Back in August of this year, two words I frequently encountered when trying to visit sites of interest in Andalucía, southern Spain, were“Cerrado” (closed) and “No”, which as a tourist you take in your stride, leg it to the nearest hostelry and reconsider the rest of the day from the perspective of its slightly less [...]
Entries from October 2009
October 30, 2009
A Cave Shut by Closed Minds? La Carihuela Neanderthals vs. the Junta
October 29, 2009
Grandma Plays Favourites: X-Chromosome Relatedness and Sex-specific Childhood Mortality – Proceedings of the Royal Society B
As this paper is freely accessible for the next 7 days, I’m posting it here in the hope that as many readers as possible will have time to read it through. Molly Fox et al turn their thoughts to the question of why women are able to live for many years after they able to [...]
October 28, 2009
Four Stone Hearth Volume #78 @ _Paddy K_
Today marks the half-way point between the most recent edition of Four Stone Hearth and the next, so here’s a quick recap on the 78th edition, as hosted by Paddy K – if by some chance you haven’t been able to read the various entries, please be sure to do so, as there is a [...]
October 27, 2009
Sex and the Single Neanderthal: Inter-Species Breeding in the Upper Palaeolithic?
There’s been some coverage of a recent announcement by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute, who opines that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans had sexual encounters as they co-habited in Upper Palaeolithic Eurasia from around 42,000 bp to 24,500 bp. The main article is over at the London Times, from which this is an [...]
October 26, 2009
Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley
Science Daily report on a paper published back in June which I appear to have missed, and as it’s freely accessible at PNAS, I’m pleased to be able to link to it here. This is the abstract:
Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant [...]
October 25, 2009
Understanding Ancient Hominin Dispersals Using Artefactual Data: A Phylogeographic Analysis of Acheulean Handaxes – PLoS ONE
Interesting paper by Dr. Stephen Lycett, of the University of Kent, UK, from which the following extract is taken:
In recent years it has been increasingly recognized that the manufacture of artefacts such as handaxes results from the process of social transmission of knowledge between individuals and across generations [18]–[21]. It is also been increasingly recognized [...]
October 24, 2009
Modern Humans Are Still Evolving But Will Modern Men Get Wimpier?
Two interesting articles that went into my inbox today: Modern man a wimp says anthropologist and Darwin Lives! Modern Humans Are Still Evolving.
A cover illustration from Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister’s new book entitled “Manthropology” and sub-titled “The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.” Photo from REUTERS/Hachette Publishing/Handout.
Modern man a wimp says anthropologist from Reuters, summarizes [...]
October 14, 2009
Cooperative Hunting and Meat Sharing 400–200 kya at Qesem Cave, Israel – PNAS
Brief details of research from Israel which has led authors Mary Stiner et al to ruminate upon the possibility that differing cut-marks from ancient kills may offer insights into how meat-sharing behaviours amongst archaic humans may have evolved through the various stages of the Palaeolithic.
Abstract:
Zooarchaeological research at Qesem Cave, Israel demonstrates that large-game hunting was [...]
October 8, 2009
Evidence That Two Main Bottleneck Events Shaped Modern Human Genetic Diversity – Proc R Soc B FirstCite
The subject of bottlenecks in ancient human populations is visited once again, as Amos and Hoffman propose to have found evidence for two such events, one as humans migrated out of Africa and later when a migration event into Pleistocene America occurred across the Bering Strait.
Here’s the abstract of the paper which is freely accessible:
There [...]
October 8, 2009
Four Stone Hearth 77 @ A Place Odyssey
Just a quick note to point readers in the direction of the latest edition of the anthropology blog carnival which is hosted for the first time over at A Place Odyssey, a team of bloggers who describe themselves thus:
Known locally as the ‘landscape detectives’, we are a group of Masters students at Sheffield University studying [...]
