NewHuman created a database of microtomographic scans of all fossils belonging to Homo floresiensis (recovered from Liang Bua Cave, Flores, Indonesia and curated in Jakarta) as well as 1000s of bones of museum specimens belonging to extant primates (including the Powell-Cotton Museum, Natural History Museum in Berlin, the Natural History Museum in Munich, and the British Museum of Natural History). Many of these scans are now directly available through our online archive (Human-Fossil-Record.org) or will be available through the relevant curatorial institution via our archive. This archive of CT scans will provide for hundreds of future scientific studies of fossil hominins and collectively they represent a step-change in data access which has been notoriously difficult in the field of human evolution. We conducted archaeological fieldwork on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2022 and 2023, excavations were carried out at Liang Panas and Liang Verhoeven, two sites near the western coast. This work has led to the discovery of the oldest directly radiocarbon dated human bone on Flores––a hand middle phalanx dated to 21 thousand calibrated years before present. In 2024, excavations at Liang Bua recovered a large number of stone artefacts and faunal remains that are extending our understanding of the paleobiology and paleoecology of Homo floresiensis. We also collected hominin fossils from Chesowanja (Baringo County, Kenya). A large proportion of the research conducted by NewHuman was aimed at using internal bone structure to reconstruct behavior in fossil hominins. Most impactful were our demonstration of distinct locomotory repertoires in South African hominins (Georgiou et al 2020), the first evidence of hand loading behavior in A. sediba (Dunmore et al 2020), the first evidence of finger-loading and its impact on bone structure in A. sediba and H. naledi (Syeda et al 2025), and the first internal data on the ankle of H. floresiensis (Pietrobelli et al 2025a/2025b). Methodologically, NewHuman developed Canonical Holistic Morphometric Analysis of trabecular bone, which allows for more robust statistical analyses of internal bone structure. Our work also 1) improved our understanding tooth development, and 2) incorporated dental data into the systematic analysis of hominin evolution. Davies et al (2021) provided novel findings, interpretations and guidance on accessory cusp expression in hominin molars, we published the Primate Tooth Crown Morphology Framework for the interpretation tooth crown variation in all primates (Chapple et al 2023), demonstrated for the first time that a leading cusp patterning model is consistent with cusp variation in monkeys (Chapple et al 2024), reported a link between thermoregulatory stress and tooth defects in Japanese macaques (Skinner et al 2025), and revised the current nomenclature used to study primate tooth crowns (Chapple and Skinner 2023). Additionally, we produced a number of analyses of the Homo naledi dental sample (Davies et al., 2019, 2020; Delezene et al 2024), the first data on dental tissue growth in Homo naledi (Mahoney et al 2024), the first enamel periodicity data and stress events recorded in Homo naledi teeth (Skinner et al 2024), and a comprehensive catalogue of the entire dental hypodigm (Delezene et al., 2023). Davies et al (2023) published the first data on internal tooth structures of Homo habilis and we contributed to a number of high-profile publications on fossil hominins including: the earliest modern human fossils in Europe from Bacho Kiro (Hublin et al., 2020), the first Denisovan hominin remains from Laos (Demeter et al., 2022), our reattribution of a number of hominin specimens from South Africa (Zanolli et al., 2022), new Neanderthal remains from Axlor, Spain (Bailey et al., 2024), and the earliest Homo erectus from Ethiopia (Mussi et al 2023).
