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 readingdating plant domestication
Category: human evolution
Using 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 […]
Continue readingNew paper on floresiensis
Ever since the 'hobbits' (Homo floresiensis) were discovered in 2003, on the Indonesian island of Flores, there has been an on-going debate about their exact relationship with our own species. One interpretation of the fossils sees them as members of our own species, with the most complete individual (LB1) having suffered from microcephaly (ie an abnormally small […]
Continue readingDiet and your genes
Modern molecular biology has allowed us to look ever more closely into the genetic changes associated with human evolution. A recent research project used this technology to examine a possible relationship between diet and genome.
Continue readingmarathon man, part deux
Possession of an Achilles tendon is only one of the things that sets humans up for endurance running. Bramble & Lieberman (2004) note that long-distance running requires a whole suite of adaptations for skeletal strength, stabilisation, thermoregulation, and energetics. I'll summarise some of their comments here.
Continue readingmarathon man?
I was looking through the SciTech Daily website (a good place to go for new reading in a whole range of science areas) when I saw the link to an article on the evolution of running in Homo. Followed it, read the article – & thought, this is really interesting.
Continue readingQuestion: are humans still evolving?
Here’s a question to consider: are humans still evolving? What sort of evidence could we use to answer this question? We do tend to view evolution as something that happened in the past, and see the study of evolution as a ‘historical’ science. But nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution is an […]
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