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 readingTag: human evolution
Diet 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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