Rhonda L. Quinn

TL;DR: The discovery of Lomekwi 3 is reported, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment and the name ‘Lomekwian’ is proposed, which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record.

TL;DR: Co-occurrence of Oldowan and Acheulian artefacts at the Kokiselei site complex indicates that the two technologies are not mutually exclusive time-successive components of an evolving cultural lineage, and suggests that multiple groups of hominins distinguished by separate stone-tool-making behaviours and dispersal strategies coexisted in Africa at 1.76 Myr ago.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed 87Sr/86Sr of water, bedrock, soils, and plants across a broad geographic region to test the potential of this method in the ancient Maya area.

TL;DR: The age of the sites and hominins is at least bracketed between these estimates and is older than currently accepted, and may favor an African origin for recent humans who would overlap with H. erectus in time and space.

TL;DR: The results indicate grassland expansion between 2.0 and 1.75 Ma, coincident with major shifts in basin-wide sedimentation and hydrology, and propose basin transformation decreased residence time for Omo River water and expanded subaerial floodplain landscapes, ultimately leading to reduced proportions of wooded floras and the establishment of habitats suitable for grassland communities.