Beyond bones & stones
An Oxford University team of two led by Tamás Dávid-Barrett published an open access paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B testing the social brain hypothesis. In a nutshell, the social brain hypothesis was created by the other author of this paper, Robin Dunbar, who theorized in 1993 with anthropologist Leslie Aiello, that intelligence among humans is... Continue Reading →
Today's issue of Nature has a brief essay on the role of language in cultural evolution. The authors touch up on a lot basics, such as anatomical localization of brain activity related to language and tool making, FOXP2, and how language has helped humans pass on cultural information more effectively than any other form of... Continue Reading →
A couple days ago, press release agencies like EurekAlert! and ScienceDaily ran some anthropology blips that was not picked up by major news sources. So if you don't follow them you would have missed out on this news. In a nutshell, Wu Xiujie, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy... Continue Reading →
A new paper in the open access journal PLoS Biology describes a new way to model the human brain using diffusion spectrum imaging. Since we're in the omics age of science, you shouldn't be surprised that this map is dubbed the connectome. The semantics of the connectome is similar to genome, proteome, metabalome, transcriptome --... Continue Reading →
Despite the fact that I've seen some really impactful primate related research lately, I've completely neglected updating Primatology.net with it. I can't believe it has been almost three months since I've posted there! I should really resume posting there. Actually, I was considering putting up this following blog post over there, since it has to... Continue Reading →
Charles Limb and Allen Braun at Johns Hopkins have recently published a study on the internal characteristics and functions of improvisation in music. The study, "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation," uses a functional MRI to look at the neural activity of Jazz musicians, specifically pianists, during improvisation. Several... Continue Reading →
Dopamine is a fundamental neurotransmitter and hormone. You may know it as one of the neurotransmitters associated with the limbic system, being released during eating and sex, which causes a sensation of pleasure. But it is more than just a hedonistic chemical, actually many of the functions of the brain are dependent on dopamine. Memory,... Continue Reading →
That new paper on PCNT's role in microcephaly I just covered this afternoon has really sparked my interests. I have done a bit more digging around and came across another very recent paper, published about two weeks ago in Nature Genetics on PCNT's role in inducing Seckel syndrome when it is nonfunctional. From OMIM, Seckel... Continue Reading →
The New York Times is running a profile of Ralph Holloway, a paleoanthropologist that specializes in brain evolution, one of my favorite subtopics in anthropology. The piece is written by Michael Balter, and it overviews his current project research with Homo floresiensis. In a nutshell, Holloway is on the fence about whether or not Homo... Continue Reading →
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