Seven Million Years of Human Evolution
This fascinating visual presentation from the American Museum of Natural History outlines what we know about human evolution by combining …
Author Archives: Kambiz Kamrani
How did the Eastern Island Maoi Get 13-Ton Hats
One of my interests in the peopling of the Americas are the Easter Island maoi statues made by the Rapanui …
Wars Explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck
A new paper in Nature Communications documents a strange bottleneck event occurring about 7,000 years ago, where the genetic diversity …
The Presence of the Frontal Opercula in Homo naledi
When it comes to the evolution of the human brain, size isn’t everything. In fact, shape is a huge determinant. …
First Native American Population Was Just Around 250 People
No one knows exactly the population of Native Americans when contact with Europeans occured. There are some estimates claiming there …
Horse-riding Huns & Mongols Spread Hepatitis B, Plague into the Western Eurasia and Replaced Scythians
A very cool series of three studies were published several days ago in Science and Nature that I just have …
Growing ‘Mini-Brains’ With Neanderthal DNA
Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany wants to …
Someone Butchered a Rhino in the Philippines 700,000 Years Ago, But Who?
Yesterday, Nature published an alarming find of butchered rhinoceros remains from the Kalinga site in the Cagayan Valley on Luzon in the …
The 550 Year Old Chimú Site in Las Llamas, Peru Is World’s Largest Child Sacrifice Site
The pre-Columbian burial site of the Chimú civilization known as Las Llamas, in northern Peru contains the skeletons of 140 …
A Modern Human Genetic Adaptation for Diving
The Bajau people of Indonesia are known as “Sea Nomads,” because we’ve known that for thousands of years they live …
