Beyond bones & stones
There are many different processes that alter allele frequencies. The most commonly understood concept is Natural Selection. But others such as drift and Founder effects also play an evolutionary role. This is seen in the Out of Africa model of human evolution. As modern humans branched out of Africa and into footholds in Asia and... Continue Reading →
A study published about two days ago in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents the genomes of four prehistoric Irish individuals: a Neolithic woman (3,343 – 3,020 BC) from a tomb in Ballynahatty near Belfast, and three Early Bronze Age men (2,026 – 1,534 BC) from a cist burial in Rathlin Island. The results have... Continue Reading →
Currently, the human population growth is about 1% per year. Prehistoric human population growth, from beginning of the end of the Ice Age was just 0.04% annually until about 200 years ago, when a number of factors led to higher growth rates, such as modern medicine. We have been taught that the agricultural revolution increased... Continue Reading →
Tattoos are becoming ubiquitous. The art of tattooing is ancient, but when it began is unknown. Written records date the art of tattooing back to fifth-century B.C. in Greece—and maybe centuries earlier in China. It is hard to ever know how old tattoos are. A paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports concludes that the Chinchorro... Continue Reading →
Analysis of a 14,000 year-old partial human femur found in 1989 from the Maludong (Red Deer) Cave in the Yunnan, Southwest China states that the femur looks like that of early Homo erectus and H. habilis... Way more archaic in morphology than the dating implies. The full paper has been published in PLoS One. In 2012 the... Continue Reading →
A new study in Cell Research,suggests dogs were domesticated in Southeast Asia. The team sequenced the entire genomes of 12 gray wolves, 27 dogs indigenous to Asia and Africa and a collection of 19 diverse breeds from across the globe. Their analysis reveals that there was two phases of dog domestication. Firstly, there was on began in... Continue Reading →
Researchers from Duke University have published a paper in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology. They scoured the scientific literature and compiled a database of sleeping patterns across hundreds of mammals including 21 species of primates -- from baboons and lemurs to orangutans, chimpanzees and people. They then used statistical techniques to account for each species’ position... Continue Reading →
Circular burial pits like the one shown above were common during the Neolithic period in Central and Western Europe some 6,500 to 5,500 years ago. But rarely do graves from this time hint at so much brutality. This one, a 6.5 foot (2 meter) deep circular pit excavated in Bergheim, France, includes several complete human... Continue Reading →
A series of detailed reports on the Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany which is best known for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden spear findings have been published online in the Journal of Human Evolution. Altogether, they present a picture of groups of prehistoric hunters who sojourned at sites in the Schöningen area... Continue Reading →
A new open access paper in Nature Communications, "Ontogeny of the Maxilla in Neanderthals and their Ancestors," describes for the first time the developmental processes that differentiate Neanderthal facial skeletons from those of modern humans. As may known humans and Neandertals have different faces but recent advances in ancient genetics have brought to light the... Continue Reading →
