I am so proud of my PhD student Kate Fish who just succesfully defended her dissertation today. Congratulations Dr. Fish! @kfish28.bsky.social
W. Andrew Barr
@wabarr.bsky.social
Associate Prof at George Washington University. Paleoecology and human evolution. Creator of bioanthtree.org
Paranthropus in the Afar, pretty neat find! 🏺🧪
2.6 million-year-old jaw from extinct 'Nutcracker Man' is found where we didn't expect it
A fossil jaw of a distant human relative was discovered much farther north than previously thought possible, revealing new information about diversity in human evolution.
livescience.com
I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar. Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature
With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...
nature.com
I am finally willing to admit I was wrong and revise my position. Growth is hard, but….I am just going to come out and say it. Swedish Fish are actually pretty OK.
House continuing res will force DC Gov. (funded by taxes on DC residents, not fed. funds) to revert to FY24 spending levels, though we are halfway through FY25. This means DC will be forced to cut $350+ million from our public/charter school budget, leaving more than 95,000 kids high and dry.
I am deeply saddened to have learned of the death, on Feb 5, 2025, of Elisabeth Vrba—a fantastically creative scientist and a warm, wonderful human being. She leaves us a legacy of original macroevolutionary thinking that is still fresh and illuminating.
pretty fun to see my recent paper (Barr and Wood, 2024) listed in this list of 100 significant paleoanthropology papers compiled in honor of the 100th year anniversary of the naming of Australopithecus.
100 years of Australopithecus
On 7 February 1925, Nature published a curious paper on a ‘missing link’ – the fossil of a form intermediate between apes and humans.
nature.com
Best grant writing advice I ever received: "Write your proposal as if someone from a completely different field will search through it looking for 100 banned words"
Feeling inspired after an awesome lab meeting this morning with a great group of undergrads, Masters and PhD students in my lab. Just in case you needed a reminder that amazing things are happening in Washington DC, in addition to all the other things.
I am very proud of my PhD student Nick Rosas for successfully defending his dissertation proposal! Lots of cool research on Middle Miocene bovids biogeography and ecology coming soon!
Once again, the seasons change, and this old meme feels 100% accurate.
The rhinos we have and the ones we lost. In the late Pleistocene, about two thirds of the worlds terrestrial megafauna went extinct. Rhinos fared better than average, but still, all the temperate and cold climate species are gone. Those that remain are endangered and in dire need of protection.
Paper led by my now-graduated PhD student Jesse Martin where we argue that the SK 54 cranium from Swartkrans in South Africa is Homo, not Paranthropus. www.scielo.org.za/pdf/sajs/v12...
Human evolution is not out of the woods yet! Congrats to Enqu on this landmark paper! In it, we present a new model for predicting woody cover based on an Africa-specific soil dataset. Results show hominin sites were ~13% more wooded than previously predicted! authors.elsevier.com/a/1k5a6_14mM...
In my paper, coauthor Bernard Wood and I explore the potential impacts of a spatially limited fossil record on understanding human evolution. We do this using two "thought experiments", focusing on the Eastern African Rift Valley. (1/4)
postdoc on hominin postcranial morphology to work on the Woranso-Mille hominins with Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al! apply.interfolio.com/137850
what kind of person are you? A) there is no more toothpaste B) there's DEFINITELY at least one more squeeze in there!
So proud of Kate Fish for successfully defending her dissertation proposal today. We are looking forward to exciting research on modeling biases in the fossil record!!
any other biological anthropologists getting calls from the hospitality union in Los Angeles calling for a general boycott of the city and telling us not to go there for #AABA24?
I was just making a map in QGIS and accidentally zoomed out on my digital elevation model base layer, and accidentally 'discovered' that Antartica has the highest average elevation of any continent! Genuinely very surprised.....no idea.
hey geometric morphometrics folks who use the R package geomorph. When I do a gm.prcomp, does the function automatically project the points into tangent space before doing the PCA? I assume so, but I wasn't able to 100% convince myself that it does while reading the help file. Thanks!
Such an amazing lecture hall here in Aarhus for #ESHE2023. Feels like a church dedicated to human evolution.
interesting and detailed 3D morphometric study of two hominin mandibles from Baringo from Clement Zanoli at ESHE 2023. The results show they are more likely Australopitheucs, Paranthropus and Homo aff. habilis, rather than Homo aff. ergaster as previously argued.
congrats to Stine Keibel Blom on an excellent first conference presentation: "Signatures of incomplete lineage sorting in the phenotypes of great apes at the ESHE 2023 conference in Aarhus, Denmark!
Statement from the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists regarding the transport of two hominin fossils aboard the recent 3rd Virgin Galactic commercial space flight.
