Marta Mirazon Lahr

University of Cambridge | Cam · Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies

The evolution of modern humans was a complex process, involving major changes in levels of diversity through time. The fossils and stone tools that record the spatial distribution of our species in the past form the backbone of our evolutionary history, and one that allows us to explore the different processes—cultural and biological—that acted to...

The nature of inter-group relations among prehistoric hunter-gatherers remains disputed, with arguments in favour and against the existence of warfare before the development of sedentary societies. Here we report on a case of inter-group violence towards a group of hunter-gatherers from Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana, which during the late Pleistoce...

Eastern Africa (broadly Ethiopia , Somalia, South Sudan, Kenya , Uganda, and Tanzania) has yielded the earliest fossils of modern humans, the earliest evidence for Mode 3 technologies (Middle Stone Age), and is one of the areas in which modern humans may well have been endemic. This paper reviews the genetic, archaeological, and fossil evidence for...

The abundant evidence that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years, and dispersed across the world only within the past 100,000 years, provides us with a strong framework in which to consider the evolution of human diversity. While there is evidence that the human capacity for culture has a deeper history, going beyond the orig...

The Central Sahara is an area of great interest in human evolution partly because it currently exhibits some of the most extreme desert conditions in the world, and partly because of its geographical location - in a nexus of relationships with sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa, and Western Asia. Fieldwork in the Ubari sand sea and the Messak...

Zinc is incorporated into enamel, dentine and cementum during tooth growth. This work aimed to distinguish between the processes underlying Zn incorporation and Zn distribution. These include different mineralisation processes, the physiological events around birth, Zn ingestion with diet, exposure to the oral environment during life and diagenetic...

The Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition (EMPT) is characterised by major environmental changes and evolutionary innovations within the genus Homo but the scarcity of the African EMPT fossil and archaeological records obscures its palaeoecological context. Here, we present archaeological and faunal evidence from a newly excavated West-Turkana EMP...

The spoken word does not fossilize. Despite this, scientists have long sought to unearth the origins of language within the human lineage. One of the lines of evidence they have pursued is functional brain areas, such as Broca's and Wernicke's areas, which are associated with speech production and comprehension, respectively. Sulcal layout of Broca...

For many species, sexual dimorphism is one of the major sources of intraspecific variation. This is the case in some extant great apes, such as gorillas and orangutans, and to a lesser degree in humans, chimpanzees and bonobos. This variation has been well documented in various aspects of these species skeletal anatomy, including differences in the...

Neanderthal extinction has been a matter of debate for many years. New discoveries, better chronologies and genomic evidence have done much to clarify some of the issues. This evidence suggests that Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000-37,000 years before present (BP), after a period of coexistence with Homo sapiens of several millennia, invol...

Neanderthal extinction has been a matter of debate for many years. New discoveries, better chronologies and genomic evidence have done much to clarify some of the issues. This evidence suggests that Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000–37,000 years before present (BP), after a period of coexistence with Homo sapiens of several millennia, invol...

Archaic hominins in the Middle East underscore local demographic diversity in the last half million years

MCAA Traumatic death affects our daily life, but how did traumatic mortality affect human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective? TRAUMOBITA aims to understand how traumatic mortality among prehistoric humans shaped our behaviour during the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene. Confirming that how we died had an enormous influence on our anc...

Objectives: The food that people and animals consume leaves microscopic traces on teeth in predictable ways, and analyses of these markings-known as dental microwear analyses-allow us to reverse engineer the characteristics of diet. However, the microwear features of modern human diets are most often interpreted through the lens of ethnographic re...

Mortuary behavior (activities concerning dead conspecifics) is one of many traits that were previously widely considered to have been uniquely human, but on which perspectives have changed markedly in recent years. Theoretical approaches to hominin mortuary activity and its evolution have undergone major revision, and advances in diverse archeologi...

این نوشتار به گوناگونی فرهنگی در میان نخستین جوامع انسان هوموساپینس )هوشمند( در کوهستان زاگرس و جایگاه این گوناگونی در تطور و پراکنش این جوامع در اوراسیا می پردازد. این پژوهش با مطالعۀ فناوری و گون هشناسی دس تافزارهای سنگی برجای مانده از این جوامع و تحلیل آماری داد ههای آن ها دو هدف را دنبال م ینماید: نخست پاسخ به این پرسش که آیا پارین هسنگی نوین ز...

The origin of Homo sapiens remains a matter of debate. The extent and geographic patterning of morphological diversity among Late Middle Pleistocene (LMP) African hominins is largely unknown, thus precluding the definition of boundaries of variability in early H. sapiens and the interpretation of individual fossils. Here we use a phylogenetic model...

Located within the Nakuru-Naivasha basin on the northern slope of Mt. Eburru, the open-air site of Prospect Farm (Central Rift, Kenya) is one of the few East African sites that have yielded a stratigraphic sequence containing archaeological levels dating from the late Middle Pleistocene to the Holocene. Excavations at the site by Barbara Whitehead...

Rationale: Stable isotopic analyses are increasingly used to study the diets of past and present human populations. Yet, the carbon and nitrogen isotopic data of modern human diets collected so far are biased towards Europe and North America. Here, we address this gap by reporting on the dietary isotopic signatures of six tropical African communit...

Northeastern Siberia has been inhabited by humans for more than 40,000 years but its deep population history remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the late Pleistocene population history of northeastern Siberia through analyses of 34 newly recovered ancient genomes that date to between 31,000 and 600 years ago. We document complex populati...

This paper aims to understand the cultural diversity among the first modern human populations in the Iranian Zagros and the implications of this diversity for evolutionary and ecological models of human dispersal through Eurasia. We use quantitative data and technotypological attributes combined with physiogeographic information to assess if the Za...

Our current knowledge of the emergence of anatomically modern humans, and the human lineage in general, is limited, in large part because of the lack of a well preserved and well dated fossil record from Pleistocene Africa. Thus, the primary aim of our research is to partly relieve this problem by virtually reconstructing and analyzing the hominin...

Burials, Migration and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond - edited by M. C. Gatto February 2019

Have Neanderthals gained an unfair reputation for having led highly violent lives? A comparison of skulls of Neanderthals and prehistoric humans in Eurasia reveals no evidence of higher levels of trauma in these hominins.

Complex processes in the settling of the Americas The expansion into the Americas by the ancestors of present day Native Americans has been difficult to tease apart from analyses of present day populations. To understand how humans diverged and spread across North and South America, Moreno-Mayar et al. sequenced 15 ancient human genomes from Alaska...

Far northeastern Siberia has been occupied by humans for more than 40 thousand years. Yet, owing to a scarcity of early archaeological sites and human remains, its population history and relationship to ancient and modern populations across Eurasia and the Americas are poorly understood. Here, we report 34 ancient genome sequences, including two fr...

Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded...

Headland and Bailey (1991) argued in Human Ecology that tropical forests could not support long-term human foraging in the absence of agriculture. Part of their thesis was based on the fact that supposedly isolated ‘forest’ foragers, such as the Wanniyalaeto (or Vedda) peoples of Sri Lanka, could be demonstrated to be enmeshed within historical tra...

Africa is the birthplace of the species Homo sapiens, and Africans today are genetically more diverse than other populations of the world. However, the processes that underpinned the evolution of African populations remain largely obscure. Only a handful of late Pleistocene African fossils (∼50-12 Ka) are known, while the more numerous sites with h...

Two distinct population models have been put forward to explain present-day human diversity in Southeast Asia. The first model proposes long-term continuity (Regional Continuity model) while the other suggests two waves of dispersal (Two Layer model). Here, we use whole-genome capture in combination with shotgun sequencing to generate 25 ancient hu...

Recent studies have reported evidence suggesting that portions of contemporary human genomes introgressed from archaic hominin populations went to high frequencies due to positive selection. However, no study to date has specifically addressed the post-introgression population dynamics of these putative cases of adaptive introgression. Here, for th...

Mobility is one of the most important processes shaping spatiotemporal patterns of variation in genetic, morphological, and cultural traits. However, current approaches for inferring past migration episodes in the fields of archaeology and population genetics lack either temporal resolution or formal quantification of the underlying mobility, are p...

Significance Migratory activity is a critical factor in shaping processes of biological and cultural change through time. We introduce a method to estimate changes in underlying migratory activity that can be applied to genetic, morphological, or cultural data and is well-suited to samples that are sparsely distributed in space and through time. By...

How early human groups were organized Sequencing ancient hominid remains has provided insights into the relatedness between individuals. However, it is not clear whether ancient humans bred among close relatives, as is common in some modern human cultures. Sikora et al. report genome sequences from four early humans buried close together in western...

The Neanderthal remains from Shanidar Cave, excavated between 1951 and 1960, have played a central role in debates concerning diverse aspects of Neanderthal morphology and behaviour. In 2015 and 2016, renewed excavations at the site uncovered hominin remains from the immediate area where the partial skeleton of Shanidar 5 was found in 1960. Shanida...

Objectives: Porotic hyperostosis, characterized by porotic lesions on the cranial vault, and cribra orbitalia, a localized appearance of porotic lesions on the roof of the orbits, are relatively common osteological conditions. Their etiology has been the focus of several studies, and an association with anemia has long been suggested. Anemia often...

O sítio Água Vermelha (10ì0150 e 700ú0Bp), si¡uado no extrenìo noroeste do Estado de São Paulo, apresenta cerâmica con-ì características diversificadas, renerendo à ocupações típicas de Goiás e Minas Gerais. Foram escavados restos ósseos humanos de, no mínino,17-32 indivíduos, sendol/3 deles juvenis. Os adultos eram ahos (hon-rens:>l .ZBm; muiheres...

Human skin color represents a classic example of a quantitative trait that is highly polymorphic in humans. Models based on natural selection suggest that pigmentation variation has accumulated in response to human dispersals and colonization of diverse environments, primarily due to differences in the damaging versus vitamin D synthesis-related ef...

Human skin color represents a classic example of a quantitative trait that is highly polymorphic in humans. Models based on natural selection suggest that pigmentation variation has accumulated in response to human dispersals and colonization of diverse environments, primarily due to differences in the damaging versus vitamin D synthesis-related ef...

In Africa ERC Funded Project (ERC295907). Research was carried out through affiliation with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK/ ESC/PAL/w/VOL.1), with permission from the National Council of Science and Technology, Government of Kenya (Permit numbers 2009-11: NCST/5/002/419 and 2012-15: NCST/5/002/419/9) and with the support of the Turkana Basin In...

Replying to C. M. Stojanowski et al. Nature 539, 10.1038/nature19778 (2016) "Contesting the massacre at Nataruk".

The population history of Aboriginal Australians remains largely uncharacterized. Here we generate high-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians (speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages) and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands. We find that Papuan and Aboriginal Australian ancestors diversified 25-40 thousand years ago (kya), suggesting pre-H...

Readable link: http://rdcu.be/kt5n High-coverage whole-genome sequence studies have so far focused on a limited number of geographically restricted populations or been targeted at specific diseases, such as cancer. Nevertheless, the availability of high-resolution genomic data has led to the development of new methodologies for inferring populatio...

Evolutionary problems are often considered in terms of ‘origins', and research in human evolution seen as a search for human origins. However, evolution, including human evolution, is a process of transitions from one state to another, and so questions are best put in terms of understanding the nature of those transitions. This paper discusses how...

The evolution of modern humans was a complex process, involving major changes in levels of diversity through time. The fossils and stone tools that record the spatial distribution of our species in the past form the backbone of our evolutionary history, and one that allows us to explore the different processes—cultural and biological—that acted to...

The bacteria Yersinia pestis is the etiological agent of plague and has caused human pandemics with millions of deaths in historic times. How and when it originated remains contentious. Here, we report the oldest direct evidence of Yersinia pestis identified by ancient DNA in human teeth from Asia and Europe dating from 2,800 to 5,000 years ago. By...

Humans have had a major impact on the environment. This has been particularly intense in the last millennium but has been noticeable since the development of food production and the associated higher population densities in the last 10,000 years. The use of fire and over-exploitation of large mammals has also been recognized as having an effect on...

Subsistence links the behavioural and biological dimensions of human adaptability. We perform a cross-cultural investigation over an unpublished database containing approximately 2,700 ethnographic populations. The distribution of those Basic Economies is analysed by Latitude, Temperature and Rainfall. Results show unequal geographic distributions,...

The origin of contemporary Europeans remains contentious. We obtained a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating from 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans from Europe. We find that Kostenki 14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European M...

Understanding the peopling of the Americas remains an important and challenging question. Here, we present 14C dates, and morphological, isotopic and genomic sequence data from two human skulls from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, part of one of the indigenous groups known as ‘Botocudos’. We find that their genomic ancestry is Polynesian, with n...

Arctic genetics comes in from the cold Despite a well-characterized archaeological record, the genetics of the people who inhabit the Arctic have been unexplored. Raghavan et al. sequenced ancient and modern genomes of individuals from the North American Arctic (see the Perspective by Park). Analyses of these genomes indicate that the Arctic was co...