out of africa

Chris Stringer's new book, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, attempts to reconcile the age-old conflict between the "Multiregional" and "Out of Africa" hypotheses of Modern Human origins. Stringer has long been identified with the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, and his criticism of the Multiregional model pretty much still hold. In the Multiregional model, different groups of a human ancestor, i.e., Homo erectus (and friends) existed over a large region of the earth (Africa and Eurasia) and different populations of that ancestral populations evolved in parallel to…

Wet phases in the Sahara/Sahel region and human migration patterns in North Africa: The carbon isotopic composition of individual plant leaf waxes (a proxy for C3 vs. C4 vegetation) in a marine sediment core collected from beneath the plume of Sahara-derived dust in northwest Africa reveals three periods during the past 192,000 years when the central Sahara/Sahel contained C3 plants (likely trees), indicating substantially wetter conditions than at present. Our data suggest that variability in the strength of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a main control on vegetation…

Zooillogix welcomes you back to our favorite ill-conceived, questionably licensed, death-circus: Tiger Splash Park! Any Arizona state legislators amongst our readers? If so, you might want to put this place to sleep... Thanks to dedicated reader Judy for making this vid and sending us the link.

Out of Africa Wildlife Park was founded in 1988 by a husband and wife team in Arizona. In their words... "It was a preserve born from their single-minded objective of bringing God, people, and animals together in a natural setting." In our words... oh Jesus... this place is a disaster waiting to happen. In particular, we would like to introduce you to the comedically-dangerous "Tiger Splash Park," where you'll discover how tigers "instincts, intellect and feelings interact to form spontaneous, natural behavior." If that description isn't foreshadowing for the inevitable human mauling, I don't…