Greg Laden's Blog

Nyamulagira Volcano and Human Evolution

Category: lost congo memoir

I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 3:40 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Primitive Cultures are Simple, Civilization is Complex (A falsehood) I

Category: Falsehoods

I'd like to offer a way of thinking about the difference between what we call "civilization" and what some people call "primitive cultures" that will be more useful and less falsehood-prone

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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:54 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 2:01 PM • 4 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

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

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

Roots Coming Home to Roost

Category: Roots

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...

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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:09 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks