This collection is composed of various fossils representing a snapshot of human evolution. Of course, this is not an exhaustive collection of hominin fossils, but it will provide you with a brief overview of some of the major species and the fossils that are currently thought to be essential to understanding how we became Homo sapiens, us. Although not all species known to be part of our lineage and history have been included, the species included represent many of the key species that have been discovered to date.
Throughout the site, image quality, colouration, and size will vary. Wherever possible, images have been used from original publications so that you will begin to get an idea of how these fossils were originally presented to the scientific community and how that has changed throughout the years. In the last century of fossil publications, technology has improved, and so have the images that are published. Some images were initially published as drawings and others have been published as reconstructed virtual renderings. I hope that the variety of images will give you a sense of how far the field of anthropology has come in the last 150 years.
As this is not a complete collection, the target user of this site is those that are new to anthropology and human evolution like early students or anyone with an interest in learning about human evolution. This site includes many of the major species that are thought to be important to human evolution as well as the important fossils associated with each. Additionally, I have included both scientific and non-scientific terms to help facilitate making the connections between the scientific literature and the English terms more commonly used. Although it is neither exhaustive nor completely comprehensive, this site provides users with the appropriate information to begin their own searches.
The metadata elements were deliberately chosen to benefit all users of the site no matter how much experience and previous knowledge they have. As such, the metadata included has been carefully selected to include the current species classification, original publication, and locality (location fossil was found in). Many of these fossils were published under different species names or are referred to as different species depending on the scholar. For simplicity, the current and most widely accepted species name has been used but the original species may be found in the original publication. Other metadata elements include the discoverer, discovery date, unique fossil ID, and fossil type. These metadata elements provide both the use most pertinent information about each fossil but can also serve as a “jumping off point” if anyone is curious about a particular fossil or species.
Throughout the creation of this mini collection, there were many problems that came to light. Many were related to the sheer nature of the collection and time span covered while others were related to technology and its limitations. One of the biggest problems encountered during the creation of this collection was locating original sources. As some of the fossils included were published prior to 2000, it was difficult to find which was the original publication and even more difficult to find a digital (or physical) copy of the publication to find the original images. Additionally, due to the nature of the history of anthropology, many of the original publications are not written in English. In some cases, it was impossible to find original images due to a complete lack of digitization, paywalls, or no institutional access. In this case, alternative images were used in lieu of originals and links to library holdings were used instead of DOI information. This also meant that there were some fossils I could not provide a link to the original paper for.
Additionally, some problems were due to the Google Sites and it limitations as a platform. Although many websites use anchors to direct you to a specific part of the webpage, this is not a current feature of Google sites. Once a page is published, there are workarounds to use anchor links; however, they are not currently integrated into the design process of Google Sites. As a result, anchors were omitted and links from the fossils page simply refer the user to the species for that corresponding fossil rather than the part of the page with that fossil as was originally hoped. Though a separate page could have been created for each fossil and circumvent this issue, I wanted to create a sense of cohesion within each species and chose to keep them together in one page.