Lee Berger’s got a big problem. Rex Dalton was on his case earlier this year about Berger’s political and cultural approach to his Palaun study. And now Scott Fitzpatrick, one of the most vocal critics of Berger’s dwarves from Palau, has a new paper out in the open access journal PLoS One, where he sinks [...]
Entries from August 2008
August 26, 2008
On Neandertal Stone Tools & Estimations Of Their Intelligence
Razib points me to this press release announcing a study estimating Neandertal intelligence by way of their stone tool set. The press is running wild with this news. The Independent put out a piece on it. So has the Guardian. Even the BBC has got something to say about it. And the story has made [...]
August 21, 2008
MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometry Of Ötzi/Oetzi The Iceman’s Clothing
Whatever you call him Ötzi, Oetzi or simply the 5,300 year old Tyrolean iceman mummy found in the Alps in 1991… you can’t deny that he doesn’t have a special place in our collective curiosity. We’ve explored his fertility, his last meal, and his cause of death. Why? Well, he’s the most intact late Neolithic [...]
August 20, 2008
An Attempt At A Morphological Reassessment Of The Teshik-Tash Neandertal Child
Michelle Glantz, Sheela Athreya, and Terrence Ritzman have taken up yet another a reassessment of Teshik-Tash Neandertal child in the latest issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. They’ve published the paper under the title, “Is Central Asia the Eastern Outpost of the Neandertal Range? A Reassessment of the Teshik-Tash Child.”
The child, Teshik-Tash 1, [...]
August 19, 2008
The Mitochondrial & Y-Chromosome Variation Of The Talysh From Iran & Azerbaijan
Ivan Nasidze and Mark Stoneking, along with a half dozen or so other colleagues, have studied the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome diversity of the Talysh. They’ve published their analysis in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The paper can be found under this title, “mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation in the Talysh of Iran and Azerbaijan.”
The Talysh [...]
August 14, 2008
The Kiffian & Tenerean Occupation Of Gobero, Niger: Perhaps The Largest Collection Of Early-Mid Holocene People In Africa
In late May, Paul Sereno was in town to talk at the 2008 conference titled, ‘Integrating Evolution, Development, & Genomics.’ He was invited to also give a talk titled, “Living Lakeside in the Sahara: A Chronicle of Holocene Adaptation,” to the Primate Biology Group. I eagerly attended. Paul Sereno, if you don’t know, is primarily [...]
August 14, 2008
Extending The Domestication Of Sheep & Goats In Mediterranean By 1,000 Years
Last week, I shared with you all some research on the Neolithic/agricultural revolution in Iran and Turkey, specifically on barley and cattle domestication. Since then, PNAS has published a related paper, “Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact,” by Melinda Zeder. Zeder believes that the domestication of sheep and goat [...]
August 12, 2008
Advent Of Cooking & The Big Cognitive Leap In Human Evolution
In the open access paper, “Metabolic changes in schizophrenia and human brain evolution,” Phillipp Khaitovich and team have compared the gene expression and metabolite concentrations in the healthy human brain to a schizophrenic brain. Their results indicate that the biggest differences between a normally functioning brain and an unhealthy one was in 9 genes and [...]
August 12, 2008
Dravidian & Korku People Of India Maybe Descendants Of Middle/Early Upper Paleolithic Settlers
The mitochondrial macrohaplogroup M is a descendant of the macrohaplogroup L3, a really old East African haplogroup thought to have originated around 104,000 years ago. Sun et al., explained that within haplogroup M, lie many smaller haplogroups of which the M2 lineage is thought to be the oldest mitochondrial lineage in India. You can check [...]
August 11, 2008
Genetic, Geographic, And Linguistic Structure Of European Populations
Both Razib and Dienekes have put a posts about this new Current Biology paper, “Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe.” The authors of the paper compare the genetic make up of 2,514 individuals from Europe using the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Mapping 500K Array Set.
Always the over achiever of science blogging, Razib has dutifully [...]
