John Hawks shares with us news of a new hominid discovery. Similar to the post from a couple days ago, this is news of mandible of Homo erectus. Unlike the Serbian mandibular fragment, this is a complete jaw and was discovered at the Thomas I quarry near Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by CRNS [...]
Entries from June 2008
June 30, 2008
Cross Cultural Burial Rituals
I stumbled upon this list of 10 ‘extraordinary’ burial ceremonies that I want to pass onto you. Since we’re a anthropology focused community, it is very possible that you’ve heard of most of these rituals. I knew of several of them, but learned some new things as well.
The following are ones I found particularly noteworthy:
Air [...]
June 30, 2008
The Concept of Race
Introduction
Before I dive into the concept of race, I just want to thank Kambiz for this opportunity to broaden not only my perspectives but everyone else’s as well. I am very excited to discuss subjects that interest me and make people think critically about culture and society. I am looking forward to this personal challenge [...]
June 29, 2008
A possible Homo erectus jaw from Sicevo Gorge, Serbia
John Hawks just pointed out a press release announcing a new hominid from Serbia. The site is a cave in the Sicevo Gorge. The site is dated to the Middle Pleistocene, or around 130,000 to 250,000 years old. The press release doesn’t provide a definitive dating technique, just saying that the,
“The [remains were] found at [...]
June 28, 2008
Paul Ehrlich and Carl Zimmer discuss Cultural Evolution on Bloggingheads.tv
I have brought up Paul Ehrlich a lot lately. And this morning Razib emailed me a link to an interview of Ehrlich by Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads.tv, so I felt compelled to share the interview with you.
In the discussion, Zimmer and Ehrlich discuss Ehrlich’s new book, “The Dominant Animal, the ‘overrated idea of a [...]
June 26, 2008
An Arab in Roman Iron-Age Denmark
Ancient mtDNA from 22 individuals from two sites in Southern Denmark have been isolated, sequenced and analyzed. The two sites are Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde. On the map to your right, they are marked as B for Bøgebjerggård and S for Skovgaarde. They date to the Danish Roman Iron-Age period, or approximately 2000 to 1600 years [...]
June 23, 2008
More on Cultural Evolution
Cultural evolution has been a pretty active and heated topic in the anthropology blogosphere, especially between Martin, afarensis, and I. Afarensis continued the discussion today, returning to this topic but on the projectile point scope.
In some sort of weird coincidence, the professional press has also chimed in — not explicitly on projectile points, but on [...]
June 23, 2008
Sophisticated Tools Associated with Neandertals found in Beedings site, near Pulborough, West Sussex, UK
News of Neandertal tools from an Early Upper Palaeolithic site called Beedings, north east of Pulborough in West Sussex, United Kingdom is emerging. So far the BBC News is the only major news source running this, but smaller local news papers such as the West Sussex Gazette have also published news on this subject.
Team leader [...]
June 20, 2008
Improving Multiple Sequence Alignments with a Phylogeny-Aware Algorithm
Ari Löytynoja and Nick Goldman have developed a new method that detects and distinguishes insertions and deletions in genomes. Their work was published in the most recent issue of Science. While Löytynoja and Goldman didn’t explicitly write how their new algorithim, described in, “Phylogeny-Aware Gap Placement Prevents Errors in Sequence Alignment and Evolutionary Analysis,” impacts [...]
June 20, 2008
Emerging news of Debbie Argue’s cladistic analysis of Homo floresiensis
According to these press reports, Debbie Argue, of the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology, has produced a new cladistic comparison of Homo floresiensis to many other H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. habilis specimens. I read the releases, and it seems like some gracile australopithecines were also in the comparison set… at least [...]
