Evolution of Diet
Category archives for Evolution of Diet
New link between exercise and weight loss uncovered?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2010 A recent paper provides the groundwork to establish a way for exercise to diminish appetite. Or, more likely, for sedentary behavior to increase appetite.
Nyamulagira Volcano and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on January 4, 2010 I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an island effect that has been a laboratory for evolution, and…
Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory
Posted by Greg Laden on August 4, 2009 The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore’s site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
Two chimps walked into a bar …
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 … and made a real mess of the place when one of them spotted the jar of pickles on the counter. They fought over it until one of them had almost all the pickles and the other one had a number of bruises and a tiny fragment of one pickle that the other chimp dropped…
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2009 Or not. Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record…
The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2009 One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason…
Size and Scaling in Hominid Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on August 14, 2008 Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even…
The Potato and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2008 Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can’t find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on…
Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang
Posted by Greg Laden on February 15, 2008 Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang I’ve known Shea for years … since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me.
Cooking and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on December 18, 2007 From Scientific American, a piece on the “Cooking Hypothesis” (which yours truly helped develop some years back). Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our evolution, he says, is cooking Cooking does indeed turn a lot of stuff that is…
Evolution of Birds: New Evidence for Foraging Behavior
Posted by Greg Laden on November 16, 2007 Birds evolved during the Mesozoic, during the various “Ages” of the dinosaurs, as a subset of those dinosaurs. Many researchers believe that these early birds were different from their then very close dinosaur cousins because of their flight adaptations, and some have linked this idea to flight-based or tree- based foraging. Today, most birds fly…
Roots Coming Home to Roost
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2007 Many years ago a couple of researchers (Hatley and Kappleman) suggested omnivory, including eating of roots, to be a common theme in the adaptations we see in bears, humans, and pigs. Some years later, Richard Wrangham and I independently and for different reasons came to the idea that roots are potentially important in human evolution,…
Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2007 I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens. For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even modest quantity to rats, causes the rats to get cancer…
, which is now available for the 
