Blogs / Discoblog

• It’s all in the hands: Did early humans stone the Neanderthals into extinction?

• “Debby was a great bear. She acted like a grumpy old bear a lot of times. It was great. She had a lot of life in her, a lot of feistiness.” The world’s oldest living polar bear is no more.

• The Great Ape Trust is having an auction of ape paintings—that’s paintings done by (non-human) apes—to raise money for conservation. Is it just us, or these look suspiciously like those elephant paintings?

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Could humans talk 500,000 years ago? Their ears say… maybe, according to Rolf Quam of the American Natural History Museum in New York.

Quam and his colleagues used fossil remains of a 500,000-year-old human—an ancestor of the Neanderthals, actually—to reconstruct how big its ear canal would have been. He found that the canal would have been surprisingly long, which is important because it would have allowed these ancient humans to hear sounds with frequencies between 2 and 4 kilohertz quite well, a range that includes human speech patterns.

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