Tim Compton

• Natural History Museum, London

Thirteen permanent fully erupted teeth were excavated at the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey in 1910 and 1911. These were all found in the same location, on a ledge behind a hearth in a Mousterian occupation level. They were originally identified as being Neanderthal. A fragment of occipital bone was found in a separate localit...

Neanderthals occurred widely across north Eurasian landscapes, but between ~ 70 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) they expanded southwards into the Levant, which had previously been inhabited by Homo sapiens. Palaeoanthropological research in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated alternate occupations of the Levant by Neanderthal and Ho...

In 2006, six isolated hominin teeth were excavated from Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits at the Magubike rockshelter in southern Tanzania. They comprise two central incisors, one lateral incisor, one canine, one third premolar, and one fourth premolar. All are fully developed and come from the maxilla. None of the teeth are duplicated, so they may r...

Additional information on ESR methods. (DOCX)

Genetic evidence for anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa before 75 thousand years ago (ka) and in island southeast Asia (ISEA) before 60 ka (93-61 ka) predates accepted archaeological records of occupation in the region. Claims that AMH arrived in ISEA before 60 ka (ref. 4) have been supported only by equivocal or non-skeletal evidence....

Hominin remains have been discovered at Azokh Cave from three different entrance passageways during the early and present phases of excavation. Evidence for three different species of hominin – Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens – has been found at Azokh Cave. A fragment of hominin mandible was found in Azokh 1 in 1968. P...

Seventeen Middle Pleistocene hominin teeth were excavated at Pontnewydd Cave in North Wales between 1980 and 1995 with a probable age of ∼225 ka, associated with handaxe and levallois artefacts. Their Neanderthal characteristics and their affinities with other European Middle Pleistocene teeth and the major sites of Atapuerca-SH in Spain and Krapin...

In 2001, a collection of skeletal material was donated to the Natural History Museum, London, by the Royal College of Surgeons, London. It consisted of boxes discovered among the personal belongings of Sir Arthur Keith. This paper describes the work undertaken to identify and document the human skeletal material in the Keith Collection. The study i...

The primary aim of this study was to conduct a taxonomic assessment of the second of three isolated human teeth found in the Stajnia Cave (north of the Carpathians, Poland) in 2008. The specimen was located near a human tooth (S5000), which was identified by Urbanowski et al. (2010) as a Neanderthal permanent upper molar. Both of these teeth were e...

Itaakpa rockshelter was excavated in three short field seasons, from 1985 to 1988, during which a human maxilla and mandible were found in a context characteristic of the ceramic phase of the West African Late Stone Age (LSA). An AMS date of 2210±80 b.p. was obtained from burned palm kernels from the same level. There was no apparent stratigraphic...

The earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe are thought to have appeared around 43,000-42,000 calendar years before present (43-42 kyr cal BP), by association with Aurignacian sites and lithic assemblages assumed to have been made by modern humans rather than by Neanderthals. However, the actual physical evidence for modern humans is extremel...

The largest series of Neolithic human skeletal material derives from Çatalhöyük, in the Konya plain of peninsular Turkey. The excavations were carried out by James Mellaart in three seasons between 1961 and 1964 (Mellaart 1962; 1963; 1965). Larry Angel of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and Denise Ferembach of the Musée de L'Homme, Pari...

The relationships between a range of modern human samples are assessed from cladistic analyses of the published population frequencies of tooth crown characters, using new data on the Krapina Neanderthal sample as an outgroup. All of the most parsimonious trees show an early divergence of African and Australasian groups. This result is compared wit...