Thanks to Carl at A Hot Cup of Joe for passing this along – if you navigate to the CV page of Milford H. Wolpoff, you’ll find a number of freely accessible (PDF) papers, many or indeed all of which should be of interest to readers here. They span a time frame of more than [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Physical Anthropology’
November 4, 2009
Long Toes & Short Ankles Help Sprinters Accelerate Faster
The Journal of Experimental Biology has published an interesting paper about some unique features in sprinters: longer toes and shorter ankle joints. The only one flaw is that their sample size is limited, they only compared 12 collegiate sprinters with 12 non-athletes of the same height. Regardless, from a physical anthropological point of view, this [...]
November 1, 2009
Robin McKie Of The Observer Reviews 3 Books On Human Evolution
Ciarán Brewster, a.k.a. adhominin, just tweeted about three book reviews. The reviews, written by Robin McKie of The Observer, cover recent books on cooking and human evolution which were written by some pretty big names in anthropology:
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
Wrangham’s thesis is that the advent of cooking reduced [...]
October 30, 2009
A Cave Shut by Closed Minds? La Carihuela Neanderthals vs. the Junta
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 [...]
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 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 1, 2009
Science Publishes 11 Papers On Ardipithecus ramidus
There’s more than 11 citations here, but the others are associated news and media covered by Science. They’ve even dedicated a special issue to it. Very impressive thorough volume of information. Now you have a some understanding why it took so long to publish… Anyways get to reading.
News Focus
Gibbons, A. (2009). A New Kind of [...]
October 1, 2009
The 4.4-Million-Year-Old Ardipithecus ramidus
I want to be the first to break news to you that Science has published White’s contentious 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus! I caught news of the release on the internet. The link is not live yet, but when it is I’ll fill you in.
Owen Lovejoy is one of the authors of the paper, and he says [...]
September 30, 2009
A Mammalian Lost World in Southwest Europe During the Late Pliocene – PLoS ONE
There’s a very interesting new paper, through which prospective readers are free to roam and explore at will, by Alfonso Arribas et al, in which the site of Fonelas, Granada in southern Spain is described, where excavations have revealed that around 1.8 million years ago, a vast suite of mammalian fauna from Asia, Europe and [...]
September 23, 2009
Free Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins Special Feature In PNAS
The latest issue of the Proceedings from the National Academy of Science journal hosts a Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins special feature for free online. I recommend you check it out.
Here’s a line up of the content:
Editorial by Richard G. Klein, “Darwin and the recent African origin of modern humans.”
Perspective by Ian Tattersall, “Human [...]
