Human Evolution
jlynch | February 24, 2007
According to this paper, a hidden Markov model of the divergence between humans and chimps finds "a very recent speciation time of human-chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years)". This would put the last common ancestor with Pan after a previously
reported date of between 4.98 and 7.02 million years. (TimeTree reports the weighted average for the time of nuclear divergence to be 5.56 million years). The age of 4.1 million years would apparently put the split during the time of such taxa as Australopithecus anamensis, A. afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops. It will be interesting to see how this…
jlynch | February 6, 2007
This is Turkana boy (Homo ergaster), soon to go on display in Kenya's national museum. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, of Nairobi Pentecostal Church (NPC) and Christ is the Answer Ministries, claims:
"I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it. These sorts of silly views are killing our faith."
Someone should explain to Adoyo that the truth sometimes hurts. Speaking of "silly views," apparently, Adoyo believes the world was created 12,000 years ago, humans were created 6,000 years ago, and each biblical day was equivalent to 1,000 Earth years. I guess nothing in Adoyo's BA in design…
jlynch | January 17, 2007A day or so back, I posted on an AP article which declared that "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." The original research article is now online. Let's look at the abstract, shall we?
Between 2003 and 2005, the Pestera cu Oase, Romania yielded a largely complete early modern human cranium, Oase 2, scattered on the surface of a Late Pleistocene hydraulically displaced bone bed containing principally the remains of Ursus spelaeus. Multiple lines of evidence…
jlynch | January 15, 2007
AP is reporting that a "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." A paper to appear in Tuesday's PNAS (and not online yet) will argue that the ~40,000 year old skull raises "important questions about the evolutionary history of modern humans,"
jlynch | January 11, 2007
A fossil skull discovered in 1952 offers support for the hypothesis that Upper Paleolithic Eurasians descendedfrom a population that emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa inthe Late Pleistocene. In tomorrow's Science, Fred Grine and co-workers describe a South African skull dated to 36.2 ± 3.3 thousand years, and note that while the skull is morphologically modern overall, its strongest morphometricaffinities are with Upper Paleolithic Eurasians ratherthan
recent, geographically proximate people.
The paper is available here (subscription required).
jlynch | September 21, 2006
A number of my SciBlings has already covered the discover of the three-year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton that has been dubbed "Little Lucy" (see, for example, PZ's post). I'm just going to point out the the specimen was discovered and described by individuals associated with Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins, in particular Bill Kimbel with whom I have in the past worked with on temporal bone variation. Great stuff!
jlynch | April 12, 2006From UC Berkeley:
New fossils discovered in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia are a missing link between our ape-man ancestors some 3.5 million years ago and more primitive hominids a million years older, according to an international team led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as A. anamensis, and date from about 4.1 million years ago, said Tim White, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and one of the team's leaders. The hominid Australopithecus…
jlynch | December 20, 2005With all the posting about the Dover decision, it is always good to remember that scientific problems are solved by scientists and aired in scientific journals, not in the legal arena. Investigators at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of the human/chimp split between 5 and 7 million years ago -- a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies, which have placed the divergence anywhere from 3 to 13 million years ago.
From the press release:
The scientists analyzed the largest data set yet of genes that code for proteins…