Human Evolution
gregladen | June 7, 2017You've heard to story. I'm here to give you a little context.
A pretty typical early handaxe, made by a Homo erectus. This was a big flake made from a bigger rock. The big flake was subsequently flaked to make this handaxe. The word "handaxe" can be spelled about nine different ways.
But in case you haven't heard the story, this is from the press release which is, so far, the only information generally available:
New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by…
gregladen | May 9, 2017You've heard of Homo naledi, the strange "human ancestor" (really, a cousin) found a while back in South Africa. There were many skeletal remains in a cave, in the kind of shape you'd expect if they had crawled into the cave and died there, not much disturbed. They look enough like other members of our genus, Homo, to be called Homo, but if we assume that increase in brain size is the hallmark of our species, they seem to be an early grade.
Over the last ten years, we have come to appreciate the fact that our genus may have differentiated into multiple species that did not have a large brain…
gregladen | March 16, 2017Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind is a new book on cultural evolution in humans from a biological perspective.
This is an interesting book and a good book, and I recommend it, but I need to add a strong caveat. The author could have made a more compelling argument had he more carefully studied and used some of the prior work that makes a similar argument. He strangely cites Terry Deacon in two places (once as a psychologist, incorrectly) for work Deacon has done, but seems to ignore Deacon's key thesis, which is pretty much the same as Laland's key thesis. (See:…
gregladen | July 15, 2016You can read this book review, or you can just go HERE and listen to our interview with author Christie Wilcox. I promise you in advance that you will want to read her book!
But, if you want to read the book review, here it is...
Did you ever do anything that hurt, then you had to do it again and you knew it would still hurt, and you didn't like that? Like getting your teeth cleaned, or licking a nine volt battery. OK, maybe you didn't have to lick the nine volt battery, but you get my point.
When I was working in the Ituri Forest, in the Congo, taking a walk in the forest was one of…
gregladen | February 15, 2016I have often made the argument that religiosity, a personal belief in god, spirits, the supernatural, etc., would emerge in human societies on its own if it wasn't there already.
Imagine taking an entire generation of people in a geographically isolated region, and wiping out their memory of religion, and also, removing all references to religion that they might ever encounter. They would be religion free for a while, maybe even for a number of generations, but eventually, they would reinvent it.
Everybody has a theory of why religion exists, what purposes it serves, etc. etc. Until proven…
gregladen | January 26, 2016The Great Human Race is a new production of National Geographic, in three parts. I recently viewed the first episode, "Dawn" which comes with this description:
All people can trace their roots to the savanna of East Africa, the home of one of the first members of the human species -- Homo habilis. Archaeologist Bill Schindler and survival instructor Cat Bigney face what early man did as they work together to survive in the wild savanna just as these primitive people did 2.6 million years ago -- without any weapons or fire. But they soon find that living like our ancestors is harder than…
gregladen | November 13, 2015Years ago I proposed a theory (not anywhere in print, just in seminars and talks) that went roughly like this. Humans hunt. Dogs hunt. Prey animals get hunted. Each species (or set of species) has a number of characteristics such as the ability to stalk, track, kill, run away, form herds, etc. Now imagine a landscape with humans, wolves, and game animals all carrying out these behaviors, facilitated with various physical traits. Then, go back to the drawing board and redesign the system.
The hunting abilities of humans and dogs, the tendency of game animals to herd up or take other…
gregladen | September 18, 2015There is a new paper in Science linking genetic variation in people living in Greenland with long term selection for managing a marine-oriented diet, affecting stature, weight, and probably, physiological processing of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs).
The vast majority of the variation we seen in stature (height) among humans is not genetic. That is a fact hard to swallow by so many of us who were told in biology class that "height is a complex genetic trait with many genes affecting it." It also seems wrong because the classic examples of variation in stature, the Pygmies of…
gregladen | September 2, 2015Jonathan Marks' new book is called "Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution"
I've got to tell you that when I first saw the title of this book, the letters played in my head a bit. Tails of the Ex-Apes. That would be funny because apes don't have tails. Or Tales of the Exapes. Pronounced as you wish. Perhaps in an Aztec accent.
Anyway...
Jon Marks is a colleague and a friend from way back. He is a biological anthropologist who has engaged in critical study of central biological themes, such as genetics, and he's said a few things about race. He wears black, often does…
gregladen | January 27, 2015A new early human fossil has been reported, recovered from the seabed near Taiwan. We are calling it Penghu 1.
Simply put, it is the lower right jaw of a hominid (hominine) that most resembles either a form of Homo erectus or Archaic Homo sapiens (kin to, but not, Neanderthal). Teeth are fairly useful for categorizing hominids into groups that can be thought of as species. This hominid does not look like modern humans (teeth are way too big and the enamel is not right). It does not look like African Homo ergaster or Asian Homo erectus. It does not look like Neanderthal or so called…
gregladen | December 1, 2013Nature editor and author Henry Gee has produced his Christmas list in which he describes his three wishes as an editor at a scientific journal; he enumerates the scientific discoveries that sit at the top of his professional "bucket list."
Henry Gee. Not a Leprechaun.
I started to write a comment on Henry's blog post, here, but it turned into a blog post of my own, here:
Henry: As you know, I address in a fictional context in "Search for Sungudogo" (now only 99 cents on Amazon) all three of your wishes, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe, the discovery of intelligent life…
gregladen | November 24, 2013Catching Fire is apparently a very popular book and/or movie that everyone is very excited about. But Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is a different a book about some interesting research I was involved in about the origin of our genus, Homo.
You can pick up a copy of our paper on this page. We call it "The Cooking Hypothesis." The basic idea can be summarized with these points:
1) Cooking food transformed human ecology. Many potential foods in the environment can't be consumed by humans (or apes in general) without cooking. But adding cooking to our species-specific technology,…
gregladen | July 17, 2013There is now a video and a transcript of the Evolutionary Psychology Panel at CONvergence 2013. Many of you, when you watch this, will become enraged at things said by the panelists. Rumors of what was said had already been spread around on the internet and as I understand it Jerry Coyne and Stephen Pinker have already become enraged. Or maybe the loved it. I'm not sure.
If you want me to respond to any of your enraged rage regarding anything that was said, or for that matter, if you have anything at all ... negative, positive, informative, whatever ... to contribute to the conversation…
gregladen | May 24, 2013There are bacteria that use Iron (and other elements) to make tiny magnets that they carry around so they don't get lost. (I anthropomorphize slightly.) There are isotopes of Iron that are not of the Earth, but are found only elsewhere in the universe.
Suppose an event happened elsewhere and spewed some of that cosmic Iron isotope, say Fe-60, onto the earth, and the bacteria who were busy making their tiny compasses at that time used some of it. Then the bacteria died and were trapped inlayers in seafloor sediment and later examined by scientists looking for ... well, looking for…
gregladen | April 10, 2013A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the question of penis size and female preference in humans. The study involved making a set of 3D models of human males of various relative body sizes, and fitting them out with various size flaccid penises. These were shown to a sample of Australian women to get their reactions.
The assumption of this study is that at some time in the past humans did not wear clothing, so that information about penis size in men would be available to women who could observe flaccid penises and then choose sexual…
gregladen | January 30, 2013Common misconceptions and unproven assumptions about the aquatic ape theory
A Guest Post by Marc Verhaegen
*2013 m_verhaegen@skynet.be
It is often assumed that Alister Hardy’s and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape theory (AAT) suggests that more than 5 Ma (million years ago) there was a semi-aquatic phase in our past (explaining e.g. human fur loss, fatness and upright bipedalism), which was followed by a savanna phase on the African plains. In 2011, AAT proponents published an eBook, Was Man more aquatic in the past?, which showed a rather different picture of AAT. Here I very briefly describe my…
gregladen | January 9, 2013The Hobbit is a book by JRR Tolkien, a just released blockbuster movie, and a hominid from Indonesia. Here, we are speaking about the hominid from Indonesia.
A while back I wrote a review of a book by Dean Falk, for American Scientist. You can find that review here, and you can find a different review of the same book here on my blog.
Falk's book is about endocasts and brains her area of specialty and she goes into the study of two specific hominids in particular, Taung, and LB1. Taung (pronunced "Tah oong," roughly) is the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, the first described…
gregladen | January 6, 2013People who do a lot of field work end up with interesting stories to tell, especially if the fieldwork is diverse and the conditions are adverse. Often, the sort of thing people want to know about is very different from the repertoire of available stories, but as long as the expectations of the audience is not too rigid, experienced fieldworkers in the various sciences that do field work make the best cocktail party extras.
I never met Jon Kalb, but we have a lot of colleagues in common. I first heard of him as one of the scientists on the same expedition that found the famous fossil "Lucy…
gregladen | January 6, 2013I just want to say that Huxley is pretty bad at swimming.
I quickly add, for a 3 year old human, he's pretty darn good at it. Amanda's family is very aquatic, as tends to happen when everyone spends several weeks per year (or longer) on the edge of a lake. They can all ski really well, they can all swim really well, etc. etc. So, very soon after Huxley was born, his grandfather started to bring him to age-appropriate swimming lessons. He is now 37 months old and has been to a swimming lesson almost every week. In addition to to that, Amanda brings him to the pool pretty close to once a…
gregladen | January 5, 2013Following on discussion arising from this post, here is a revised discussion of throwing in human evolution.
The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists.
Here I want to do two separate but related things. I want to discuss certain aspects of the nature of fieldwork in…