorized this ancient water spout, likely from Cyprus and now at the Met Museum
/End

That's not an accurate description of hunter-gatherers. They weren't migrating every day, week, or even every month. They moved 3-6 times a year but weren't moving into unknown lands. They require intimate knowledge of the land. I.e. "remember that dead hollow tree that has a week's worth of water?"

The leap of butchered elephants = large groups, i.e. a fiesta of hundreds or 1,000 Neanderthals, was always questionable to me. Especially when you consider genetic evidence of low diversity. They don't seem to have gathered in large groups unless they were very serious about abstinence. Not likely.

It's all more evidence #Neanderthals were highly adaptable inc warm climate, also using plant foods.
Broader Qs beyond this paper: food storage & elephants hunts = larger groups? While focused task locales & evidence from lithics of reduced mobility might indicate a particular way of forest life.

What exactly do you mean by "finalized"...several million years would encompass the whole of the genus homo

The developing rift between what the genetics tell us and what's inferred through morphology is fascinating. Either sapiens split ~1 mya or ~700 kya, it can't be both. Perhaps the molecular clock isn't fine tuned enough or morphological models are generating associations that don't exist.

Tickets to the Austin show purchased! Thanks for remembering us behind enemy lines 😂

I see that diversity across time (Sima de los Huesos root Neanderthal and Denisova 5) but isn't it true that after ~105 kya most Neanderthals were closely related? Besides the Thorin pop. what other deep lineage has been found? If DNA can be obtained I could see the Krapina pop. being divergent.

The Wood Age,it seems, is a lost world. It should be considered more often when reconstructing human origins.