A week or so back, one of the weekend papers ran a story on just how many beers someone needed to drink before they’d be legally too drunk to drive. The Significant Other & I were staggered to find that the answer was, A Lot. (Around 9, as I recall.) Speaking for myself, about 2 […]
Continue readingTag: human evolution
our lives with dogs, & other interesting reading
I have a dog. As a result, papers to do with dogs tend to catch my eye 🙂 On his blog Neuroanthropology, Greg Downey reviews an upcoming book by Pat Shipman and discusses humanity’s long relationship with canines. Beginning with the point that "the first animals domesticated were not food sources, but a fellow predator and […]
Continue readinganother early hominin specimen, & other things to read
I’m catching up on my reading of other people’s blogs, so here are some interesting posts to share with you. At Laelaps Brian Switek has commented on the latest fossil hominin find. Dubbed ‘Kadanuumuu’ (or ‘Big Man’), this is a partial Australopithecus afarensis skeleton.Kadanuumuu was much larger than the more familiar (& more recent) ‘Lucy’, & because […]
Continue readingthe genetics of lactase persistence
Some time ago now I wrote about lactose intolerance in humans & the domestication of cattle. Last year the Schol Bio exam included a question that looked more deeply into lactase non-persistence (which is the normal genetic condition: around 70% of all adults can’t digest the milk sugar lactose because the gene coding for the […]
Continue readingiconography of evolution
You’re probably fairly familiar with some of the iconography associated with human evolution. Here’s a frequently-used image: and there’s another similar one, which uses a visual joke to make a serious point about where dietary habits in the West may lead us.
Continue readingsequencing the neandertal genome
I’ve had this one in my ‘must write about’ file for a little while: in the May 7th edition of Science, a large research team announced that they’d produced a draft sequence of Neandertal DNA (Green et al. 2010). Using DNA from 3 individual Neadertals, the multi-institutional team managed to decipher more than 4 billion nucleotides from […]
Continue readinganother missing link…
This morning’s NZ Herald carried a story from the UK Telegraph under the headline "Child’s skeleton missing link to man’s ape-like forebears.’ It could have been worse: the Telegraph‘s headline was ‘Missing link between man & apes found’ (sigh). I read the article & have to confess a certain amount of disappointment – because this seems to be […]
Continue readinga new hominin from siberia?
The latest edition of Nature carries an item that raises the possibility of another new – & recent – new hominin species, this time from Siberia (Krasuse et al., 2010). A few years ago, when the story about Homo floresiensis first broke, I remember commenting to my classes that it was probably only a matter of time until […]
Continue readingknuckle-walking – not an ancestral trait in humans
After writing about ‘Ardi’, I remembered that this wasn’t the only paper I’d read recently suggesting that our ancestors were not knucklewalkers and that knuckle-walking must have evolved independently in the gorilla & chimp lineages. (We can say this because, if the last common ancestor of chimps & humans didn’t get around by knuckle-walking, then […]
Continue readingthe ‘missing link’ disproved?
A friend of mine’s sent me an item from National Geographic with the headline ‘Oldest "human" skeleton found – disproves "missing link"’. (Thanks, Heather!) The story itself is based on the publication this week of a series of papers describing aspects of Ardipithecus ramidus, & they make extremely interesting reading. But before I start talking about them, […]
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