Louis Leakey on the failure of the stage model of human evolution
From Louis Leakey in 1965:
Recent Posts
Ancient genetic introgression between cave hyenas and spotted hyenas
I’ve been writing about ancient mixture between species for a long time now. Since the reporting of the first Neandertal genome in 2010, a lively field of an...
Brain-body allometry revisited across mammals
Humans today have much bigger brains than our close living relatives among the great apes. It used to be that scientists assumed that brain evolution followe...
Fossil profile: Zlatý kůň and the Neandertal heritage of early Upper Paleolithic Europeans
Two papers came out yesterday showing relatively recent Neandertal ancestry within the genomes of early Upper Paleolithic Europeans. The paper about Bacho Ki...
Fossil profile: Sangiran 31 and the exceptionally thick skulls of Homo erectus
We cannot interpret the entire fossil record by limiting our view to the most extreme specimens, yet sometimes extremes are instructive. Sangiran 31 has some...
Fossil profile: Skhūl 1 and the mixing of populations
The Mugharat es Skhūl is today quite a small cave or rock shelter in the side of the Nahal Me’arot, a wadi running from Mount Carmel, Israel. The archaeologi...
Fossil profile: AL 400-1 mandible and the curving line of human evolution
The jaws of ancient human relatives that we call “Australopithecus” show the problems of thinking about evolution as a straight line of gradual change.
Fossil profile: Guattari 1 and the history of mortuary archaeology
An opening to the Grotta Guattari was uncovered by workmen in 1939. In this hidden cave, they found a chamber with bones, which included the skull of a Neand...
Fossil profile: U.W. 101-258 and humeral torsion
The upper limbs of humans are different from those of living great apes in many ways, but one way in which they are fairly similar is the orientation of the ...
Fossil profile: BOU-VP-16/1 and mortuary practice
Some fossil hominin sites from the Middle and Late Pleistocene have an unusual overrepresentation of skulls compared to the rest of the skeleton. Anthropolog...
Fossil profile: Krapina 49 maxilla
Shovel-shaped incisors are a striking anatomical variant in many living people. The upper incisors of most people are gently curved or straight across, and t...
Fossil profile: KNM-WT 8556 mandible
Kenyanthropus platyops makes an interesting case study of species in the fossil hominin record. The name formally applies to only two fossils, which are the ...
Creationist guru of Muslim world convicted at trial as leader of ‘rape cult’
Fifteen years ago, the name Harun Yahya was known worldwide as maybe the foremost global source of creationist literature and teachings. A man in Turkey name...
How the lives of mothers matter to offspring survival in wild primates
A new research paper by Matthew Zipple and coworkers looks at the impact of maternal mortality on offspring survival across seven species of wild primates: “...
Link: The archaeology of Yellowstone
Smithsonian magazine has a feature article by Richard Grant describing the archaeology of Yellowstone National Park: “The Lost History of Yellowstone”. The s...
A new site extends the evidence of hominin behavior at Olduvai Gorge
Julio Mercader Florin is one of the authors of a study of a new excavation site at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and he has written an account for The Conversatio...
Link: Current thinking on the evolutionary history of menopause
The evolutionary history of menopause in humans has been one of the longest-standing areas of research interest in life history evolution. One of the big ide...
Link: Science behind the mRNA vaccines
A lot of people are reading the Wired story about the background of the messenger RNA (mRNA) science that underlies the new COVID-19 vaccines: “How mRNA went...
Fitness in hybrid baboons
It’s rare to have good data on fitness of individuals in wild populations of animals. It’s even more rare to have data on fitness of hybrid individuals in na...
A palimpsest of artifacts on a glacial landscape
As in many places in northern or alpine Europe, the warming climate has been shrinking glaciers in Norway. As the ice melts away, artifacts that were left on...