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People often enjoy reading about where humans come from and how we developed into the unusual creatures we are today: upright-walking, omnivorous mammals who inhabit every continent (and who enjoy [...]

Have you ever wondered whether your own family history is more interesting and exotic than you think? Might you have a long-lost relative who was a circus performer, a pirate, [...]

Body mass is a critical variable in many hominin evolutionary studies, with implications for reconstructing relative brain size, diet, locomotion, subsistence strategy, and social organization. We review methods that have been proposed for estimating body mass from true and trace fossils, consider their applicability in different contexts, and the appropriateness of different modern reference samples. Recently developed techniques based on a wider range of modern populations hold promise for providing more accurate estimates in earlier hominins, although uncertainties remain, particularly in non‐Homo taxa. When these methods are applied to almost 300 Late Miocene through Late Pleistocene specimens, the resulting body mass estimates fall within a 25–60 kg range for early non‐Homo taxa, increase in early Homo to about 50–90 kg, then remain constant until the Terminal Pleistocene, when they decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern human hand is an intriguing mix of primitive morphology and derived function. Traditionally, its form and function are explained as a functional "trade‐off" between the requirements of locomotion and manipulation, but recently acquired comparative, experimental and fossil evidence suggests that this functional trade‐off is more complex than conventional wisdom suggests. Moreover, when studying hand evolution within the hominin clade, the only morphological evidence comes from the hard‐tissues, and evidence about hand function must be inferred indirectly from the archaeological record. We lack information about critical aspects of hand form (e.g., soft tissues) and function (e.g., neurology) as well as non‐lithic evidence about behavior. Thus, comparative anatomical, experimental and ethological studies of modern humans and other primates are critical to making more informed inferences about hand use in the past. We review the relevant fossil and archaeological evidence within the relevant comparative context (e.g., other extant apes and dexterous monkeys) in an attempt to reconstruct hand evolution within the hominin clade. We conclude by summarizing our current understanding—or lack thereof—of the evolutionary history of the modern human hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]