That’s what Timothy Weaver, Charles Roseman and Chris Stringer, asked in a Journal of Human Evolution paper titled, “Were neandertal and modern human cranial differences produced by natural selection or genetic drift?“
It is an interesting question to ask because if you’ve ever spent some time looking at a Neandertal skull and compared it to a [...]
Entries from July 2007
July 24, 2007
Can one use natural selection or genetic drift to explain human and Neandertal cranial differences?
July 23, 2007
What’s really at stake here? Publish or Perish? Or something more?
From time to time, I like to take a moment to ask myself, “Why do I blog?”
I think this is a good time for me to be doing one of these type posts because as most bloggers know, after returning from a hiatus, it is hard to get back into the swing of things. Often [...]
July 23, 2007
Chimpanzees Gait Energetics & The Origin of Human Bipedalism
In late May, I shared with you a paper that introduced us to the hypothesis of bipedalism originating in Orangutans. I thought it was a rather foolish hypothesis to make considering the wealth of comparative anatomical and physiological research done with chimpanzee to human gaits. Chimpanzees have more similar anatomy to us than Orangutans and [...]
July 23, 2007
EHL Linguists try to identify a time where there was only one language
I don’t know why this is the way it is, but linguistic anthropology seems to make it into my RSS headlines far less than any other sub discipline within anthropology. It is a very active field, with a lot of interesting research available for us to digest and learn from. So I don’t know why [...]
July 22, 2007
A Podcast Interview on Ancient DNA from the Neanderthal Genome
I have a podcast I found thru Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei’s blog, which actually came originally from Marc Pelletier of Futures in Biotech, that I wanna share withya. The podcast is fairly long, its about 45 minutes long.
Marc interviewed Dr. Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, [...]
July 22, 2007
Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie announces 3.5 million year old Hominid Mandible
I was actually in Ethiopia when I heard on the national radio of Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie’s new 3.8 million to 3.5 million years ago hominid mandible. I remember it was hot that day, about 116 degrees Fahrenheit or about 47 degrees Celsius, when I heard the news. I was pining over the heat and this [...]
July 21, 2007
Last Stand Of Stone Age Man: The Hadzabe Tribe Of Tanzania
The ongoing plight of the Hadzabe in Tanzania has caught the attention of the British mainstream press, in the guise of this article from the Daily Mail, on whose behalf Andrew Malone has filed a report. Although many readers of these pages will already be familiar with this story, it’s important to keep it in [...]
July 21, 2007
Back in Black
My field season in Ethiopia has ended, and it was very successful. I want to share with you a lot more than I’m able to write at the moment, so you’re gonna hafta sit tight until I summarize all my experiences into a more thorough post.
In the meantime, you can busy yourself with the photos [...]
July 21, 2007
‘Hidden’ Species May Be Surprisingly Common
Here’s a brief report from New Scientist, discussing research by Markus Pfenninger and Klaus Schwenk, of the Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt, Germany, who have been engaged in a project which aims to ‘barcode’ every living organism on the planet.
Cryptic species – animals that appear identical but are genetically quite distinct – may be much more widespread [...]
July 21, 2007
Mars Experiment: 520-Day Trip To Nowhere And Back Again
One of the realities of humans travelling to Mars is the need to confine as many people as possible into the smallest possible craft, obliged to enjoy or endure each others’ company for months at a time – and to that end, many experiments will be carried out here on Earth, in which it is [...]
