Anthropology.net

Some famous paleontologists and anthropologists like Mark Goodwin, Donald Johanson, John Kappelman, and Anne Molineux of the Texas Memorial Museum, have helped Scott Solomon answer the question, “Do We Need the Original Lucy Fossil?“

I don’t wanna steal thunder from the post… but with all this drama ensuing over Lucy’s trip out here, I haven’t heard anyone ask,

“Given that many museums around the world have nearly identical plaster casts of Lucy, how important is the original fossil?”

That is of course until Scott decided too.

He goes onto explain out the actual fossils are useful for more indepth analysis, like computed tomography, a method used to analyze the Chororapithecus abyssinicus fossils. If you want a really basic run down on the importance of having actual fossil remains, then jump on over and read his article in Slate.

I recently visited a couple of Palaeolithic painted cave sites, namely Las Monedas and El Castillo, and have written them up at Remote Central, along with links to images both outside the caves, along with a few I scanned from a brochure my guide very kindly gave me at the end of my two tours – no photography is allowed inside the caves, and I’m very grateful to her for her generosity, as it allows me to share some of what I saw within the caves.

Picture albums can be viewed at Picasa, by clicking here, here and here.

Before that, I also visited the Museo de Prehistoria y Arqueologia in Santander, and although there is an accompanying picture album for that as well, I haven’t yet finished uploading images to it, which might take a day or two yet. (TJ)

One of our more popular posts of the last month, has surprisingly been this short little blurb on the influence of pronouns in brain function. To extend that, there’s new research that shows neurons of liberals and conservatives, react differently when confronted with tough choices, suggesting that political orientation may be hard-wired.

The study has been published in Nature Neuroscience, David Amodio co-authored, “Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition.”

He and his more colleagued used electroencephalographs, a type of visualization biomedical tool that measures neuronal impulses… or in other words brain activity, to examined activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region strongly linked with the self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring. What they found was pretty remarkable, for example,

“respondents who had described themselves as liberals showed “significantly greater conflict-related neural activity” when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine…. Conservatives, however, were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits “despite signals that this … should be changed.”

People often ask whether biological sisters from the same parents are more closely related than a brother and sister? Why do they ask this? Because, sisters get the same X chromosome from their father. Ken Weiss, professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State answered that question, stating that sister-sisters siblings are more genetically similar than brother and sister sets.

“Weiss offered a lesson in basic biology: Get a piece of paper and a pen. Draw a circle for the mother and a square for the father. Populate the circle with “XX” for the female sex chromosome and the square with “XY” for the male chromosome. Draw two more circles under the symbols for the parents to represent two sisters.

“The two daughters below them are going to inherit an X from their mother, one or the other. Each one gets an independent choice,” said Weiss. “But if they’re daughters, they have to be XX, which means they must both inherit the same X from their father, since he only has one to give them. Everything else is scrambled equally between the two sisters from the two parents. They have one X that they share, and one X that they may or may not share, depending on the luck of the draw from the mother.”

Now, if you were to draw two squares for brothers under the parents, you would pull one or the other X from the mother and the Y from the father, because to be a son you must be XY and the Y can only come from Dad.

Humans have 46 chromosomes, inheriting 22 non-sex chromosomes, and one sex chromosome, from each parent. What they inherit from the other chromosomes is similar regardless of sex, which overall makes the child 50 percent related to each other and to each parent. In this sense, Weiss said, “Two brothers are as equally close to each other as two sisters. A brother and a sister are not as closely related as two brothers or two sisters. They’re a bit more distantly related.” This is because one will have an X and the other a Y from their father, whereas two brothers must share the same Y, and two sisters the same X, from him.”

I don’t know of Weiss has published this ‘finding’ of his in any peer-reviewed journal. The press release the Penn State is running doesn’t mention it anywhere but it would be an interesting study if applied. Has anyone seen this make the rounds in the journals?