Human Evolution
Category archives for Human Evolution
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.
Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival 33
Posted by Greg Laden on January 30, 2008 Welcome to the Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival #33, ‘specializing’ in the four fields of anthropology. The previous edition of 4SH can be found at Testimony of the Spade, and the next edition will be hosted by Our Cultural World. The main page for Four Stone Hearth has additional information on the carnival, and you…
Did Humans or Climate Change Cause the Extinctions of Pleistocene Eurasian Megafauna?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 25, 2008 Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to…
New Hominid Skull in China
Posted by Greg Laden on January 23, 2008 So far no reliable reports seem to be available of a new and potentially interesting, but not necessarily earth-shattering, find in China.
Natural Selection
Posted by Greg Laden on January 17, 2008 Every time I put this video up, You Tube eliminates it. So look quick before it goes away again.
The Evolution of the Modern Climate: New Evidence from Plant Remains
Posted by Greg Laden on January 17, 2008 Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely…
Cave Bears More Carnivorous Than Previously Thought
Posted by Greg Laden on January 8, 2008 From a University of Bristol Press Release: “Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears, a species which became extinct 20,000 years ago, ate both plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the time such as hyaenas, lions, wolves, and our own human ancestors.”
Deep Sea Evidence of Major Volcanic Eruptions
Posted by Greg Laden on January 8, 2008 Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water…
Alcohol, Sexual Attraction, Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Performance
Posted by Greg Laden on January 3, 2008 Daily alcohol use by males has been shown to increase sexual arousal and decrease sexual inhibition.
Redefining Human
Posted by Greg Laden on December 24, 2007 From Oxford University Press Blog, regarding Aaron Filler’s recent, very controversial, and very interesting publications.
The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Posted by Greg Laden on December 19, 2007 Homo floresiensis more widely known as the “Hobbit,” may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the anatomy of H. floresiensis. To explore this we first have to understand the concept of “Humeral torsion.” Humeral torsion is…
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…
Neanderthal Childhood. Did it happen?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 18, 2007 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:
Anthro Notes
Posted by Greg Laden on December 17, 2007 The new Anthronotes is available, here This is a Smithsonian publication. This issue has, among other things, a very nice article on the Flores Hobbits and a piece on teaching Human Evolution. Teachers should take special note of this, the material in this publication is usually perfect for 10th through 12th grade Life Sciences. [Hat…
Life history trade-offs and human pygmies
Posted by Greg Laden on December 16, 2007 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:
The Wood Spider … stoned
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 This is a good one for your 8th grade biology class… … or maybe not…
Human Evolutionary Rate Study
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets,…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on December 10, 2007 There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years.
Creationists Can be So Funny
Posted by Greg Laden on December 7, 2007 There was a time, not so long ago, when you could “Google” the terms “Greg Laden” and “Idiot” and get, well, besides the several thousand hits about me being an idiot and stuff, an Amazon.com page for “The Idiot’s Guide to Human Prehistory by Greg Laden” This is a book I never wrote. But the…
Extended Male Growth in Robust Australopithecus
Posted by Greg Laden on December 1, 2007 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.
Sex Difference in Sex Drive
Posted by Greg Laden on November 25, 2007 According to a story in the last issue of Psychological Science: … for most women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both men and women. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to only one sex or the other, depending on the individual’s sexual orientation. These…
Fish Oil, Statins, and Neural Disease
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2007 The “statins” make up a class of cholesterol lowering drugs. Fish oil (oil derived from fish) is rich in certain fatty acids. Both types of compounds can have powerful positive and protective effects in the brain. A study just now coming out (to be published in Brain Research Reviews) looks at the biochemical effects of…
Modern Humans and Neanderthals: Did they “do it?”
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2007 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?
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…
Framing the Language Gene: FOXP2
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2007 You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online. Here is the summary of the article: Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under…
Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness (TED)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 11, 2007 Nature Neuroscience: Focus on Glia
Posted by Greg Laden on November 9, 2007 Ever since I started to learn about brains, back in the mid 1980s, from some really brainy brain experts like Terry Deacon and Joe Marcus, I always knew that glial cells were important. But I now read in current material in Nature Neuroscience, that “A decade ago, glia were the neglected stepchildren of neuroscience. Although…
, which is now available for the 
