Quote: Arthur Keith on Weidenreich and Piltdown
In 1944, after receiving Franz Weidenreich’s monograph on the fossil sample from Choukoutien, China (now spelled as Zhoukoudian), Arthur Keith wrote a letter...
In 1944, after receiving Franz Weidenreich’s monograph on the fossil sample from Choukoutien, China (now spelled as Zhoukoudian), Arthur Keith wrote a letter...
In 1945, American Naturalist published a lecture by Fay Cooper-Cole on “Some problems of human racial development and migration”. Cooper-Cole had been a stud...
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Eric Delson, Niles Eldredge, and Ian Tattersall in 1977 published on one of the first cladistic analyses of humans and our close relatives: “Reconstruction o...
This week I read a review in Nature of Matthew Cobb’s forthcoming book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. The review by Stephen Cas...
The Washington Post has an opinion piece by Robert Gebelhoff asking the tough questions about a South American herd of African herbivores: “The great conundr...
This week, the New York Times published a piece by information scientist Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired”. The main idea ...
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
This week, scientists announced a study of one of the most significant Cretaceous fossil discoveries within a chunk of amber from Myanmar, the tiny skull of ...
A recent paper from Jerilyn Walker and coworkers in the journal BMC Mobile DNA reports that today’s baboons and geladas may have mixed in their history more ...
In the last few years, a surprising number of paleoanthropologists have published papers claiming that various fossil species could not be ancestors of other...
I was flipping through a 1929 paper by Raymond Dart, “A note on the Taungs skull”, in the South African Journal of Science. In this, Dart gives a scientific ...
Razib Khan has an essay out in National Review drawing attention to some current trends in genomic technology and some of their implications: “Dime-store gen...
In the field of human evolution, every so often a scientist will note the absurdity of talking about “anatomically modern humans”. Biologists don’t talk abou...
CNBC has an article by Christina Farr looking at the recent layoffs at consumer genomics firms 23andMe and Ancestry.com: “Consumer DNA testing is a bust: Her...
This week, Lee Berger and I posted a new preprint in which we investigate the context of the Florisbad fossil hominin specimens. Our preprint is on the open ...
In my course on anthropological genetics last semester, I spent a week on the ethical challenges with appropriate consent by research participants for the re...
I’m pretty excited about today’s paper revealing new evidence of cooked rhizomes from Border Cave in South Africa. The paper is in Science, by Lyn Wadley and...
A paper last week by Robert Bücking and coworkers trawled through the recently-sequenced Indonesian Genome Diversity Project dataset looking for snippets of ...