Volume 03 · Issue 11 · November 2024

Reading the bones of seven million years of human ancestry.

Pithecan is a working archive of paleoanthropology — cataloguing fossil finds, mapping active dig sites, and translating peer-reviewed research for readers who want the long view of where we came from.

Enter the archive View fieldwork dispatches

Archive statistics

4,217

Catalogued specimens

Active dig sites tracked

7.2 Ma

Oldest hominin on record

1956

Year of first citation

Featured Fossil Find

A new dental arcade from Kantis, rewrites the early hominin map of East Africa.

Just Catalogued · KN-204

Specimen KN-204 · Australopithecus afarensis

Mandibular fragment with intact M3, recovered 4.1 Ma deposits

Recovered in March from the Kantis sediments by a joint Kenyan–French team, the partial mandible preserves a complete third molar and a near-pristine dental arcade. The morphology pushes the earliest confirmed gracile australopithecid occurrence in the region back by approximately 200,000 years and reframes the dispersal corridor between Ethiopia and Tanzania.

The specimen has been accessioned into the National Museums of Kenya catalogue and is the subject of an upcoming paper in Journal of Human Evolution.

4.1 Ma Depositional age

97% Completeness index

KN-204 Accession number

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Latest Dispatches

Notes from the field and the lab

Field journals, post-excavation reports, and short essays from researchers working at active dig sites across East Africa, the Levant, and South Asia.

Fieldwork Olduvai Gorge · 4 days ago

Weathering the long rains: a six-week status report from Bed II

After an unusually wet season delayed our second survey window, the team finally reached the upper tuff sequence. Initial surface finds include two isolated postcranial fragments and a heavily weathered stone tool cluster consistent with Oldowan technology.

— Dr. Aisha Mwangi, lead field archaeologist

Lab Notes Max Planck · 1 week ago

Enamel isotope analysis confirms wet-season diet shift in Paranthropus

New δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O readings from a sample of 14 P. boisei molars suggest a more flexible dietary regime than previously modelled — one that tracked seasonal water stress rather than fixed C₄ vegetation.

— Lab group, Department of Human Evolution

Editorial Archive · 2 weeks ago

Why we re-categorised 312 specimens under the new taphonomic rubric

An honest accounting of the methodology shift we rolled out last month, the rationale behind the new damage-class schema, and what it means for citation continuity in the archive.

— The Pithecan editorial board

Fieldwork Ubeidiya, Israel · 3 weeks ago

Acheulean handaxes recovered from Layer III, with surprisingly uniform knapping

The 1.4 Ma horizon at Ubeidiya continues to produce tightly clustered bifaces, suggesting either cultural transmission across generations or a much smaller, more localised knapping group than the layer's size would imply.

— Excavation team, Hebrew University

From the Archive

Recently catalogued specimens

Every specimen in the Pithecan archive is cross-referenced by site, geological period, anatomical element, and current institutional custody.

Pliocene

Homo habilis cranial fragment, OH-24

Olduvai Hominid 24, "Twiggy," is a ~1.8 Ma calvaria recovered in 1968 from Bed I, re-photographed and re-measured against modern 3D reference scans.

Tanzania · Bed I 1.8 Ma

Pleistocene

Homo erectus partial mandible, Dmanisi D-2735

1.77 Ma hominin mandible from the Dmanisi site complex in Georgia, providing key evidence for the early dispersal of Homo out of Africa.

Georgia · Layer B1 1.77 Ma

Holocene

Homo sapiens teeth cluster, Jebel Irhoud XI

Late Middle Pleistocene dental remains from the Moroccan site, dated to ~300 ka and central to the pan-African origin model of anatomically modern humans.

Morocco · Layer 7 ~300 ka

Browse the full archive

How an Entry is Made

From the ground to the archive

Every record in Pithecan passes through a five-stage provenance pipeline, designed for transparency, reproducibility, and long-term accessibility.

Field recovery

Specimens are photographed in situ, given provisional field numbers, and recorded with full GPS, stratigraphic, and sedimentological context.

Lab preparation

Mechanical and chemical preparation under controlled conditions, with every intervention logged in a public preparation journal.

Analytical imaging

Micro-CT, photogrammetry, and 3D surface scans are produced for the reference collection and deposited in the open archive.

Peer review

Each entry is reviewed by at least two subject editors and cross-checked against current literature before publication.

Public accession

The entry, scans, and citations are released under a CC-BY 4.0 license and assigned a permanent Pithecan identifier.

From Readers & Researchers

What the field says about the archive

Used by working paleoanthropologists, university libraries, and serious lay readers across thirty-eight countries.

Pithecan has become the first place I send my graduate students when they need an orientation to a new site or a new taxon. The provenance pipeline alone is a model for what scholarly archiving should look like in this field.

Dr. Rebecca Okonkwo University of Cambridge · Human Evolution

The dispatch format is the best part — short, sourced, and written by people who have actually held the specimens. It has completely replaced my old RSS feed of paleontology blogs.

Dr. Jonas Lindqvist Stockholm Natural History Museum

I teach an introductory paleoanthropology seminar and Pithecan is on the required reading list. The deep-time timelines are the single best visual explanation of the Plio-Pleistocene I have found in fifteen years of teaching.

Prof. Sana Mehta JNU · Centre for Historical Studies