A new study of over 600 mtDNAs from 20 American and 26 Asian populations is shedding some unique insight on how the Americas were peopled. As you may have been taught, it was thought that the Americas were founded by a not so diverse founding population or two. Before this paper, only about 70 left [...]
The BBC reports on the discovery of a very abundant collection of fossils unearthed at an ancient hyena den in the Granada region of south-east Spain. The site is named Fonelas P-1, and it is very important. How so? It falls right in between the Pleiocene and Pleistocene which is when early Homo is thoght to have made one [...]
A few weeks back, Kambiz posted an article, ‘US Army is Embedding Anthropologists’, which discussed whether or not it was prudent, or even desirable for trained anthropologists to assist the US military in its current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; last night I read what I consider to be an outstanding addition to the [...]
I’m sure at least Afarensis will be happy to know that his undergraduate advisor, Bill Bass and the body farm he has built has debuted on Boing Boing today. It is not everyday that anthropology makes it on that site.
Boing Boing ultimately links to an article by Allan Bellows of Damn Interesting, who followed Bill Bass around and documented his research. For [...]
Both P-ter of Gene Expression and John Hawks have covered the new publication on blood type O and malaria resistance. This is a very well studied marker and very important to human evolution because it has been a major selective force on the human population. I even isolated my own blood type alleles recently and I’m happy to confirm that I’m [...]
Many thanks to Adam James at freelancejournalists.org, for alerting us to this latest development in the fortunes of the Hadzabe tribe of Tanzania, whom it would appear, despite having the odds stacked against them, appear to have pulled off a spectacular victory in their attempt to retain domain over their traditional hunting grounds, which looked [...]
Razib beat me the the punch on the new news that some Neandertals had red hair. He’s managed to write a very thorough and informative post over at Gene Expression. Check it out. Paul Rincon, a reporter for the BBC also has news of this, here.
This is a very curious finding and the entire study [...]
Eric at The Primate Diaries has posted the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth, which as he rightly points out, is the first edition of its second year. And a roaring start it is to this second year, with an impressive array of contributions from around the blogosphere, including entries from a few blogs that [...]
A quick reminder to anyone and everyone considering submitting content for the forthcoming 4SH - this from Martin at Aardvarchaeology…
Wednesday 24 October will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at The Primate Diaries. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure [...]
If you’re a regular reader of this site, there are some times when my university doesn’t come through for me, such as its reluctance to subscribe to Nature and Science. But there are other times when my university really shines, such as on Friday afternoon, when I visited the Joint Genome Institute’s Production Genomics Facility [...]
