I’m kinda surprised that this paper, “A study on the correlation between IL1RAPL1 and human cognitive ability,” hasn’t made many waves in the press nor in the blogosphere. Aside from being controversial, it is a pretty fascinating study. But, I’m not completely shocked many have abstained from mentioning it… Like the genetics of race, [...]
Got to hand it to Blaine Bettinger, of the Genetic Genealogist, for catching this news on GenomeWeb Daily New. In a nutshell, it is a report of what Svante Pääbo’s talked about at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Pääbo, if you don’t know, is one of the main researchers behind [...]
There’s a new PLoS ONE paper making the rounds in the press today. The research behind it fits the kinda stuff you may see on Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog and sometimes on GNXP… it is basically an investigation on the attractiveness of a symmetrical face. The paper is published open access, under the title, “Symmetry Is [...]
So, I got my hands on that mouth watering Nature paper I mentioned a couple days ago. It is titled, “Cladistic analysis of continuous modularized traits provides phylogenetic signals in Homo evolution,” and it is probably the biggest anthropology news of this week. I’ve read it and it is dense. It really shouldn’t be so [...]
A summary of Yoel Rak’s talk at the last month meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Vancouver, Canada has surfaced in a National Geographic news article from several days ago. Yoel Rak and William Hylander analyzed the anatomy of the Neandertal face and inferred what that coulda meant as far as Neandertal dietary behavior. [...]
Scientific American has a news piece explaining the implications of one of the new studies on the human genome that I reported on last week. In a nutshell, the news piece explains how the identification of 250 new regions throughout the genome impacts the current human reference genome… raising concerns that reference genome may be [...]
The press is running some mouth watering news on an upcoming Nature paper that provides ‘a new, simplified family tree of humanity.’ I’m really interested in this topic, especially figuring out just how bushy our phylogeny is. See, there has been what I consider misguided movement growing within hominin systematics. One where features from a [...]
In brief, Science has published three news pieces that you maybe interested. They are all reports of what was presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting a couple weeks ago. The first, “Snapshots From the Meeting,” is a summary of the conference, where Ann Gibbons and Elizabeth Colutta discuss, ‘the evolution of gliding, [...]
Two similar papers published the latest issues of Nature and Genome Research do high-resolution analyses of the structure of the human genome. They differ in methodology, but have some cool conclusions. The Nature paper, “Mapping and sequencing of structural variation from eight human genomes,” created libraries of 4 African, 2 Asian, and 2 European genomes. [...]
A brand new study in the open access journal PLoS One reports on the results of an analysis of the microwear on the teeth of Paranthropus boisei (also known as Australopithecus boisei). The results contest what we’ve all along assumed was going on with the form and the function of these robust australopithecine teeth. I [...]
