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...
Recent Posts
Quote: Fay Cooper-Cole on bones and races
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...
Chicken ancient DNA and natural selection during medieval times
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Quote: Sweeping out the cruft for cladistics in human origins
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...
Reading a review of ‘The Idea of the Brain’
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...
Hippos in South America
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...
Mask fiasco
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 ...
Quote: Eileen Whitehead Erlanson defining taxonomic inflation
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...
Quote: Colin Groves on primate species
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
New York Times looks at the hidden cost of amber paleontology
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 ...
How much have baboons and geladas hybridized during their evolution?
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 ...
Quote: Broom on fossils as ancestors
In the last few years, a surprising number of paleoanthropologists have published papers claiming that various fossil species could not be ancestors of other...
Quote: Dart on Piltdown and ape relationships
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 ...
A look at a ‘total genomic information’ world
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...
Quote: No ‘anatomically modern’ elephants
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...
Looking at layoffs from consumer genomics firms
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...
Florisbad: How old is the ‘early Homo sapiens’ skull?
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 ...
Stopping the misuse of DNA samples from African research participants
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...
Border Cave rhizomes from the early Middle Stone Age
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...
Nuclear insertions of mitochondrial DNA from Denisovans
A paper last week by Robert Bücking and coworkers trawled through the recently-sequenced Indonesian Genome Diversity Project dataset looking for snippets of ...