Beyond bones & stones
Ian Towle of John Moores University and colleagues published an interesting paper in the International Journal of Paleopathology that illuminates early hominins had similar dental issues as we do now. Dental erosion from brushing too vigorously as well as fizzy drinks, fruit juice, wine, and other acidic food and drink can leave shallow, shiny, lesions... Continue Reading →
A lot of discussion is constantly had about what is the healthiest diet; low fat or low carb. An interesting study was published in the Lancet recently where anthropologists teamed with cardiologists to study cardiac health of Amazon's Tsimane. The Tsimane are Bolivian. They live off and around the Maniqui River located in the Amazon... Continue Reading →
UC Berkeley Integrative Biologist, Rasmus Nielsen and his colleagues, published a fascinating study in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution looking at hundreds of human genomes and the relative diets. They were even able to include the genomes of 101 Europeans from 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age as well as Neanderthals and Denisovan genes. The authors... Continue Reading →
Razib has responded to my disagreement with his statement that any given hunter-gatherer infant is far more likely to reach reproductive age than any given offspring of peasants. And he's confident with his standing. I've done some reviewing of the literature and I still think that the probability that a child of an agriculturalist will... Continue Reading →
Razib has chimed in on the latest piece of research to come from John Lukacs, "Fertility and Agriculture Accentuate Sex Differences in Dental Caries Rates," published in Current Anthropology. Throughout time, women have had more cavities on average than men. I've explained how cavities are formed in a previous post. Diet change and sexual division... Continue Reading →
Zooarchaeology is an anthropological sub-discipline which focuses on studying animal remains from archaeological sites. Animal remains can tell us a lot of about prehistoric peoples' diets and behavioral tendencies as well as the ecological makeup of the area. A new PNAS paper investigates the zooarchaeological record of two Neandertal sites in Gibraltar, Vanguard and Gorham's... Continue Reading →
In the open access paper, "Metabolic changes in schizophrenia and human brain evolution," Phillipp Khaitovich and team have compared the gene expression and metabolite concentrations in the healthy human brain to a schizophrenic brain. Their results indicate that the biggest differences between a normally functioning brain and an unhealthy one was in 9 genes and... Continue Reading →
A summary of Yoel Rak's talk at the last month meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Vancouver, Canada has surfaced in a National Geographic news article from several days ago. Yoel Rak and William Hylander analyzed the anatomy of the Neandertal face and inferred what that coulda meant as far as Neandertal dietary behavior. Did... Continue Reading →
Last month's annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society hosted a talk by Amanda Henry, a graduate student at George Washington University. She analyzed the microfossils of plant material found in the dental plaque on Neandertal teeth from Shanidar, Iraq. What is dental plaque? Much to the chargin of dentists out there, the composition and origin... Continue Reading →
Even though I read the classic 1975 Science paper by Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson, where they demonstrated through comparative protein analysis, that chimpanzees and humans are genetically 99% identical, I was still shocked to read the results of the initial draft of the chimpanzee genome when it came out in September 2005. Like many... Continue Reading →
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