Juan Luis Arsuaga

An international team with Spanish participation has analysed hominid remains discovered in Casablanca (Morocco) and concluded that they could be very close ancestors of early modern humans. The fossils date from around the same period as the Homo antecessor found in Atapuerca—some 773,000 years ago—but are morphologically different. According to the authors, who published their findings in Nature, the fossils offer clues about the last common ancestor shared with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and support an African, rather than Eurasian, origin for H. sapiens.

English ethologist Jane Goodall died on Wednesday at the age of 91 in California (United States), where she was participating in a lecture tour. This was announced by the Jane Goodall Institute on its social media. ‘Dr Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,’ the statement said. Her observations and analysis of chimpanzees in the wild over decades were a milestone in primatology.

At least two hominin species - Homoerectus and Paranthropus boisei- coexisted in Kenya's Turkana Basin around 1.5 million years ago, a study published in Science confirms. The authors describe the first physical evidence of this coexistence in the form of footprints, found at several sites in the area.

The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo, a specialist in evolutionary genetics, for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.