Archive for August 2009
Homo floresiensis Walked Out of Africa
New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy that originated from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
With Mike Moorwood from University of Wollongong and Thomas Sutikna from Indonesian Center for Archaeology, Debbie Argue compared 60 skulls and skeletal features from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas using cladistic analysis. The result shows that Homo floresiensis “probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago”.
Read more here: Hobbits Walked Out of Africa
Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.
Redheads Can’t Handle The Pain
Kambiz here. I’m about to start my second term of medical school, which is both exciting and nerve racking. In my summer readings, I came across a medical and anthropological tidbit today that caught my attention: redheads have a lower tolerance for pain. I didn’t know that. Did you?
Skin pigmentation is one of my favorite topics. We know from previous posts that the melanocortin-1 receptor gene or MC1R affects melanin production and ultimately skin and hair phenotypes. Redheads carry a variant of MC1R which produces a different pigment, called pheomelanin, resulting in freckles, fair skin and ginger hair.
How MC1R receptors affect pain is another story though, one that is not well understood. Aside from the skin MC1R is also expressed in the brain. It could be possible that the redhead allelic variant of the MC1R receptors don’t quite receive the signal transduction of pain reception in the same manner as those with the wildtype receptor. I don’t think I’m gonna become an anthesthesiologist but as someone interested in human genetic variation it is good to acknowledge some phenotypes affect how medicine is delivered. ;-)
Anyways, I don’t have much else to add to this other than to share some interesting information and to let you all know I’m alive but will be crawling under a rock again. Till next time.
