# data[].attributes.headline
I think that homo habilis is the most interesting Hominid because they were hominid that started to make tools out of stone and I wonder what were they thinking and how they did it.   

# data[].attributes.subject
I think that homo habilis is the most interesting Hominid because they were hominid that started to make tools out of stone and I wonder what were they thinking and how they did it.   

# data[].attributes.headline
I think that the homo habilis is the better one because it is the most interesting one. Aleyshia Brown

# data[].attributes.subject
I think that the homo habilis is the better one because it is the most interesting one. Aleyshia Brown

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows. In it and in a new book, he describes a new wrinkle to the hypothesis of a recent African origin of modern Homo sapiens. His ideas may light up more debate in a contentious science.
First of all, would you explain the title of your new book?
Yes, the title is " Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth." And this comes from the fact that if we went back 100,000 years, which is very recent, geologically speaking, there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the earth. All those other kinds have disappeared, and left us as the sole survivors.
You wrote that in 1970, when you started doing research in this field, the origin of modern humans was hardly recognized as a topic worthy of study in science. What has changed since then?
It's been a fantastic time to be involved in the field, and even when I was writing this book in the last two years, I had to regularly go back and rewrite things I thought I'd finished with, because new developments were coming up all the time. In 1970, for some people, there was no single origin of modern humans: We evolved globally, all over the world. There was a view that in the different regions an earlier species, Homo erectus, evolved relatively seamlessly to modern humans. This idea was known as multiregionalism.

The argument went that we remained one species throughout that evolutionary process, because there was interbreeding among the different populations. It meant that the Neanderthals in Europe, for example, would be the ancestors of modern Europeans; Homo erectus in China would be the ancestor of modern Asians. And Java Man would be a distant ancestor of modern Australian aboriginal populations.

What we have seen since then is a growth in the fossil record, in our ability to date that record and to CT-scan fossils and get minute details out of them. DNA studies have had a huge impact on our field. We now have the genomes of Neanderthals and of these strange people in Siberia called the Denisovans.
Speaking of DNA, what about the African Eve? This established an approximate date for the genetic origin of modern humans, in Africa. As a leading advocate of the recent African origin, in contrast to the multiregional model, did you believe this settled the debate?
To be honest, it's not been totally resolved, but the Mitochondrial Eve publication of 1987 was a key moment. Up to then, a few of us were arguing for a recent African origin from the fossil and archaeological evidence. But the evidence was pretty skimpy, and the majority opinion was against our view.

When this new genetic technique appeared, it seemed to give clarity to the picture. Here was an independent bit of data, from our mitochondrial DNA, inherited through females, suggesting we originated, all of us, all over the world, from a single ancestral population that lived in Africa maybe 200,000 years ago.

I came to this conclusion gradually, starting with the Neanderthals. They were the best-known ancient humans, and there was a view that they were our ancestors. I tested that model in my Ph.D. research, and I concluded the Neanderthals did not make good ancestors of modern humans, even in Europe, where we had the best data. So gradually my search moved from one region to another, to see where the evidence best fitted the idea of our origins.

It turned out that Africa was the place that had the oldest fossils of modern humans. Africa, for me, was the only place that showed a transition from archaic to modern humans.
In your book you propose that there was not one place in Africa where modern humans originated.
Earlier, influenced by the mitochondrial DNA data, I felt there was one place in Africa, a sort of garden of Eden, where we evolved, where we changed behaviorally and physically to become modern humans.

But the story is much more complicated. Even the DNA data show that essentially each of our genes has a separate evolutionary history. And so, when you look at the total picture, including the fossil data and archaeological data, there is no single spot in Africa that seems to be the place for our origins genetically.

The story is dominated by East Africa, because that's the area that has the best preservation of the fossil record. You could say southern Africa is giving scientists the best record of behavioral evolution. They are finding evidence pretty early of processing marine resources, the use of red ocher for symbolic purposes, self-adornment with shell beads.

In my view, different parts of Africa were important at different times, to distinct human species, and this was being controlled by the climate. Africa is a huge place influenced by many different factors: the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Southern Ocean, the monsoons coming off the Indian Ocean. At different times this would have produced good areas for humans and bad areas.

Populations in different areas would have flourished briefly, developed new ideas, and then maybe those populations could have died out, even - but not before exchanging genes, tools and behavioral strategies. This kept happening until we get to within the last 100,000 years, and then finally we start to see the modern pattern behaviorally and physically coalescing from these different regions to become what we call modern humans by about 60,000 years ago.
Previously, the splendid cave art of Europe influenced the view that modern behavior began there some 40,000 years ago. How firm is the new interpretation that Homo sapiens developed modern behavior as well as modern anatomy in Africa?
There were remarkable things happening in Europe at least 40,000 years ago, with the painted caves, with flutes, with the statuettes and so on. But the seeds of that revolution were sown in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. I would argue that when modern humans came out of Africa, say 60,000 years ago, fundamentally they were behaviorally modern. They took that into Europe. They took that into Asia and into Australia. So there was no single revolutionary event in Europe; this was something that was in modern humans when they came out of Africa, and the ones who stayed behind as well.
How does the discovery in Indonesia, on the island of Flores, fit in with current thinking about human migrations and lineage? Are the so-called hobbits really members of our genus Homo?
The hobbit, Homo floresiensis, is a really challenging find for everyone. There's still a minority of scientists who don't accept that it is a distinct human species; it's some kind of a weird, maybe diseased form of modern human. But I think it is a genuine distinct form, and actually a very primitive form.

It's either derived from a very primitive form of Homo erectus, maybe similar to the ones at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, or it's evidence of an earlier Africa exit, maybe before two million years ago, by something that's pre-erectus that somehow got all the way over to the Far East and survived there in isolation, evolving for more than a million years. It's an extraordinary story, if that's true. And again, further evidence of how little we know about much of Asia in terms of this story.
The more you learn, the more fascinating the subject becomes.
Absolutely, and that's how I found it right through my career.
In your earlier career, you concentrated on Neanderthals. Do you now accept the new evidence of Neanderthal-Homo sapiens interbreeding, which seems to establish that we are more than 2 percent Neanderthal?
This is one of the remarkable bits of news of the last couple of years. We've had the genomes of Neanderthals reconstructed, and yes, indeed, it shows that people outside of Africa have, on average, about 2.5 percent of an input of Neanderthal DNA in them. And, of course, it's led to a rethinking of our relationship with them; clearly there was viable interbreeding.

We don't know the circumstances. Maybe a parsimonious view is that there was a single interbreeding period when modern humans came out of Africa. They met some Neanderthals in the Middle East. There was some interbreeding, under circumstances we don't know yet, and that input of Neanderthal DNA was then transferred as those populations spread to Europe and to China, down to New Guinea, into the Americas; they took that bit of Neanderthal with them.
Archaeologists have found evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occupied the same caves in Israel. Could this have been an interbreeding contact?
Western Asia becomes a critical area for this possibility of interbreeding. It could have been 25 Neanderthals mixing with 1,000 modern humans. It doesn't have to be a lot of Neanderthals, but clearly there might have been interbreeding somewhere like Israel or Lebanon or Syria - all possible places where we know Neanderthals lived, and at times modern humans also lived.

There's also a view that the interbreeding was more widespread, but that either cultural or physiological factors limited the successful births. For example, we know that the pelvic shape of Neanderthal females is different from the pelvic shape of modern human females. If a modern human female was giving birth to a hybrid baby, part Neanderthal, could there have been obstetric problems? We don't know the circumstances of these encounters: if it was a peaceful mixing and merging of these people, or if the circumstances were violent.
Just who were the Denisovans?
It's an extraordinary discovery. Two or three years ago I vaguely knew there was an archaeological site in Siberia called Denisova Cave. And then a few teeth, a finger bone have produced a really high-quality genome now that's posted on the Web site of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The preservation of the DNA is exceptional, and well beyond anything we have from Neanderthals. It seems these Denisovans were related to the Neanderthals, an early branch off the Neanderthal line.

We know a lot about the Denisovans genetically, but physically we know very little about them. These fossils are so fragmentary. The even more remarkable thing is they are only known from one site in Siberia, and their DNA turns up in people only in really one region today - not in Siberia, or Asia, but down in Australia and New Guinea. That's extraordinary.

This is difficult to explain, because we thought that the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines and New Guineans must have got to their regions through southern Asia. Somewhere in Southeast Asia is the most likely place they would have had interbreeding with the Denisovans. That also implies the Denisovans were not just in Siberia; they must have been a widespread group.
This raises one more question: Could we ever clone these extinct people?
Science is moving on so fast. The first bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was recovered in 1997. No one then could have believed that 10 years later we might have most of the genome. And a few years after that, we'd have whole Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes available. So no one would have thought cloning was a possibility. Now, at least theoretically, if someone had enough money, and I'd say stupidity, to do it, you could cut and paste those Denisovan mutations into a modern human genome, and then implant that into an egg and then grow a Denisovan.

I think it would be completely unethical to do anything like that, but unfortunately someone with enough money, and vanity and arrogance, might attempt it one day. These creatures lived in the past in their own environments, in their own social groups. Bringing isolated individuals back, for our own curiosity or arrogant purposes, would be completely wrong.
In the introduction to your book, you list the kinds of questions you're always getting from people. One of them will be the closing question: What is the future of human evolution?
That's a tough one to answer. There's a lot of data, not my research, but mainly geneticists have been working on this, and they've showed just how many genetic changes there have been in the last few thousand years in the human genome. And this is because we've undergone great changes with urbanization, with agriculture, very big changes in lifestyles. And this has influenced our genetic makeup as much as living in the Paleolithic had done. We've seen, if anything, an acceleration of genetic changes in humans due to these lifestyle changes. So, I think human evolution has been going on quite rapidly recently, and it's going to carry on.

Not everyone agrees. My colleague in London, Steve Jones, has argued essentially that evolution has stopped in humans because we are in control of it. We have medical care. Nearly everyone reaches reproductive age. Everyone has enough food and water. So natural selection has been nullified in humans. I disagree with him because, of course, there are still a lot of people in the world who don't have the best medical care, who don't have enough food and water. Think of the impact of AIDS in Africa.

So selection is still operating on many human populations just as much as it ever has done, really. Also, all of us probably have 50 mutations in our DNA compared with our parents. So that's going on every generation as well. We are still evolving. We will continue to evolve.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chris Stringer on the Origins and Rise of Modern Humans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows. In it and in a new book, he describes a new wrinkle to the hypothesis of a recent African origin of modern Homo sapiens. His ideas may light up more debate in a contentious science. First of all, would you explain the title of your new book?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Arizona State University

Paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson is the man who found the woman that shook up our family tree. In 1974, Johanson discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia that would forever change our understanding of human origins. Dubbed Australopithecus afarensis, she became known to the world as Lucy. In the years since, Johanson and his colleagues have unearthed a total of 363 specimens of Australopithecus afarensis that span 400,000 years. His new book, Lucy's legacy: The Quest for Human Origins picks up where his 1981 New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginning of Humankind left off — posing thoughtful questions as to what exactly makes us who we are. TIME caught up with Dr. Johanson to discuss how our family tree has gotten a bit more bushy. ( See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

As jargon-free as you can manage to articulate, how did Lucy revolutionize the study of human origins?
Why, by being found after being missing for 2.3 million years [Laughs]. Lucy is still a terribly important discovery all these years later. She appeared at just the right time, I think, in terms of paleoanthropology, in the sense that we had very few fossils beyond three million years old at that point. Most of the evidence for human evolution older than three million years, you could fit in the palm of your hand. One of the major things she did was open wide that window. She showed us conclusively that upright walking and bipedalism preceded all of the other changes we'd normally consider being human, such as tool-making. She gave us a glimpse of what older ancestors would look like. Lucy is really at a nice point on the family tree: she sits at this pivotal point between things that are more ancient and things that are more modern. ( See pictures of ancient skeletons.)

Since the dramatic find in 1974, what has happened? Give me a snapshot of the groundbreaking discoveries, the heated debates. What has changed since your last book?
What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote Lucy, I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time. We have been surprised by the discovery of these little hobbits in Indonesia, something that nobody would have ever predicted. There's been the wonderful discovery of the Dikika baby which is telling us interesting things about the ontogeny, the growth and development, of our ancestors. The tree has gotten a little bushier. The story is becoming fuller and more interesting with lots of new characters.

To set the record straight, it was the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that gave birth to the hominid's name, correct?
Yes, the whole camp was listening to Beatles' tape because I was a great Beatles fan, and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was playing and this girl said, well if you think the fossil was a female, why don't you name her Lucy? Initially I was opposed to giving her a cute little name, but that name stuck. ( See pictures of the Beatles' final performance together.)

Why do you think she so successfully captured the public imagination? It's not particularly common for a fossil to become a household name.
I think she's captured the public's attention for a number of reasons. One, she's fairly complete. If you remove the hand bones and foot bones, she's 40% complete, so one actually gets an image of an individual, of a person. It's not just like looking at a jaw with some teeth. People can envision a little three-and-a-half foot tall female walking around. Also, I must say, her name is one that people find easy and non-threatening. People think of her as real personality.

Lucy's an international celebrity; she's toured museums as a good-will ambassador. As a spokeswoman for human evolution, what does she say?
Well I think the major message she brings to all the people who have an opportunity to see her or understand who she was is that the evidence for human evolution is irrefutable. She broadcasts that loud and clear. And not only Lucy, but many of the other fossils that have been found since, that we are all united by our past, that we all have a common history and though we may be vastly different, our origins all lead back to the crucible of human evolution that is Africa. She's announcing: "You are all my descendants and regardless of who we are, we are all, in fact today, Africans." ( See the top 10 museum exhibits of 2008.)

How do you look at her? It's almost as though throughout the book, you view her, though she's an ancestor, as your child?
Oh, exactly. She's an acquaintance, a good friend. I think one does develop an affinity to discoveries that one makes. She's so incredibly important in terms of our lives. How do I think of her? It's a very interesting question because if I had the ability to travel back in time, with only one choice of a place to go, my answer is quite simple. I'd want to be standing on the hill overlooking where Lucy and her cohorts were living when she fell into that lake and died. I'd like to see what she looked like, though I don't think I'd want to get pretty close to her.

Here's a zinger: what makes us human?
What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we're talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking up right. That's all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it's the fact that we're designing and making stone tools. And at 2 million years ago what makes human is our large brains that are at least two and half times the size of a chimp's. At twenty thousand years ago, what makes us human is the ability to make beautiful cave art. It's all relational. And if you look at us today, I wonder if we are human.

Where are we going as a species?
You'll have to call me after a few martinis [Laughs]. Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

See pictures of archaeological discoveries in Afghanistan

See pictures of Charles Darwin's life and discoveries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
lucy's legacy: the quest for human origins

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson is the man who found the woman that shook up our family tree. In 1974, Johanson discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia that would forever change our understanding of human origins. Dubbed Australopithecus afarensis, she became known to the world as Lucy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Human - Homo sapiens - Details - Encyclopedia of Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Descriptions and articles about the Human, scientifically known as Homo sapiens in the Encyclopedia of Life. Includes Overview; Brief Summary; Comprehensive Description; Distribution; Physical Description; Morphology; Type Information; Ecology; Habitat; Trophic Strategy; Associations; Diseases an...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donald Johanson Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943) is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering - with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb - the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.

# data[].attributes.headline
homo sapiens sapiens nickname is doubly wise man. The Homo Habilis were found 150,000 years ago. The date they were found was 1879 in the eastern of Africa by Christopher stringer.

# data[].attributes.subject
homo sapiens sapiens nickname is doubly wise man. The Homo Habilis were found 150,000 years ago. The date they were found was 1879 in the eastern of Africa by Christopher stringer.

# data[].attributes.headline
Homo habilis nickname is Handy man. There nickname was that because they were the first to make tools out of stone to help them skin animals and hunt.  The Homo Habilis Skelton was  found 1.5 million years ago. The palce they were found was 1960 in the eastern of Africa by Louis Leakey Maurice taieb.

# data[].attributes.subject
Homo habilis nickname is Handy man. There nickname was that because they were the first to make tools out of stone to help them skin animals and hunt.  The Homo Habilis Skelton was  found 1.5 million years ago. The palce they were found was 1960 in the eastern of Africa by Louis Leakey Maurice taieb.

# data[].attributes.headline
Homo Sapiens nickname is wise man . The Homo Sapiens were lived to  200,000 to 28,000 million. The date found of the skeleton  was in 1891 in Africa northern by Robert. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Homo Sapiens nickname is wise man . The Homo Sapiens were lived to  200,000 to 28,000 million. The date found of the skeleton  was in 1891 in Africa northern by Robert. 

# data[].attributes.headline
Homo Erectus nickname is upright man. There nickname was that because they were the first to walk with out the hands on the ground.  The homo erectus was found 2 million to 200,000 B.C.E. The location of the homo erectus not found but they migrated out of Africa . 

# data[].attributes.subject
Homo Erectus nickname is upright man. There nickname was that because they were the first to walk with out the hands on the ground.  The homo erectus was found 2 million to 200,000 B.C.E. The location of the homo erectus not found but they migrated out of Africa . 

# data[].attributes.body
INDONESIA IN 1891 BY A DUTCH

# data[].attributes.headline
Australopithecus aphaeresis nickname is Lucy and lived up to 800  B.C.E. There location Found was in Ethiopia. The person who found the Australopithecus aphaeresis Skelton was Donald Johnson Australopithecus 

# data[].attributes.subject
Australopithecus aphaeresis nickname is Lucy and lived up to 800  B.C.E. There location Found was in Ethiopia. The person who found the Australopithecus aphaeresis Skelton was Donald Johnson Australopithecus 