Human Evolution
Category archives for Human Evolution
Extended Male Growth in Robust Australopithecus
Posted by Greg Laden on October 21, 2008 It has always been suggested, by a wide range of evidence, that australopiths in general, and robust australopiths in particular, have a higer degree of sexual dimorphism than chimps, and possibly, dimorphism in body size as high as one sees in any ape. Resent research on growth patterns, just published in Science, examines this. In…
Life history trade-offs and human pygmies
Posted by Greg Laden on October 21, 2008 Every few years a paper comes out “explaining” short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case with the recent PNAS paper by Migliano et al. From the abstract:
Modern Humans and Neanderthals: Did they “do it?”
Posted by Greg Laden on October 18, 2008 Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring … and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people? In my opinion,…
Review of SMM Exhibit on Race and Racism
Posted by Greg Laden on October 7, 2008 The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called “Race: Are we so different?” This exhibit is now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and will be in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Boston and Washington DC between now and June 2011. If you get a chance, go see…
Effective Polygyny in Humans: Turns out it is for real
Posted by Greg Laden on September 29, 2008 Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation…
What do you get when you mix a The Lion of the North and a bunch of explosives?
Posted by Greg Laden on September 19, 2008 Gustavus The Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, naturally. Gustavus Adolphus was the king of Sweden and founder of the Swedish Empire from the age of seventeen until he his death at the age of 37, in 1632. He looked, as a testosterone-ridden teenager, at vast unconquered lands, at his large and experienced army, and…
Precarious Pettiness of Sexual Politics In the Blogosphere: An uppity response to the perspicacious Dr. Isis and an appeal to get serious about sexual aggression and exploitation
Posted by Greg Laden on September 11, 2008 Dr. Isis the Scientist at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, has written an open letter to our sister, Zuska, regarding (in part) the exchanges between my Sbling and myself. Dr. Isis points out that she has had a long term academic interests in breasts, which is primarily political and pragmatic as it turns…
What is the sound of one hypothesis clapping?
Posted by Greg Laden on September 5, 2008 Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as though the words were entering your eyes,…
Louise Leakey: Digging for humanity’s origins
Posted by Greg Laden on August 21, 2008 A Portrait of The Brain by Adam Zeman
Posted by Greg Laden on August 15, 2008 Published by Yale University Press A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman is a new book describing how the brain works (and does not work) in something of an Oliver Sack’s experiential manner, but with a twist. Zeman is a Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Nerology at the Pininsula Medical School. A Portrait of…
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…
Unbelievable Magic Illusion Thingie
Posted by Greg Laden on June 2, 2008 Look at the following image. Look in particular at squares A and B. A appears to be dark grey, B appears to be white or whitish. But in fact, they are the same exact color. Don’ t believe it? Me neither! Or at least, I didn’t until I went ahead and deleted most everything that…
Fun And Instructive Classroom Exercise
Posted by Greg Laden on May 7, 2008 Your brain … to explore the nature of the conscious mind. You are the teacher, and you’ve got a classroom full of reasonably well behaved students. Tell them: “I want you to close your eyes, and I’m going to ask you a question. … Quietly work out the answer to the question and keep your…
New Hominid Fossil from Tanzania
Posted by Greg Laden on April 26, 2008 One of the most important evolutionary transitions in human prehistory was the rise of modern humans (Homo sapiens) from earlier hominids. A newly reported fossil from Tanzania provides an important new data point necessary to understand this transition.
Christopher deCharms: Looking inside the brain in real time
Posted by Greg Laden on April 10, 2008 Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening — emotion, body movement, pain. (In other words, you can literally see how you feel.) The applications for real-time fMRIs start with chronic pain control and range into the realm of science fiction, but…
Dyslexia in Chinese Readers vs. English Readers
Posted by Greg Laden on April 8, 2008 Developmental dyslexia is a disorder affecting as many as 17% of school children. This neurological disorder involves an impairment in reading skills, and has been found to be “associated with weak reading-related activity in left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal regions” in English speakers. However, different abnormalities in the brain are associated with dyslexic readers in the…
The Boneyard XIII
Posted by Greg Laden on April 6, 2008 Grrrrrrrrrrrrr…. Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard … the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff. “The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It’s held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a…
Early, somewhat controversial hominid walked like an Australopith
Posted by Greg Laden on March 27, 2008 The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the…
New early human fossil
Posted by Greg Laden on March 26, 2008 I have not read the paper yet, but there is a news report out. This will be in tomorrows nature: MADRID, Spain – A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier…
The Flores Hobbits Were Members of a Separate Species
Posted by Greg Laden on March 21, 2008 … according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study compares skull measurements of Flores material with a wide range of other hominid data and concludes that Flores cannot be clustered with Homo sapiens. This is the first published study that takes into account how size affects…
Evidence for an ancient lineage of modern humans
Posted by Greg Laden on March 9, 2008 It almost seems like there are two separate research project under way regarding the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. One focuses on recent humans, tends to use DNA as a major source of information, and from this base projects back into the past. This approach tends to confirm the idea that humans share an African…
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.” From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital…
The Origin of the Human Smile
Posted by Greg Laden on March 3, 2008 A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here: A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that…
Human Evolution News
Posted by Greg Laden on February 26, 2008 A new genetic analysis of people from around the world adds further confirmation to the African origin of humans. The study of genetic details from 938 individuals from 51 populations provides evidence of how people are related and different, researchers led by Richard M. Myers of Stanford University report in Friday’s issue of the journal…
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…
What did the immediate ancestor of chimps and humans look like?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2008 Comparing living chimpanzees to living humans, in reference to the species that gave rise to these two closely related species, is one way to frame questions about the evolution of each species.
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.
What is a disease?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 12, 2008 “Disease” is a big word. I’d like to address this question by focusing on the difference, or lack of difference, between a poison, a disease, and a yummy thing to eat. It turns out that they may all be the same. Yet different.
Seeking Knowledge in Science (Rue Continued)
Posted by Greg Laden on February 9, 2008 I’ve not been commenting on the comments on this post about the Myers – Rue debate, but I have been reading them with great interest. The following, while not addressing most of the comments, arises from them.
The Myers – Rue Debate And Why They Had to Taser Me
Posted by Greg Laden on February 8, 2008 Last night, the Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists club (C.A.S.H.) presented a debate between PZ Myers and Loyal Rue on the question: Can religion and science co-exist? I witnessed this event and would like to tell you what happened.
, which is now available for the 
