Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory
Category: Anthropology
A theory like this can evolve into a zombie that will eat the brains of science geeks, graduate students, and others, for decades
Posted by Greg Laden at 10:36 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Category: Anthropology
A theory like this can evolve into a zombie that will eat the brains of science geeks, graduate students, and others, for decades
Posted by Greg Laden at 10:36 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Archaeology
... 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...
Posted by Greg Laden at 3:43 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Archaeology
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...
Posted by Greg Laden at 2:01 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
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...
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:04 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by Greg Laden at 1:45 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:14 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
Posted by Greg Laden at 5:48 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can you believe this guy? Check it out: The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once proposed that humanity began with cooking. [a Twin Cities anthropologist] says love may have begun with cooking, as well. ... The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living...
Posted by Greg Laden at 3:43 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by Greg Laden at 5:53 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Morphology and Diet
New research published in Current Biology falsifies a widely held idea about the early evolution of birds.
Posted by Greg Laden at 8:36 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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