Greg Laden's Blog

Two chimps walked into a bar ...

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:43 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution

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. By an increased rate of evolution, the...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 2:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Size and Scaling in Hominid Evolution

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 by Greg Laden at 1:45 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People

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 by Greg Laden at 8:46 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Potato and Human Evolution

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 by Greg Laden at 8:14 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

What did the immediate ancestor of chimps and humans look like?

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 by Greg Laden at 8:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Crazy Anthropologist Links Food, Sex

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:43 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder

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 by Greg Laden at 8:51 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Life history trade-offs and human pygmies

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 by Greg Laden at 9:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Human Evolutionary Rate Study

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 by Greg Laden at 12:15 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks