Ankarapithecus :: overview
Ankarapithecus meteai remains include a handful of mandibles and partial faces from Central Turkey, and date to around 10 million years ago (Begun and Gulic,...
Recent Posts
Aegyptopithecus :: overview
The largest sample of early catarrhines come from the Fayum depression in present-day Egypt. Today this region is arid desert, but during the Oligocene arou...
The Great Rift Valley
The climate of the Early Pliocene differed from that of the Miocene primarily by the appearance of a cooling and drying trend across Africa, where early hom...
Sivapithecus
Sivapithecus includes a great diversity of Miocene ape species from South Asia. Fossils are known from between 10 and 7 million years ago, with many fossils ...
Ouranopithecus
Ouranopithecus macedoniensis (called by some Graecopithecus) is from the Late Miocene of Greece, around 8 million years old. Based on its facial and dental a...
Fossil apes
The hominoids--the group including humans and living and fossil apes--originated sometime during the Oligocene period, between 34 and 24 million years ago. ...
Dryopithecus::overview
Today, the only non-human primate native to Europe is the Barbary macaque, which has extended its North African range to a small area including Gibraltar, o...
Gene control by microRNA::evolutionary implications
News story at Nature
The Neandertal mtDNA story: 2004 edition
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We have learned vastly more about Neandertal genetics since then. These two papers are important to the history of discoveri...
An ancient gene inversion under selection in Europe
New York Times news story on this inversion
The science of Helicobacter pylori
There is an article in the February 2005 Scientific American with the intriguing title “An endangered species in the stomach.” The article fairly well covers...
The Liang Bua debate, continued
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We have learned much since then about the context of the Liang Bua fossils and archaeological record. These have changed the...
Wobst’s population model
Reference:
Two recent bottleneck studies
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We know much more today about the population history of modern humans. This includes the bottleneck that led to the founding...
The Flores find: more thoughts on Liang Bua
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. More recent posts have up to date information about Homo floresiensis and the Liang Bua stone artifacts.
Terrence Deacon’s ‘The Symbolic Species’
I was recently asked for my thoughts about this book, and I wrote down some. I think the book is a very important one, and other reviews have raised many rel...
Sahelanthropus: a brief introduction
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. Later posts detail my own research on Sahelanthropus. My research with collaborators ultimately took a critical perspective ...
Modern human origins: X marks the spot?
Reference: Garrigan, Daniel, et al. 2005. Evidence for archaic Asian ancestry on the human X chromosome. Molecular Biology and Evolution 22(2):189-192.
Brain evolution: what do the genes say?
Reference: Dorus, S. et al.. 2004. Accelerated evolution of nervous system genes in the origin of Homo sapiens. Cell 119:1027-1040.