Top 5 Human Evolution Discoveries of 2017 | PLOS

Photo:  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

By Briana Pobiner, PhD, and Ella Beaudoin, BA, Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History

Human evolution is an exciting, interdisciplinary science. We often think of fossils and artifacts as the only evidence for the grand narrative that is our evolutionary history, but just as important are discoveries based on genetics and living primates, as well as those that happen in museum collections: re-discovering new information from evidence that has already been unearthed. In this blog post, though, we’re going “back to basics” and highlighting (in chronological order) five discoveries published between May and August of 2017 of things that were actually dug up from the ground. [...] PLOS SciComm