Author: Sally Christine Reynolds, Associate Professor in Hominin Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University

Autumn walks in Britain are glorious, as the foliage changes colour and cool crisp air begins to bite. However, some of these European trees hide a much darker secret. For example, the yew tree’s lovely red arils – the cup-shaped coverings around the seeds – carry toxins that may have been used to poison arrow […]

For most of the 20th century, the model of human origins was a tree: with the trunk dividing into branches, and then twigs. Each species of human relative (hominin) was a neat, single branch. As an undergraduate, I was taught that Homo sapiens was one of these branches that emerged in Africa, spread across the […]