Reviews
I've called this section of the weblog the "reviews" section, because I review things -- single papers, multiple papers, TV shows, books.
When a review gets long enough, or is popular enough, I often spin it into one of the other sections of the site, such as the "fossils" or my FAQ. So this area is a bit of a mixed bag: the reviews are my reactions and thoughts about things, sometimes in the course of development of other work and sometimes not.
The section is divided into categories where I put things. Some are highly populated (like "genomics"), with multiple subcategories and dozens of posts. Others are less so, but hold diverse content.
Here are the categories:
And following are short excerpts of the posts in each category:
One study reported at the meetings brought to mind a growing literature on the sophistication of Pliocene archaeological assemblages, grouped as "Oldowan" or "pre-Oldowan...
Whallon R...
Reference:
Wobst, H...
The BBC reports on a BBC program covering Silvia Gonzalez and the Cerro Toluquilla "footprints"...
Well, archaeology is set to receive a once-in-a-generation influx of interest from teenagers drawn to the allure of the past...
Afarensis has a post on Brazilian evidence relating to the origins of Native Americans (via Gene Expression)...
Writer Rachel D'Oro of the Associated Press reports on the repatriation of human remains from On Your Knees Cave, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Human remains estimated to be more than 10,000 years old will be returned to southeast Alaska Tlingit tribes 11 years after they were found in a cave in the Tongass National Forest...
I happened across an interesting article from last year by Christina Giovas that looks at pigs in Polynesia...
Chickens were brought to South America in Precolumbian times by Polynesians...
I just read a good popular article by Colin Woodard about the 15th-century decline of the Greenland Norse...
There is no hard endpoint to the Acheulean; its tool types -- in particular the handaxe -- last well into the MSA/Middle Paleolithic...
I'm taking some notes on change and stasis during the Acheulean, and they're not entirely complete, but in the interest of clearing my desktop I'm going to start posting them in sections...
I've had this working paper by Tony Baker on my desktop for awhile, and it has been discussed on some message boards...
One study reported at the meetings brought to mind a growing literature on the sophistication of Pliocene archaeological assemblages, grouped as "Oldowan" or "pre-Oldowan...
On the basis of a couple of student questions, I think it's worthwhile to reflect a bit on where I am going with this (also possibly made more clear in this post, which covers learning more extensively...
In case you needed a reminder that much of the territory occupied by Pleistocene humans is now beneath the waves, just take a look at this press release from the British archaeology company Wessex Archaeology:
An amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old, have been unearthed in gravel from a licensed marine aggregate dredging area 13km off Great Yarmouth...
Parfitt et al...
I was reading this 2003 paper by Philip Van Peer and colleagues, which is a quick introduction to the site 8-B-11, Sai Island, Sudan...
The current Science has meetings reports from the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Congress, including this article by Richard Stone about excavations from Sangiran:
At the meeting, archaeologist Harry Widianto of the National Research Centre of Archaeology in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, wowed colleagues with slides showing stone tools found in sediments that he says were laid down 1...
Bouzouggar et al...
Brooks and colleagues (2005) describe evidence for distance weaponry from late MSA contexts in eastern and southern Africa...
Gaudzinski (2004) reviewed evidence from four sites from the German Eemian, to see what conclusions could be drawn about Neandertal subsistence...
It's a really short paper in Science by Marian Vanhaeren and colleagues:
Perforated marine gastropod shells at the western Asian site of Skhul and the North African site of Oued Djebbana indicate the early use of beads by modern humans in these regions...
This is from Reuters:
Swiss researchers have discovered the 100,000-year-old remains of a previously unknown giant camel species in central Syria...
Noble and Davidson (1996:200-201) have a great passage on the lack of relevance of the Levallois technique to interpreting ancient cognition...
I was reading back through Bednarik's "Concept-mediated marking in the Lower Palaeolithic," for some background on the ochre-shellfish post, and I ran across this quote in Bednarik's rejoinder to Randall White:
[A]n estimated 100 tons of iron ore was mined at just one Middle Stone Age site, Ngwenya, carbon-dated to about 43,200 B...
Slimak and Giraud report Comptes Rendus Palevol that a small proportion (
Out of 10 artifacts with distant sources, six are from far to the north of the site (in the Loire Valley and Paris Basin) while two are from equivalent distances to the south...
I was looking through some MSA literature, and ran across a paper earlier this year by Negash and Shackley (2006) concerning long-distance movement of obsidian in Ethiopia...
The Research Council of Norway has issued a press release about Sheila Coulson's work in the MSA of Botswana:
A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history...
After the press report earlier this week about Eemian Neandertals hunting elephants in France, we now have a story from Der Spiegel (German) about a Neandertal "hut" being found in the Rhineland:
Die Forscher fanden eine ovale Vertiefung, die nach ersten Erkenntnissen der Grundriss seiner Hütte war...
We checked the Krapina mollusc shells for holes, since they are here and all...
The New Yorker has a nice profile of origami artist (and physicist) Robert J...
It is no secret that I really don't like the hypothesis that the massive ancient eruption of Mt...
Alfredo Coppa and friends have a cool short article in Nature detailing evidence for early tooth drilling in Pakistan:
Prehistoric evidence for the drilling of human teeth in vivo has so far been limited to isolated cases from less than six millennia ago...
So imagine you are digging out a pottery bowl from a 4000-year-old site, you turn it over, and out pops a bowl-shaped cast of dirt with noodles in the bottom...
James Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page have a new book entitled, The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory...
A paper by Anikovich and colleagues in Science describes revisions to the Upper Paleolithic chronology of Kostenki, Russia...
That's "Upper Paleolithic", not "Upper Peninsula...
A few weeks ago, I posted on recent work by Clive Trueman et al...
Australia is well known for its unique animals...
Brumm and Moore (2005) review the "symbolic revolution" in the light of the Australian archaeological record...
I've been buried in archaeology papers the last couple of weeks, and so I thought I would recommend a few real gems...
This LiveScience story covers a paper by David Steadman that seems not to be available yet at PNAS...
Why is it that the BBC always picks up stories like this one...
Australia's The Age online has a story by Deborah Smith that gives a short report about excavations at Jerimalai rock shelter, East Timor:
A cave site in East Timor where people lived more than 42,000 years ago, eating turtles, tuna and giant rats, was unearthed by Sue O'Connor, head of archaeology and natural history at the Australian National University...
John Hoffecker, one of the authors of the Science paper by Anikovich et al...
Thank goodness for blogs...
The current Nature has a review by Paul Mellars covering recent revisions in radiocarbon dates of early modern Europeans...
I skipped last week's (9/15/2006) Science, and so missed this article by Michael Balter on radiocarbon dating...
A paper (PDF) by Tom Higham and colleagues presents a redated chronology for the late Neandertals from Vindija, Croatia...
In one of those interesting twists of bibliographic fate, before today's announcement about the new dates for the initial Upper Paleolithic at Kostenki, I happened to have been reading the chapter, "The beginning of the Upper Paleolithic on the Russian Plain," by L...
Der Spiegel reports on recent portable art finds at Vogelherd, Germany:
The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3...
Whallon R...
Very nearly this time last year, I commented on a paper by Brad Gravina, Paul Mellars, and Christopher Bronk Ramsey concerning the stratigraphy of the Châtelperron type site...
Science's Michael Balter reviews the recent Cambridge conference on "Global Origins and Development of Seafaring"...
Next time you hear that everybody knew that humans were the only toolmaker before Jane Goodall showed otherwise:
It has often been said that no animal uses any tool; but the chimpanzee in a state of nature cracks a native fruit, somewhat like a walnut, with a stone...
Via Dienekes: Ember and colleagues (2005) address the question of whether cultural preferences for fatness or thinness in women are related to the prevalance of resource scarcity in a society...
This BBC story covers this paper (warning...
James Fowler (UC Davis) has an article in the May 10 PNAS that presents a model explaining the benefits that may arise from "altruistic punishment...
Usually that's a title about something related to cloning or stem cells or something...
I'm noticing a lot of new uses of the word "genomics" in the last few days...
Dario Maestripieri (U of Chicago) has a paper in PNAS demonstrating the transmission of abusive parenting style from mothers to their offspring in macaques...
It is essential to commencing labor contractions in pregnant women...
If you get Science, there's a pretty good News Focus item by Elizabeth Pennisi describing recent experiments on animal social intelligence...
I've been meaning to write about the paper on primate policing by Jessica Flack and colleagues...
Well, it hit Slashdot, so here goes:
Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains
Lynne A...
OK, this is just weird...
I covered this story earlier, here's a bit more (from Science Blog):
Researchers have found stronger evidence for a link between a parasite in cat faeces and undercooked meat and an increased risk of schizophrenia...
LiveScience reports on David Carrier's current paper in Evolution:
"The old argument was that [apes] retained short legs to help them climb trees that still were an important part of their habitat," said the study author David Carrier, a biologist at the University of Utah...
In the New Yorker, Jared Diamond writes a long article with an interesting personal account of revenge cycles in Highland New Guinea:
Hiring, supporting, and rewarding all those allies was a complex logistical operation...
Nicholas Wade profiles the work of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth in this article, "How Baboons Think (Yes, Think)...
I'm reading through David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature...
Chapter 4 of David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature is a critique of the concept of massive modularity applied to the human mind...
Chapter 5 of David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature is mostly about the critique of studies that purport to demonstrate human mate preferences, covering males and females in turn...
A reader forwarded me a reference to this website, which is a placeholder for present and future critiques to David Buller's book, Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature:
What about David Buller's book, Adapting Minds...
On the subject of objections to Buller's book, I should point out that Buller himself has a website where he has additional work and some responses to critics (particularly this reply to the short comments in TiCS)...
If you've ever noticed that kids have the same facial expressions as their parents, you're not alone...
A current paper by Flack and Frans de Waal (2007) shows one of the main reasons why monkeys are a bit more sophisticated than fish in their signaling about dominance...
Chris Chatham has an informative post up about a current paper by Michael Tomasello and Malinda Carpenter, titled "Shared Intentionality...
Sharon Begley in Newsweek reports on a hypothesis about "collectivism" and pathogens:
The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued...
I have been reading an interesting article from 2002 by Dominique Lestel, considering the definition of culture and its applicability to animals...
In another post I discussed a paper by Dominique Lestel concerning animal cultures...
A paper by A...
Hmm...
A new paper by Michael Krützen and colleagues (2005) presents evidence for extractive foraging in bottlenose dolphins...
Current Biology is running an interview with biologist and Mutants author Armand Leroi...
George Will's Newsweek column is about football this week -- specifically a discussion of changes in the sport since the days of the late "Bear" Bryant...
On the subject of ape tool use, Andrew Whiten and colleagues have an interesting experiment in Nature this week (9/29/05)...
On the heels of last month's paper on walking-stick use in gorillas, the AP reports on nutcracking by a juvenile gorilla at the Dian Fossey sanctuary in Congo...
A short paper in PLoS Biology by Thomas Breuer and colleagues describes the first two observed instances of tool use in wild gorillas...
There's lots of news this week from the AAAS meetings...
Nutcracking by capuchin monkeys has become the best non-hominoid example of tool use, and serves as a marker of the potential for anthropoids to develop and maintain cultures...
Newsweek's Sharon Begley dials the number for evolutionary psychology and doesn't get an answer:
When an Anna Nicole Smith (27) marries a J...
The Scientific American blog feature, "Mind Matters," returns this week with a discussion of animal empathy involving primatologist Frans de Waal and neurobiologist Peggy Mason...
Nick Wade has an article about Marc Hauser's book, "Moral Minds" that reviews the basic ideas and contextualizes them:
Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys...
Wood (2006) describes two alternative hypotheses that attempt to account for the fact that meat transfer in ethnographic hunter-gatherers doesn't accord simply with a family provisioning strategy:
The showoff hypothesis, developed by Hawkes (1990, 1991) using data gathered among the Ache as well as the Hadza, proposes that men's hunting is best understood as camp provisioning that is repaid with social attention including increased mating opportunities...
Hmmm...
Burtsev and Turchin (2006) present the results of simulations of cooperative behavior in self-interested agents...
AP writer Randolph Schmid tells the story of the cowbird protection racket:
To see what would happen, Hoover and Robinson watched where the cowbirds left eggs in warbler nests, and then removed some of them...
About those cheap mental scanners, there's this paper from last week by Damon Tomlin and colleagues, which relied on brain scans to determine the cortical correlates of exchange:
We carried out an iterated, two-person economic exchange and made simultaneous hemodynamic measurements from each player's brain...
The introduction of game theory into evolutionary biology is often credited to George Price and John Maynard Smith...
The second week of theory in my seminar focuses on John Maynard Smith and evolutionary game theory...
I've been working through the book, Evolutionary Game Theory, by Jörgen Weibull, and it has a really concise two-page history of game theory (as applied in an evolutionary context) in a foreword by Ken Binmore...
Carl Zimmer's profile of mathematical biologist Martin Nowak is well worth reading...
These are some notes on game theory and social behavior in lions...
A very brief paper by Arnold and Zuberbüler in Nature presents a case of a complex call in guenons:
Putty-nosed monkeys rely on two basic calling sounds to construct a message of utmost urgency...
This week's Science has an interesting paper by Quentin Atkinson and colleagues, titled "Languages evolve in punctuational bursts...
There's a study of handedness in baboon communicative gestures by Meguerditchian and Vauclair...
HOMER: But I'm just one man...
Generative grammar -- the theory of language structure originated by Noam Chomsky -- is lost on most people...
Chris at Mixing Memory has a post from last week reflecting on the meaning of the finding that starlings can learn certain patterns of syntactic recursion...
John Tierney describes some research into the effects of "gossip...
That's the question posed by Ronald Butters in a recent book review, discussed by Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log...
OK, maybe not mixmasters, exactly, but Mixing Memory does review this paper on marmoset reactions to human music by McDermott and Hauser, so I don't have to...
Just taking some notes on a paper from last year by Helga Andresen, on the ways that role playing by preschool-age children can illuminate language and metacommunication development...
The PNAS early edition is like a one-stop shop today...
Seed is running a little article on the evolution of language, by lingust Juan Uriagereka:
A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution...
Muller and colleagues (2006) found that male chimpanzees approach older females more often for copulation (compared to younger females), more males tend to hang around with older females in estrus (compared to younger females), older females tend to mate more often with high-ranking males, and males compete more aggressively to mate with older females:
This study demonstrates that male chimpanzees do not merely disdain young females but actively prefer older mothers to younger mothers...
Labouriau and Amorim (2008) show that women have more children if they were born farther from their husbands:
We report a positive association between marital radius (distance between mates' birthplaces) and fertility detected in a large population...
André Fernandez and Molly Morris have an interesting paper in American Naturalist examining the effect of color vision in primates as a bias toward the evolution of sexual signaling...
At least, in Iceland...
On the topic of how to measure intelligence in different species, I found this passage on pp...
I am more or less fascinated by these ants who count their steps to find their way home...
A nice post on bee dancing and the bee sensory system at Neurophilosophy...
Charles Siebert of the Times had a story this weekend about aggression by young bull elephants...
At least, not willingly, says this article, citing a short study by Jake Wall et al...
You have to have a pretty weird science story to get traction this week, and Reuters serves one up:
Gene swap makes boy flies fight like girls
The researchers swapped the male and female versions of the gene in fruit flies and observed the consequences...
It's all meerkats all over the place today...
Yesterday's post on mice mating songs left with a final question: Do FoxP2 knockout mice sing...
According to this PLoS Biology paper by Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo, mice can sing...
Rutte and Taborsky report in PLoS Biology that their rats know how to be nice to others:
The evolution of cooperation is based on four general mechanisms: mutualism, where an action benefits all partners directly; kin selection, where related individuals are supported; "green beard" altruism that is based on a genetic correlation between altruism genes and respective markers; and reciprocal altruism, where helpful acts are contingent upon the likelihood of getting help in return...
Read Nick Wade's article about Siberian rat breeding experiments...
It's minor election day here in Wisconsin, and I see this story (discovery...
Neurophilosophy has really come to life in the last few weeks...
It's not just any rodents, but the "highly social, intelligent" degus...
This is interesting:
Scientists had previously placed the skill of "future-planning" into the exclusively human category...
Charles Q...
Seed magazine has a very good summary of neurogenesis and profile of Elizabeth Gould online, by Jonah Lehrer...
The American Museum of Natural History has set up a Darwin website to accompany their Darwin exhibit...
Dienekes came up with his own set of predictions for next year...
I found out from a reader this morning that Dennis Etler has a blog called "Sinanthropus" -- and it's excellent...
The Freakonomics guys have a blog, and this week they are having guest posts from Seth Roberts, who has developed a new diet through self-experimentation...
Another in the series of "10 questions" interviews, this one with Steven Pinker...
The Jane Goodall Institute has a blog, which has been updated daily for some time...
I posted on the three-part PBS special "Guns, Germs and Steel," but I didn't watch it myself...
For the next week, the Just Science aggregator (www...
A very interesting post by Pharyngula scribe P...
August seems to be a month of self-reflection...
A blog carnival is a selection of self-submitted articles following a theme of topics...
Here's a familiar picture:
Endocranial volumes of Pleistocene Homo
I ran across a 2003 paper on the evidence of recent positive selection on the MRG gene family in humans...
Reference: Dorus, S...
Elton and colleagues (2001) examined the record of brain size in early Homo with the following question in mind: we know that brain size increased in this lineage, but was that increase unusual compared to other lineages of primates at the same time...
A paper by Hannah Faye Chua and colleagues of the University of Michigan asserts that there are significant differences between Chinese and American graduate students in "perceptual judgment"...
Modularity is a property of biological organization: organisms are composed of subunits that perform different functions...
An interesting story from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (via Science Blog) about the information content of whale song...
This post in progress...
This is too weird:
Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr...
A really big problem in studying the evolution of the brain is that we have very little idea how the organ develops...
This PLoS Biology paper by Pier Ferrari et al...
I posted about the "Sherlock Holmes theory of mind" last month, which I often mention to my classes...
The Times had this article the other day discussing whether TV is good for preschool-age kids...
Jerry Fodor reviews David J...
One of those impressively short brief communications in Nature Neuroscience by Dharol Tankersley et al...
This LiveScience article reviews some recent research...
From Brainethics, I was pointed to this article in the Boston Globe about evolutionary explanations for music...
I was looking in Neuron to find this paper by Koechlin and Jubault about Broca's area...
This article in last week's Science seems interesting:
Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Control of Attention in the Prefrontal and Posterior Parietal Cortices
Timothy J...
Science is running a brain-probing essay by Marcus Raichle, titled "The brain's dark energy...
Welcome, everyone, to the twenty-second edition of the neuroscience carnival, Encephalon...
There's a house in my neighborhood that puts on a giant show every Halloween, with graves, ghosts, and horror-show music...
Scientific American has started a new feature on their website called Mind Matters, which reviews neuroscience and psychology papers...
One of the proposed purposes of sleep is that the brain requires time to consolidate new learning, and requires an inactive consciousness to do it...
Semenza et al...
At last, someone may have the courage to try to harness the brainpower of the superintelligent fearless mice...
According to Nature News, Brian Knutson and Camelia Kuhnen of Stanford have discovered that the interaction between two brain regions is involved in determining whether people take risks:
As centres for pleasure and anxiety battle it out, a simple brain scan of the two can actually predict what a person will chose to do a few seconds before they do it: when joy beats worry in our brain, a risky decision is made...
This article by P...
Here's an AP story about humor and the sexes:
Women seem more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny...
Another of the papers in PNAS online this week is this one:
Human relational memory requires time and sleep
Jeffrey M...
A study by Ingrid Olson and colleagues in the Journal of Neuroscience examines feature memory (memory about objects and locations) and relational memory (memory about objects' relations to each other and locations) in patients with medial temporal lobe amnesia...
I happen to be interested in smell right now -- it's a system in which chemical traces clearly function as iconic signs, but it's extremely ancient, and humans have this immense array of chemoreceptive genes, of which many have recently evolved into pseudogenes...
OK, I think it cheapens the idea of "speaking in tongues" if people can do it on command in an MRI scanner...
Michael Balter reports on recent research by Giacomo Rizzolatti, of "mirror neuron" fame...
In the same issue of Journal of Human Evolution that we find the snake paper, there is an article by Christopher Kirk proposing that neocortex sizes in different primate lineages are explained by vision requirements...
Alan Boyle reports on the upcoming 2...
James R...
As the new semester gets underway, it's a good time to think of ways to improve all those assignments I will soon be reading...
A paper by Danielle Posthuma and colleagues (2005) reports on a map survey of the human genome looking for loci that may be linked to IQ...
An article of that title by Robert Lee Hotz of the LA Times is on the Yahoo News site...
A short paper in this week's Nature finds that neurons in the human auditory cortex have an unusual capacity for perceiving small frequency differences:
Just-noticeable differences of physical parameters are often limited by the resolution of the peripheral sensory apparatus...
At the online book review section of Bookslut, the new Steven Mithen book, The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is reviewed by primatologist Barbara J...
The lead report in Science this week was this paper by Dmitri Tymoczko, titled "The geometry of musical chords":
A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold...
A paper by Michael Petrides (McGill University) and colleagues reports that a brain region on the left side of the macaque brain, in the same general area as Broca's area in the human brain, is associated with functions of the mouth and face...
I think this is just cool:
Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb...
This week's (9/27/95) PNAS has an article by Johannes Ziegler and colleagues (Université de Provence) titled, "Deficits in speech perception predict language learning impairment"...
Carl Zimmer has put together this week's news about language evolution...
Michael Balter reports on a session at the AAAS meeting about human cognitive evolution:
Richard Lewontin knows how to grab an audience's attention...
I've gotten a couple of e-mail questions from readers about this new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence...
Weaver (2005) examined the size ratio of the cerebellum and neocortex in fossil hominid brains...
I just wrote about the alteration of a behavior pattern (decision-making) resulting from injury to the prefrontal cortex...
A Harvard Medical School press release (via Science Blog) describes a study by Majdan and Shatz in the current Nature Neuroscience:
A new study focusing on the molecular roots of plasticity has found that visual stimulus turns up the expression of some genes and turns down the expression of others, somewhat like a conductor cueing the members of an orchestra...
Neurophilosophy has this nice post reviewing work by Curtis and colleagues in Science...
You are the captain of a military submarine travelling underneath a large iceberg...
This PLoS Biology review, "Molecular insights into human brain evolution," is from 2005, but it's well worth reading...
That's what Andrea Taylor and Carel van Schaik conclude in this paper:
Setting aside P...
McBrearty and Jablonski (2005) report on the first discovery of chimpanzee fossil remains...
I want to note the new article by Langergraber, Mitani and Vigilant on chimpanzee kinship and social behavior...
Duffy, Wrangham and Silk describe in a short paper the correlation of male mating success and support for the alpha male in a group of chimpanzees...
Chimpanzees use their own version of Broca's area when they communicate, according to a new PET scan study by Jared Taglialatela and colleagues...
There's a nice little article on the topic from Reuters:
CHICAGO - The arch of an eyebrow or the curve of a lip tells chimps a lot about each other, a finding that may give scientists new understanding about the evolution of human communication, researchers reported Friday...
A nice piece in The Guardian about the chimpanzee population near Bili, DRC...
The current (February 2006) issue of AJPA carries an article by Craig Stanford describing the context of bipedal posture for chimpanzees in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park...
Following on last month's New Yorker article about bonobos (my comments here), Frans de Waal has penned a response (no permanent link yet; this link may stop working after a week or two)...
A couple of readers have pointed me to an exceptional article in the current New Yorker, in which writer Ian Parker travels with Gottfried Hohmann to Lui Kotal, the field site where he studies partially habituated bonobos...
John Noble Wilford reviews recent research on chimpanzee behavior, in the context of last month's chimpanzee behavior conference...
National Geographic sent writer Mary Roach to see the Fongoli chimpanzees, at the field site of primatologist Jill Pruetz...
Studying chimpanzee behavioral diversity is so important because they do such different things in different parts of their range...
An accessible story by Bjorn Carey discusses the paper by Mulcahy and Call, titled "Apes save tools for future use...
Ann Gibbons reports on the upcoming article in Current Biology:
[Jill] Pruetz's team, working at the Fongoli research site in the wooded savanna of Senegal, observed chimps breaking off green branches and in four cases using their incisors to sharpen the points...
Reuters is reporting on a current study by Joan Silk and colleagues in Nature...
Here's a LiveScience story by Heather Whipps, about the discovery of chimpanzee nutcracking stones dating back to 4300 years ago:
Though there were no chimpanzee remains at the settlement, testing by archaeologists revealed the tool-laden camp was most likely used by the Great Ape...
Victoria Horner and colleagues (2006) set up two "diffusion chains" of chimpanzees, to see if a learned task could be transmitted faithfully from one chimp to another for several iterations...
Carl Zimmer has an article in Forbes covering recent experiments in chimpanzee vocal communication...
A new article in the New York Times discusses an upcoming paper by Elizabeth Lonsdorf and colleagues in Animal Behavior that examines the way that Gombe chimpanzees learn termite fishing...
It's hard to improve on the headline of this story:
Why chimps eat dirt
...
This week's Nature (9/1/05) has a special feature on the chimpanzee genome (subscription required)...
Chimpanzees who use tools, predominantly do so left-handed...
Hughes et al...
In a short paper, Simon Townsend and colleagues report on several instances of infanticide initiated by female chimpanzees in the Bundongo Forest:
These observations document a systematic pattern of lethal aggression in female chimpanzees...
This article from World Science Net popped into my inbox today...
In Science this week (9/30/05), there was an article by Paul Falkowski and colleagues, including Michael Novacek of the American Museum, which documented the rise in atmospheric oxygen over the past 205 million years and suggested that this rise may have allowed the evolution of large placental mammals...
Should we return proboscids, lions and other megafauna to North America's Great Plains...
A concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene...
I just love that line from this GSA press release (via Science Blog):
North America isn't the only continent that's experienced super-colossal volcanic eruptions in the recent geologic past...
Geophysicist Sergey Zimov had an essay in the May 6 edition of Science concerning the ecological pressures that may have changed the Arctic ecosystem at the end of the Pleistocene...
I'm sure you've seen the story:
A team of Dutch and Mauritian scientists discovered the bones in a swampy area near a sugar plantation on the south-east of the island...
For those of you who may be wondering what is wrong with paleoanthropology that we can't just resolve the hobbit problem, I can only say one thing: We are not alone...
Andrew Curry profiles ancient DNA researcher Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen...
Johan Weijers and colleagues (2007) found that rainfall likely increased in tropical Africa at the end of the last glaciation and during the Holocene, with a brief interruption that approximately corresponds to the Younger Dryas...
Science seems to have had a stealth theme going last week on climate change, and it included this perspective by Anna Behrensmeyer on climate change in human evolution...
Rex Dalton of Nature has a very interesting article recounting his experiences with the Middle Awash project...
NASA's Earth Observatory has made an overhead shot of the Afar Depression its image of the day (via MetaFilter):
In eastern Africa, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, a nearly barren rockscape marks the location of the meeting place of three separate pieces of the Earth's crust...
Despite all the trouble I had traveling (or maybe because of it), I got to have a really enjoyable time finishing Ann Gibbons' new book, The First Human...
News story at MSNBC
News story at BBC
Paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw has a new paper in Nature describing fossils of Ardipithecus from the Gona research area in Ethiopia...
With apologies to the late Frank Livingstone, I couldn't help but wonder this as I read this passage from Bernard Wood's comment on the Dikika skeleton:
I am especially intrigued by the detailed morphology of the hyoid bone in the throat of the fossil...
The online companion site to Scientific American is running commentaries by a few paleoanthropologists on the importance of the new DIK-1-1 skeleton...
There is a story from LiveScience's Ker Than on the function of white sclerae in the eyes, as an adaptation for communicating gaze direction in hominids:
According to one idea, called the cooperative eye hypothesis, the distinctive features that help highlight our eyes evolved partly to help us follow each others' gazes when communicating or when cooperating with one another on tasks requiring close contact...
So have we decided that early hominids had five lumbar vertebrae...
Caley Orr (Personal page, Arizona State University) has an advance paper in AJPA examining convergent features in the wrists of knuckle-walking hominoids and the terrestrial giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla)...
Elizabeth Pennisi has a short piece in Science describing David Carrier's ideas about leg length and fighting in early hominids...
In his 2003 book, Lowly Origin, Jonathan Kingdon presents a model for the origins of hominid bipedality, along with many other possible insights concerning the evolution of both earlier apes and later hominids...
There's a new paper by Tim White in the "In Press" portion of Comptes Rendus Palevol, titled "Early hominid femora: The inside story"...
From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:
We propose that a key change in the evolution of hominids from the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees was the substitution of plant underground storage organs (USOs) for herbaceous vegetation as fallback foods...
Scott and colleagues (2005) examined dental microwear in some Swartkrans (A...
Sponheimer and colleagues (2006, link) zapped some Swartkrans teeth with lasers to measure their 13C content...
The chemical analysis of bones to interpret diet rests on the observation that different foods vary in the composition of different chemical elements or isotopes...
I've followed the literature on early hominid diets from the beginning of the weblog...
Peter Ungar (2004) investigated the dietary adaptations of A...
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i...
Patel (2005) examines the morphology of the proximal radius in different species of apes...
I spent much of the weekend digesting and writing notes on a couple of papers from last week, including the widely-reported Genographic Project paper on the mtDNA of Khoisan and other Africans...
The news stories (nature...
I've just been reading a useful paper by Andrew Millard, which reviews the chronometric dates of African and Near Eastern fossil hominids from the Middle and early Late Pleistocene...
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa...
I happened across an article by Pavlov and colleagues (2001) about the Mamontovaya Kurya site in the Russian Arctic...
National Geographic News' most popular story today is "Odd skull boosts human, Neandertal interbreeding theory...
Following up on my earlier post on the Kent's Cavern 4 maxilla: although my library doesn't have back issues of the Proceedings of the Torquay Natural History Society, it turns out that the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago does...
Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, England, underwent systematic archaeological investigation beginning in the 1860's, proceeding intermittently up to the present day...
I thought I'd link to this article from This Is South Devon...
I'm just finished with the Neandertal meeting in San Diego, so it's time to decompress a bit...
As an aside from the Neandertal theme, I ran across a paper from earlier this year by Ichim, Swain, an Kieser, where they apply a mechanical model to mandibles with and without chins:
The development of the chin, a feature unique to humans, suggests a close functional linkage between jaw biomechanics and symphyseal architecture...
I noticed that the cover of the most recent New Scientist is a story about modern human origins by science writer Dan Jones...
Hawks sightings in the news...
Another of the craniometric stories going around this week (Discovery News) proposes that early Levantine modern humans (Skhul-Qafzeh) and Pleistocene Australians come from an early out-of-Africa dispersal that was later mostly replaced by true modern humans (represented by Upper Paleolithic Europeans and living people everywhere)...
David Biello writes a nice profile of demographic researcher Virpi Lummaa:
The 33-year-old Finnish biologist, aided by genealogists, has pored through centuries-old tomes (and microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records, which ended up providing glimpses of evolution at work in humanity's recent ancestors...
Reading some of the recent books on post-Columbian disease exchange, I have been impressed by the contribution of basic historical demographic research to understanding biological processes...
In the 2002 Annual Reviews in Anthropology, Leslie Aiello and Jonathan Wells provide a synopsis of the ways that morphological evolution in the human lineage have affected the energy utilization of our species and its ancestors...
In case you haven't been paying attention, the chronology of early African Homo has been completely turned upside-down this year...
Dean and colleagues (2001) present a study of perikymata counts of anterior teeth (incisors and canines) in early humans and australopithecines, compared to extant apes and humans...
In Nature a couple of weeks ago, Robin Dennell and Wil Roebroeks had a provocative paper exploring the possibility that early humans (i...
Discovery News has an article summarizing some of Peter Ungar's recent work on tooth anatomy and wear in early Homo...
An upcoming paper in Journal of Human Evolution by O...
This quick article by Jonathan Losos and colleagues is entirely unsurprising, but good to read:
Rapid Temporal Reversal in Predator-Driven Natural Selection
Because of its potentially epochal scope, evolutionary biology is often caricatured as a strictly descriptive science, but recent years have shown that evolution can be studied on short time scales and that evolutionary biology can be both experimental and predictive...
Carl Zimmer has a great post discussing a paper by Douglas Emlen and colleagues (2005) on beetle evolution...
The New York Review of Books is running a combined review of three recent evolution books:
From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design, by Sean B...
I'm trying to resist becoming a hotbed of female orgasm blogging, but I just heard a promo for the story on the local news, so it seems impossible to avoid...
As surely as night follows day, we have this story from CNN on the real island giant animals that evolved in a King-Kong-like fashion...
I admit, I was sucked in by a link (via kausfiles) to the Huffington Post...
Frankino AW, Zwaan BJ, Stern DL, and Brakefield PM...
References:
Garant, Dany, Loeske E...
Robert D...
The story always is told that the symbiosis between early, free-ranging mitochondria and proto-eukaryotes was a virtual enslavement, with the eukaryotes consuming the mitochondria and making use of their energy-generation facility to the benefit of the eukaryotic cells...
From a Reuters story:
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have used scans to show that different areas of the brain are stimulated during an orgasm but are not activated when a woman fakes it...
Stephen Jay Gould famously made the false thumb of the giant panda one of his hallmark examples of the structural vagaries of adaptation...
Stephen Jay Gould (among many others) used to claim that life's history has been highly contingent on unlikely events...
R...
Mark Lomolino has been one of the central figures in recent work on body size, energetics, and evolution -- especially with respect to the evolution of body size in island species...
The "island rule" is the prediction that small bodied animals should evolve larger sizes on islands, while large bodied animals should evolve to be smaller...
This is pretty clever:
Although fish are neutrally buoyant, they still have to push water out of the way to move forward, he said...
Anderson and Handley (2002) presented an analysis of the evolution of three-toed sloths on the islands of Bocas del Toro, Panama...
No...
Rex Dalton has a great two-page article in Nature about the bush vs...
A subset of evolutionary theorists are specifically concerned with how the evolution of multiple characters of organisms are linked to each other by genetic correlations...
I don't write too much about the grand scheme of life, but the recent paper by Choi and Kim in PNAS is worth comment...
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects)...
Reading Yann Klementidis today, I caught a reference to a paper by Traulsen and Nowak in PNAS, titled "Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection...
Mystery Rays from Outer Space wrote earlier this month about the pattern of selection on MHC, bringing up the question of whether overdominance (heterozygote advantage) or frequency dependence is the reigning pattern...
I picked up The Structure of Evolutionary Theory today for a mostly unrelated reason, and happened across this passage:
(Ironically, stable lineages become salient enough to catch our attention only at the extreme that we call "living fossils" -- species or lineages supposedly unchanged during such long stretches of geological time that their stability becomes a paradox in a world of Darwinian evolutioanry flux and continuity...
hpb etc...
Just in time for school to start -- Slate is running a slide-show essay about Ernst Haeckel, including his life and work...
Jim Robbins of the NYT has written a long article about genetic introgression of cattle genes into bison populations...
Cattle are my favorite comparative model for Pleistocene human evolution, not because I think we necessarily share the same pattern of species and subspecies interactions, but because interbreeding and introgression are so evident among populations that are separated by strong local adaptations...
On the topic of introgression, this article by Reuters' Will Dunham is a good illustration:
A team led by University of California at Davis researcher Jorge Dubcovsky identified a gene in wild wheat that raises the grain's nutritional content...
I'd like to draw your attention to my new article on genetic introgression from archaic humans, written with Gregory Cochran...
Alouatta palliata and Alouatta pigra are sympatric in parts of their ranges, and they give rise to visibly obvious hybrids...
Although I've had a number of papers come out this year, there are two in particular that I've been working on for quite a long time...
SEED is running a good article by Lee Billings combining the Muierii paper and the MCPH1 paper...
A key issue (at least for some paleo folks) is whether the term "introgression" gives aid and comfort to the idea that Neandertals were a distinct species from us...
Evolgen's RPM writes about the opening coin flip of Ultimate:
The beginning of many Ultimate (nee, Frisbee) games is marked by flipping discs to decide which team must pull (kick off) and which goal each team will defend at the start of the game...
Believe it or not, I was just talking to someone about dwarf hippos yesterday...
Yesterday at the library I picked up the book Evolving Eden : An Illustrated Guide to the Evolution of the African Large Mammal Fauna, by Alan Turner and Mauricio Antón...
Fifty years ago in science:
Various ideas and data more or less closely related to the present hypothesis are apparently widespread in the literature (e...
In the most recent Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Darren Curnoe and colleagues have a paper titled "Timing and tempo of primate evolution"...
From the discussion of L...
Earlier this year, I discussed a paper about the collapse of stickleback species due to increasing hybridization...
This is an old paper by Peter and Rosemary Grant, from 2002:
Unpredictable Evolution in a 30-Year Study of Darwin's Finches
Peter R...
Two hypotheses, discussed by Burke and Arnold (2001):
The role of epistasis in adaptive evolution has been a controversial issue ever since Sewall Wright and R...
If hybrid zones are transient, what are the likely outcomes...
The story of colonizing species encompasses a wide range of "colonizing ability"...
Thinking about those wolves and their population structure a bit more, I was leafing through a back issue of New Phytologist, and found an article by Loren Rieseberg and colleagues...
You know I like the lizard analogies for human evolution -- I wrote about limb length and predation last time around -- and now we have another paper from Jonathan Losos' group looking at ecological differentiation and sexual dimorphism:
Sexual dimorphism is widespread and substantial throughout the animal world (1, 2)...
I've written about some future predic
