Link: The underrated takin
This is a fun article on an underappreciated mammal: “Meet the Takin: The Largest Mammal You’ve Never Heard Of”.
All posts tagged with Asia
First Peoples: Asia, and Australia
First Peoples continues tonight on PBS, with two episodes that focus on the dispersal of modern humans into Asia and Australia.
Mailbag: North and South China
I read with interest your post on: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/pigmentation/neandertal-introgression-1000-genomes-style-2011.html
Denisova at high coverage
Science today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by Mattias Meyer and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s group Meyer:Denisova:2012. ...
Afrasia djijidae: coolest monkey name ever
Ann Gibbons explains the importance of the new possible stem anthropoid fossil teeth from Myanmar: “Out of Asia? New Primate Fossils Pose Origin Riddle”.
Neandertal introgression, 1000 Genomes style
For our project to understand pigmentation genetics in archaic humans, we had to find a good comparative sample of sequence data from recent humans. The orig...
Asian Homo erectus
Homo erectus entered Asia as early as 1.8 million years ago. One of the earliest specimens of the species is the Modjokerto skull, from Java. The spread of t...
Denisovan DNA in the islands, and an Australian genome
David Reich and colleagues today report on the persistence of Denisova-like ancestry in island Southeast Asia and Australia (citation not yet available). Mea...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Older and younger Acheulean in India
Shanti Pappu and colleagues Pappu:2011 report on date estimates resulting from new excavations at the old site of Attarampakkam, India. The news element is t...
Orangutan dynamics of Borneo
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chim...
Mailbag: The Neandertal fraction
Re: Neandertal DNA
Sketchbook
Today’s sketchbook:
Ngandong interview
Nature News has run a nice interview with Russell Ciochon about the new excavations at Ngandong, Java.
More on Tibet, demography and selection
My post about the Tibetan high altitude selection story last Friday summarized the research and included some criticism of the demographic model applied in t...
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast?
Did the altitude of the Tibetan plateau lead to the fastest instance of human adaptation yet known?
The Darra-i-Kur temporal bone
Wouldn’t it be fun to compile a list of skeletal specimens that might prove interesting for DNA analysis? Near the top of my list is the only Middle Paleolit...
Mailbag: Fire starters
Regarding the use of fire, Ive always been intrigued by how early Homo was able to continue its trek northward (ex. Dmanisi) without it. It would seem that a...
More X-Woman thoughts
I had a great session with my advanced students yesterday running through different evolutionary scenarios for the X-Woman. This and some later posts will fo...
Denisova photos
Spiegel online has a nice slideshow including several of Johannes Krause’s photos from Denisova, and some other shots of Neandertals.
The Denisova mtDNA sequence: The X-Woman
In this week’s copy of Nature, Johannes Krause and colleagues Krause:Denisova:2010 report on the complete mitochondrial sequence of a pinky bone from Denisov...
It came from Guangxi
Science journalist Richard Stone writes in the current Science about new Late Pleistocene skeletal remains from Guangxi: “Signs of Early Homo sapiens in Chin...