Jessica C. Thompson

TL;DR: An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists.

TL;DR: It is argued that the chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils and the African archaeological record support an emerging view of a highly structured African prehistory that should be considered in human evolutionary inferences, prompting new interpretations, questions, and interdisciplinary research directions.

TL;DR: The deepest diversifications of African lineages were complex, involving either repeated gene flow among geographically disparate groups or a lineage more deeply diverging than that of the San contributing more to some western African populations than to others.

TL;DR: A substantial assemblage of systematically flaked stone tools excavated in situ from a stratigraphically constrained context at LG bracketed between 2.61 and 2.58 Ma suggests that hominin technology is distinctly different from generalized tool use that may be a shared feature of much of the primate lineage.

TL;DR: The study demonstrates that the full spectrum of MSA faunal exploitation can only be understood when the large mammal, small mammal, and tortoise components of fossil assemblages have all been subjected to comprehensive taphonomic analyses.