ANDRZEJ KRAUZEOrigin myths are foundational to the world’s cultures—depicted in cave paintings and later written or spoken. The fascination with origin stories lives on in modern humans, especially in a subgenre of such tales: how Homo sapiens got to be top dog. Dozens of print and film offerings inventively portray how the transition from tree-dweller to upright hominin might have played out—think Clan of the Cave Bear,The Ugly Little Boy, Iceman, Quest for Fire, and The Croods, to name but a few. Luckily, scientist debunkers are on the case.
Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall lays out the many factors, not least of which is our sometimes myopic fascination with our own species, that have complicated the drawing of any sort of reliable hominin evolutionary tree in an essay in this issue.
In the feature article “What’s Old Is New Again,” Senior Editor Bob Grant reports at length on how recent advances in sequencing ancient DNA, some from hominin leg bones more than 400,000 years old, will help prune or reshape such trees. The bugaboo for paleogenomics has been that the older the fossil sample, the more fragmented and degraded the DNA. But new techniques for extracting, purifying, and sequencing the stuff have allowed the piecing together of genomes from fragments just 30 to 35 base pairs ...
