Every year TED invites esteemed academics, thinkers, doers, entrepreneurs, etc. to give an exclusive 15-18 minute long talk about what they do and why it is important for the rest of the world. I’ve shared one of these talks with you before, Zeresenay Alemseged’s. In this year’s conference, Louise Leakey, of the Leakey family lineage [...]
Entries from July 2008
July 29, 2008
Ancient Chilean Chicken May Not Be Of Polynesian Origin
It is coincidental that a regular Anthropology.net commenter, Terry, just posted a comment about last year’s study on the origins of early American chicken because PNAS published a new paper on this topic today. Razib pointed out the link to the new paper, “Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA.” [...]
July 24, 2008
Why There Is Such A High Percentage Of Amerindian mtDNA And European Y-Chromosome Signatures In The Caribbean
I have family living in the Caribbean, they specifically reside on the island of Grenada. And I regularly go down to visit them. Given that the many islands in Caribbean functioned as pit stops for the slave trade, I’ve been curious about the demographics, history, and genetics of Grenada. Based off of cursory observations, the [...]
July 23, 2008
Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?
Language is a product of culture. Or is it? Which came first — language or culture? That’s like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. But cultural behavior has been documented in animals who do not have language systems, like gorillas who have intricate systems of processing plants. Richard Byrne summarized this behavior,
“Gorillas [...]
July 21, 2008
Differences Between Cognition & Memory Of Males And Females Linked To Two Genes
Peter Giese of the Institue of Psychiatry at King’s College London, University of London has been studying the differences between male and female memory. According to this Telegraph news piece, he’s identified two sex based genes in males but not females which function in cognitive and memory functions.
“The researchers used mice to study the role [...]
July 17, 2008
A 3D Computed Tomography Scan Of The Liujiang Cranium
A couple days ago, press release agencies like EurekAlert! and ScienceDaily ran some anthropology blips that was not picked up by major news sources. So if you don’t follow them you would have missed out on this news.
In a nutshell, Wu Xiujie, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of [...]
July 16, 2008
The 28,000 Year Old Paglicci 23 Cro-Magnon mtDNA Ain’t Neandertal — It Is More Modern Than Anything Else
The open access journal PLoS One has published a new ancient DNA paper, “A 28,000 Years Old Cro-Magnon mtDNA Sequence Differs from All Potentially Contaminating Modern Sequences.” One which establishes, yet again, that the Neandertal mitochondrial hypervariable region I is much different from modern humans. This was done by extracting mtDNA from the Paglicci 23 [...]
July 14, 2008
Charles Lockwood In Memoriam
From John Lynch, of Stranger Fruit, comes the upsetting news of Charles Lockwood’s untimely death. He died in a motorcycle accident in London.
For those that don’t know who Charles Lockwood was, he was a paleoanthropologist who investigated the evolution of skull anatomy in hominins. Last year, his book “The Human Story: Where We Come From [...]
July 13, 2008
Episode 1: A ScreenCast Tutorial On How-To Do A Multiple Sequence Alignment & Draw A Phylogenetic Tree Using Swami
The last time I did a little tutorial on how to use bioinformatic tools in anthropological research was last October. I’ve had some ideas since then and have decided to restart this project. The biggest change is the screencast format, rather than a set of static instructions.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to the first [...]
July 12, 2008
Homo heidelbergensis Ear Anatomy Indicates They Could Have Heard The Same Frequency of Sounds As Modern Humans
Pinpointing when language became a prevalent trait during human evolution has been tricky. Last fall we read a paper which documented that Neandertals have the same FOXP2 sequence as modern humans. FOXP2 is a transcription factor associated with language. Two recent papers have shown that chimpanzees and humans have very similar structures in the brain [...]
