IN THE final chapter of Lone Survivors, Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist specialising in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, tells the story of the Iwo Eleru skeleton. Found in Nigeria in 1965, its skull resembles those of some of the earliest modern humans – skulls that are more than 150,000 years old. But as Stringer showed last year, Iwo Eleru is less than one-tenth that age. Africa presents a rich anatomical and archaeological record of 15,000 years ago, near the dawn of agriculture.
Iwo Eleru is not alone in surprising us. In the past three years,…
