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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

paleoecology

  • Crowdsourcing paleoecology

    Mon, 2013-01-07 23:55 -- John Hawks

    Jacqueline Gill reports on a conference with a provocative organization: "Crowd-sourcing the 50 most pressing questions in paleoecology".

    Conference attendees (of which I believe were around 60) were emailed the questions in advance, and asked to narrow them down to each of our own individual top fifty, as well as rank which subgroups we were most interested in– I ended up in Biodiversity Through Time. Every subgroup had a scribe (to record information about which questions were particularly contentious, or when concerns or points were raised), a chair, and a co-chair (for organizational and time-keeping purposes). Each subgroup was given dozens of questions, organized into loose themes, that we had to narrow down to twenty in the first day. This process was much more complex that it initially sounds– after an initial round of voting, there was a considerable amount of discussion, word-smithing, and merging of questions.

    What a neat idea -- a conference with a real agenda and public product at the end of it. Like paleoanthropology, paleoecology is a field where data are hard to obtain and require very specialized analytical methods. Getting the public involved in the science means finding ways to get people engaged in the questions and hypothesis formation. A ranking of important questions is a great idea, and may help to shape granting priorities.

    Tags: 
    open science
    paleoecology
    meetings

  • Ardipithecus backlash begins

    Thu, 2010-05-27 17:57 -- John Hawks

    John Noble Wilford reports in the NY Times on today's technical comments that challenge various aspects of the interpretation of Ardipithecus.

    Thure Cerling and colleagues argue that Ardi's paleoenvironment was not as wooded as White and colleagues (2009) had claimed.

    Esteban Sarmiento argues that Ardipithecus wasn't a hominin, in part because of its features, in part because the molecular clock places the human-chimpanzee divergence between 3 and 5 million years ago, too young for the genus to be on our lineage.

    I'll write more later on the Sarmiento comment and White and colleagues' reply. For now, I thought I'd point to these initial skeptical takes on the Ardipithecus story.

    Oh, with some pride I'll point out that my readers were appraised of many of these issues the week of the announcement and thereafter. I discussed the molecular clock issue at some length ("Reviewing the clock, and phylogenomics"), and of course my Ardipithecus FAQ laid out most of the anatomy. The pelvis got attention in my post "The Ardipithecus pelvis", where I was the first to detail the shocking absence of Oreopithecus from the published analysis.

    Does this mean that it has taken Science and the NY Times eight months to catch up to a blog? Well, they're doing different things than I do here, so it's not a fair comparison.

    Tags: 
    Ardipithecus
    Tim White
    Aramis
    early hominids
    paleoecology
    Pliocene

  • Putting down roots

    Tue, 2009-04-21 00:06 -- John Hawks

    Last year, I reported on the strontium isotope study that showed that the Lakonis Greek Neandertal individual died at least 20 km from the place he was raised.

    The best comment, by Clive Finlayson, made the post's title: "We're talking about humans, not trees." As in, what's the big deal? If Neandertals were bears, wolves, raccoons, deer, or almost any other large Palearctic mammal, a dispersal distance of 20 km would be completely unremarkable.

    Well, I said at the time that Neandertal mobility is a controversial topic. Now in the early bin at Journal of Archaeological Science is a critique of the paper that did the isotope work.

    The criticism by Nowell and Horstwood is basically methodological -- they argue for drilling the teeth instead of laser ablation. In that respect, the critique (and the response by Richards and colleagues) are inside baseball as far as I'm concerned -- each has reasons for supporting their own line of isotope testing. The technical issues are important, and worth as many exchanges as it will take to air them.

    But I'm interested in the broader issue -- why should we be surprised if Neandertals moved? In one section of their critique, Nowell and Horstwood give reasons why the "migration model" proposed by Richards and colleagues may be in error. So there you have it -- "migration" across 20 km from the seashore to a cave is officially a surprising inference worthy of skepticism and doubt!

    References:

    Nowell GM, Horstwood MSA. 2009. Comments on Richards et al., Journal of Archaeological Science 35, 2008 ‘‘Strontium isotope evidence of Neanderthal mobility at the site of Lakonis, Greece using laser-ablation PIMMS’’. J Archaeol Sci (early online) doi:10.1016/j.jas.2009.01.019

    Richards M, Grimes V, Smith C, Smith T, Harvati K, Hublin J-J, Karkanas P, Panagopoulou E. 2009. Response to Nowell and Horstwood (2009). J Archaeol Sci (early online) doi:10.1016/j.jas.2009.03.009

    Tags: 
    paleoecology
    diet
    Neandertals
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.