Morphology and Diet:
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...
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Posted on August 14, 2008 1:45 PM • 2 Comments •
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....
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Posted on March 6, 2008 8:46 AM • 8 Comments •
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,...
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Posted on February 19, 2008 8:14 AM • 7 Comments •
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....
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Posted on February 19, 2008 8:00 AM • 7 Comments •
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 on February 13, 2008 3:43 PM • 5 Comments •
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...
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Posted on December 19, 2007 8:51 AM • 3 Comments •
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...
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Posted on December 16, 2007 9:35 PM • 2 Comments •
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...
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Posted on December 11, 2007 12:15 PM • 0 Comments •
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....
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Posted on December 10, 2007 5:00 PM • 32 Comments •
New research published in Current Biology falsifies a widely held idea about the early evolution of birds.
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Posted on November 16, 2007 8:36 AM • 0 Comments •
