Top 9 Discoveries in Human Evolution, 2020 Edition
2020 has been… quite the year! The pandemic changed a lot about the world including the ways in which paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, and other fieldwork-based researchers operate. This year, we want to highlight the different lines of evidence that are used in human origins research – so we’ve organized our nine highlighted discoveries into four broader “lines of evidence” categories. Since many scientific articles are years in the making, a lot of exciting discoveries were still revealed in 2020!
1. Fossil footprints tell us where and how modern humans traveled the globe
While
we may not be able to move around much this year, three studies on fossil human footprints published in 2020 revealed a lot more about where ancient humans traveled and how they moved together in groups. Unlike body fossils, footprints (and other “trace fossils”) offer us a snapshot of an exact moment in time, or at least a very short