Here's something for your reading list: an excellent extended essay on how our view of human evolution, & of our place in the world, has changed over time. Enjoy!
Continue readingCategory: human evolution
evolution has shaped women’s spines! Really?
Last week the NZ Herald carried a story, based on a new scientific paper, about how evolution had affected the shape of women's spines, resulting in an adaptation for weight-bearing during pregnancy. The paper (Whitcome et al. 2007) describes how men & women differ in the shape of their lumbar vertebrae, and relates this to the weight gain […]
Continue readingfaces of our ancestors
I wish I'd found this page earlier – you might have found it interesting in preparing for your exams. It's a series of images pf reconstructed hominin faces, & a linking story about them. (There's actually a whole book about them – I bought myself a copy earlier this year & I'm enjoying dipping into […]
Continue readingThe ancient mariners
One of the 'themes' you need to think about, when studying human evolution, is dispersal – just how did human populations spread about the globe, and when did they do it? In September this year a group of scientists got to together to talk about how and when humans might have become seafarers.
Continue readingprimates’ closest living relatives?
Scientists have thought for a long time that tree shrews are the closest living relatives of primates. More recently, use of DNA data together with morphological comparisons suggested that colugos are also very closely related to apes, monkeys (& us). These so-called 'flying' lemurs use extensive flaps of loose skin, stretched between their outspread front and back […]
Continue readingmore on plant domestication
I remembered, after my last post, that there's an excellent book that puts domestication of plants and animals into a global perspective and asks, among other things, why it was europeans who got into building large overseas empires, not people from other parts of the world. It's Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond (1998), […]
Continue readingdating plant domestication
When did humans first domesticate plants? Well, humans living in what is now known as Turkey had domesticated wheat by 10,500 years ago. How can we be so sure of this date?
Continue readingUsing human evolution to illustrate patterns of evolution
Sometimes we think of human evolution as being distinct from the evolution of other animals. I think it important to remember that it's not, and that our own evolutionary history follows the same patterns, and is shaped by the same processes, as the history of all other living things.
Continue readingClimate change and human evolution
Models of human evolution give quite a bit of attention to the role that climate change may have played in the evolution and dispersal of hominin species, both ancient and modern. A study just published presents evidence of an extreme and prolonged drought in East Africa, spanning 135,000 – 75,000 years ago – the time when the Out […]
Continue readingHomo erectus – more variable than first thought
Perhaps the best-known fossil of Homo erectus is the one known as the Nariokotome boy (or Turkana boy) – a boy who, when he died at around 9 years old, already stood nearly 160cm tall. Members of this tall, long-legged species are generally regarded as being the first of our genus to move out of Africa […]
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