A little while back I put up a brief post about Steve Jones’ hypothesis that human evolution is slowing. At the time this proposal was on the receiving end of a fair bit of critical discussion on various science blogs. Now here’s an article by Benjamin Phelan, in Seed magazine, that suggests that the reverse is true […]
Continue readingThe other day I mentioned I was reading Steve Jones’ book, Coral. He’s a good writer & I’ve enjoyed Coral, just as I’ve enjoyed most of his other books (although The single helix didn’t quite work so well for me). Anyway, yesterday a friend sent me a link to a report about a talk Jones had given – […]
Continue readingWhen Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools, it became clear that here was yet another example of the continuum between humans and non-human primates. Use and manufacture of tools was not something that distinguished humans from their close relatives, & chimps could be said to have a form of culture. Now here’s a paper that […]
Continue readingIn the LA Times there’s a story about using X-rays of bones to estimate people’s age. The reporter’s talking about the potential for this technique to obtain fairly accurate ages for those tiny, brilliant, and possibly under-age Chinese gymnasts from the 2008 Olympics. But the underlying anatomical and developmental data have been applied to some equally problematic, but […]
Continue readingYour brain is an energy-hungry organ – even when you’re resting, it can use up to 25% of available energy (chimp brains use about 8%: Gibbons, 2007). In other words, the running costs of a large brain are quite high. And yet humans, with their large brains, take in about the same number of calories […]
Continue readingWhen I was at high school, mumblety-mumble years ago, the accepted wisdom was that modern humans and Neandertals were sub-species in the same genus: Homo sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neandertalensis. That changed, to the view that they were probably separate species, with analyses of new fossil finds. More recently, molecular biology techniques have enabled researchers to compare sapiens & […]
Continue readingThere's been quite a lot of conjecture, over the years, about what our early ancestors ate. Much of the evidence has been indirect: size of teeth, size of chewing muscles (which can be estimated from measurements of the places where muscles attach to the skull), ridges & crests on the skull, & so on. Teeth […]
Continue readingWe know from fossil evidence that Neanderthals evolved in Europe around 400,000 years ago, and later (~150,000 years ago) spread into western Asia, before disappearing from all areas in their range about 30,000 years ago. However, it can sometimes be quite hard to be certain whether or not a fossil is from a Neanderthal, which […]
Continue readingLast month I asked the following question: In 2006 scientists announced the discovery of a new hominin fossil: a juvenile Australopithecus afarensis. The media quickly dubbed it "Lucy's child" (well, it was a catchy name, even though the underlying implied relationship had no evidence to support it!). So, tell me, how could scientists be sure that this individual […]
Continue readingEver since its fossil remains were discovered, scientists have wondered about the place of Orrorin tugenensis and its place in our family tree. Was it bipedal? And where were its closest relatives? One controversial suggestion was that Orrorin was directly ancestral to our own genus – leaving the australopiths completely out in the cold.
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