Beyond bones & stones
When it comes to the evolution of the human brain, size isn't everything. In fact, shape is a huge determinant. A new study from Hawks in PNAS suggests that morphology may proceeded size in the evolution of hominin brains. Hawks and team performed a comparative anatomy study of Homo and Australopithecus brains based on endocasts. Endocasts... Continue Reading →
Well this is kind of embarrassing but inconsequential... Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the AMNH began a reconstruction of Lucy with help from Scott Williams from NYU and noticed that one of the vertebra fragments is smaller than the other! A comparative study to other animal's vertebrae show that it more closely resembles a baboon's vertebrae. This... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
That is what University of Liverpool's Emma Nelson probably would have said if she were to meet our hominan ancestors in person. Known to hold true in anthropoids (humans, apes and monkeys), the index (second digit) to ring (fourth digit) fingers ratio or 2D:4D is an indication of how much an individual were exposed to... Continue Reading →
Speaking of the Johansons and fossils ... Earlier this year, I've blogged about the 2009 Human Evolution Leakey Symposium at Stony Brook that I went to. For more about that blog post, click here. The symposium, entitled "Hobbit in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution" can now be streamed live through the Stony Brook... Continue Reading →
Skull of LB1 (Homo floresiensis, or the hobbit) Photo from Science Museum New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy... Continue Reading →
Bergmann's rule is an observation that body mass of endotherms increases with altitude and colder climate. Neandertals fit this rule, their barrel chests and wide hips, indicate they had large bodies, and thus smaller surface area relative to their body mass. This feature made them comparatively inefficient at radiating their body heat off into the... Continue Reading →
What you may call the hip or pelvis is actually formed by the joining of ilia, ischia, pubis bones to the sacrum and the coccyx. The shape of the human pelvis is unique amongst primates and part of the complex of anatomical changes which allow us for bipedal motility. Between males and females, the pelvis... Continue Reading →
Michelle Glantz, Sheela Athreya, and Terrence Ritzman have taken up yet another a reassessment of Teshik-Tash Neandertal child in the latest issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. They've published the paper under the title, "Is Central Asia the Eastern Outpost of the Neandertal Range? A Reassessment of the Teshik-Tash Child." The child, Teshik-Tash... Continue Reading →
Pinpointing when language became a prevalent trait during human evolution has been tricky. Last fall we read a paper which documented that Neandertals have the same FOXP2 sequence as modern humans. FOXP2 is a transcription factor associated with language. Two recent papers have shown that chimpanzees and humans have very similar structures in the brain... Continue Reading →
