Back to the drawing board?
I'm from Kansas, and proud of it. I am therefore one of the select few products of public education in Kansas who studies evolution, and in particular the e...
Recent Posts
The (non-) autapomorphic ramus of Neandertals
Wolpoff and Frayer (2005) pick up the question of whether the Neandertal mandibular ramus presents features absent in other humans, recent or archaic. Here'...
The Rampasasa Pygmy Somatology Expedition
The interest in the biology of human pygmies did not begin with the Liang Bua find; it's been going on for awhile. The symptoms include Cavalli-Sforza's edi...
Social hierarchies and health in primates
Wow, it's almost like Science is reading my mind! Just after this post on social status and this post on allostasis, the April 29, 2005 Science has printed ...
What is the Kent's Cavern maxilla?
Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, England, underwent systematic archaeological investigation beginning in the 1860's, proceeding intermittently up to the present...
The Journey of Mankind!
It is really not worth looking at, but I couldn't stop laughing, so I have to point it out. The Journey of Mankind site is an animated map and timeline of p...
Who colonized the European Arctic?
I happened across an article by Pavlov and colleagues (2001) about the Mamontovaya Kurya site in the Russian Arctic. From the abstract (64):
"It's a gene, it's not Soylent Green!"
That's what my wife Gretchen had to say about this quote:
A future without men?
H. Allen Orr reviews Brian Sykes' book, Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men in the May 12, 2005 New York Review of Books. This is a great review (with short ...
Allostasis in human evolution
McEwen and Wingfield (2003) discuss the concept of allostasis. I was unfamiliar with this concept myself until an interesting presentation by one of our gr...
Money, status, and social cognition
Via Instapundit, a link to a review of the new book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Looks like a very interesting bo...
Another genetic change leading to human minds
Wang Yinqiu and colleagues (2005) report on the phylogenetic history of the PACAP precursor gene in humans and closely related primates (hat tip: Dienekes)....
Overweight is best?
The New York Times reports a new study in JAMA on the mortality risk associated with different BMI classes. The study found that obesity and underweight cla...
Citation rates among paleoanthropologists
I am doing some informal research on the number of citations indexed by ISI for paleoanthropologists. After quite a lot of searching, I have come to an appr...
Body mass in ancient humans and high latitude populations
Chris Ruff and colleagues (2005) provide additional statistics on body mass in high latitude populations, including Inupiat and Finns. The importance of the...
Different recombination hotspots in humans and chimpanzees
Winckler et al. (2005) (Science online) surveyed sequence data from humans and chimpanzees to examine whether recombination was happening at similar rates i...
Looking for more on the Genographic project?
Dienekes is all over the story, including a link to the video, news of some success stories, some details on the protocols from Spencer Wells, and detai...
Genetics and multiregional evolution, meetings 2005
Several papers at the AAPA meetings presented evidence for deep Asian-specific lineages in the present human gene pool. For example, from Mike Hammer's abst...
NSF and data access
Mark Weiss from NSF appeared at the AAPA business meeting to discuss recent changes in the funding guidelines from the Physical Anthropology program. The mo...
Resurrection ecology
ABC News story