A few days ago now there was a splash of excitement in the newspapers: a research team had announced that they’d sequenced the Neandertal genome. (They didn’t use exclamation marks but you could imagine them there.) I thought at the time that it sounded interesting, but it was a bit unusual that the announcement preceded […]
Continue readingCategory: human evolution
complete neanderthal mtDNA sequenced
Grump grumpity grump – a headline like that & we don’t have full access to the journal (only up to a year ago)…. But anyway – on The Panda’s Thumb there’s a report of a research project which has achieved the full Neandertal mitochondrial DNA sequence. TPT quotes a conclusion from the summary of the paper: […]
Continue readingbreaking the species barrier
I’ve just stumbled across a provocative – & thought-provoking – essay by Richard Dawkins. It caught my attention because I’m occasionally asked if there’s ever been a chimp-human hybrid. (The answer, so far, is ‘no’ – well, not since the two species diverged around 6 million years ago.) To Dawkins, the creation of such a […]
Continue readinghow do we recognise ‘culture’?
The ‘human evolution’ achievement standard expects you to be able to discuss trends in cultural evolution. You need to be aware of evidence relating to: use of tools (stone, wood, bone), fire, shelter, clothing, abstract thought (communication, language, art), food-gathering, and domestication of plants & animals. The earliest evidence for culture is the presence of stone tools, […]
Continue readingmore on copy-number variations in chimps & humans
A little while ago now I wrote about the creationist take on a recent paper looking at chimp/human genetics – more specifically, copy-number variations in particular gene sequences. I intended to read the original paper & blog about it, because the Sensuous Curmudgeon made it sound so interesting. So you may imagine that I was just […]
Continue readingan interesting post on the dmanisi fossils
A while ago now I wrote something on the Dmanisi fossils – the remains of a few individuals that suggest that Homo erectus spread relatively quickly through Eurasia after leaving Africa. I’ve just come across an interesting post on the Panda’s Thumb that I thought makes a good follow-up. Read it & see what you think.
Continue readingthe natural history of the eye
Well, here I am back in the office again. The conference was great – but it was on assessment in the tertiary education system: not something you want to hear about here 🙂 But during a break in the proceedings I slipped out & investigated the Lambton Quay bookshops… (Dangerous things, bookshops; I could easily […]
Continue readinghuman-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readingancient shaman’s burial site
This one’s really hot off the press – & even then lots of people have beaten me to it! Oh well. In the latest issue of PNAS, Leore Grosman & her colleagues describe the ornate & unusual burial of an elderly woman who lived 12,000 years ago in what is now Israel.
Continue readingvolcanic eruptions & human bottlenecks
We know, from looking at the amount of genetic variation in the global human population, that it went through a fairly pronounced bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This has been variously attributed to the founder effect, with only small populations moving out of Africa into Europe & Eurasia, and to the devastating consequences of the […]
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