Homo erectus is an extinct hominin species that lived roughly 2 million to 100,000 years ago, known for upright gait and wide range across Africa and Asia.
La Trobe University researchers described 18 Drimolen Cave fossils, including an adult Homo erectus skull fragment dated to about 2 million years ago. The adult specimen shores up an age for the species in southern Africa that had rested on a child's skull.
Reality
La Trobe researchers describe DNH 127, the first adult Homo erectus fossil from South Africa's Drimolen cave, dated to 2 million years ago. It is 200,000 years older than adult specimens found elsewhere and supports a first-appearance date that had rested on a child's skull from the same cave.
Reality
The forthcoming PaleoAnthropology paper argues that pacing oxygen across repeated shallow dives built the cardiorespiratory stamina later used for running, with a two-hour recording of one Ama diver's shift supplying the measurements.
Reality
LB 1's hip bones group statistically with Pleistocene Homo and away from the australopiths. That retires the convenient reading that the hobbit's odd skeleton is simply primitive. Its ancestry stays as open as before.
Reality
Stature estimates of 1.8 and 1.9 metres come from an incomplete femur and a tibia pulled off the seabed, undated and with no recorded find-spot. The anatomy is fine; the sample is the problem.
Reality