Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill brought about the largest expansion in veteran education benefits since the end of World War II, increasing annual benefit expenditures from $3 billion to more than $13 billion. Leveraging variation over time, geography, and type of veterans, I explore the effect of financial aid on degree attainment. I find that the aid expansion increased degree attainment by 5–6 percentage points (25%), roughly 0.4 percentage points per $1,000 of additional maximum aid. These findings indicate that financial aid can increase degree attainment, even for individuals with high levels of initial support.

Several hypotheses posit a link between the origin of Homo and climatic and environmental shifts between 3 and 2.5 Ma. Here we report on new results that shed light on the interplay between tectonics, basin migration and faunal change on the one hand and the fate of Australopithecus afarensis and the evolution of Homo on the other. Fieldwork at the new Mille-Logya site in the Afar, Ethiopia, dated to between 2.914 and 2.443 Ma, provides geological evidence for the northeast migration of the Hadar Basin, extending the record of this lacustrine basin to Mille-Logya. We have identified three new fossiliferous units, suggesting in situ faunal change within this interval. While the fauna in the older unit is comparable to that at Hadar and Dikika, the younger units contain species that indicate more open conditions along with remains of Homo . This suggests that Homo either emerged from Australopithecus during this interval or dispersed into the region as part of a fauna adapted to more open habitats. Key events in human evolution are thought to have occurred between 3 and 2.5 Ma, but the fossil record of this period is sparse. Here, Alemseged et al. report a new fossil site from this period, Mille-Logya, Ethiopia, and characterize the geology, basin evolution and fauna, including specimens of Homo .

The appearance of Homo erectus shortly after 2.0 Ma is widely considered a turning point in human dietary evolution, with increased consumption of animal tissues driving the evolution of larger brain and body size and a reorganization of the gut. An increase in the size and number of zooarchaeological assemblages after the appearance of H. erectus is often offered as a central piece of archaeological evidence for increased carnivory in this species, but this characterization has yet to be subject to detailed scrutiny. Any widespread dietary shift leading to the acquisition of key traits in H. erectus should be persistent in the zooarchaeological record through time and can only be convincingly demonstrated by a broad-scale analysis that transcends individual sites or localities. Here, we present a quantitative synthesis of the zooarchaeological record of eastern Africa from 2.6 to 1.2 Ma. We show that several proxies for the prevalence of hominin carnivory are all strongly related to how well the fossil record has been sampled, which constrains the zooarchaeological visibility of hominin carnivory. When correcting for sampling effort, there is no sustained increase in the amount of evidence for hominin carnivory between 2.6 and 1.2 Ma. Our observations undercut evolutionary narratives linking anatomical and behavioral traits to increased meat consumption in H. erectus, suggesting that other factors are likely responsible for the appearance of its human-like traits.