Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
A fascinating paper in Science Advances today looks at the way that a small platyrrhine monkey species conveys information about predators in its vocal commu...
The New York Times Magazine today has a long-read article about Cayo Santiago, the island just off Puerto Rico where a large colony of rhesus macaques was in...
Scientific American is previewing an article by Michael Haslam from their March issue, “The Other Tool Users”. The article focuses on the use of archaeologic...
Last summer in the South African Journal of Science, faunal specialist Shaw Badenhorst published a short commentary with an interesting question for early ho...
An article in Current Biology by Christopher Krupenye and Brian Hare suggests that bonobos may have a social preference for individuals who wear their domina...
Notable: van Leeuwen, Edwin J. C., Katherine A. Cronin, and Daniel B. M. Haun. 2017. Tool use for corpse cleaning in chimpanzees. Scientific Reports 7:44091....
Agustín Fuentes has a short essay in New York magazine’s “Science of Us”: “Creative Collaboration Is What Humans Do Best.”
Nice article by Natalie Angier about recent work on bonobo social behavior: “Beware the Bonds of Female Bonobos”.
Traci Watson from National Geographic reports on a study of behavior in whales looking specifically at how members of social groups react to the death of an ...
Ed Yong writes about a long-term study of prairie dog sociality that demonstrated a surprising behavior among females: they kill dozens of ground squirrels: ...
From Ethan Siegel: I’m weirdly fascinated by the ghostly image of a human face that emerges after averaging dozens of inanimate objects: “Averaging Inanimate...
Carl Zimmer writes in the NY Times today about an experiment with crows. John Marzluff and colleagues from the University of Washington have been examining a...
An evocative excerpt from the new book by Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel:
BBC Earth is running a story by Colin Barras looking at the origins of music in ancient humans and possible perceptual preadaptation to music in other primat...
Notable paper: Tamariz, Monica and Simon Kirby. 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science 39:171-183. doi:10.1111/cogs.12144
Notable paper: Raichlen, D. A., Wood, B. M., Gordon, A. D., Mabulla, A. Z., Marlowe, F. W., & Pontzer, H. (2014). Evidence of Lévy walk foraging patterns...
A week ago I was in Gibraltar for the 2014 Calpe Conference. The conference this year is focused on issues of world heritage, as the Neandertal sites of Gorh...
Human hunter-gatherers, despite living in small groups of 20-50 individuals, make social contacts with up to a thousand other individuals in across their lif...
Notable paper: Coqueugniot H, Dutour O, Arensburg B, Duday H, Vandermeersch B, Tillier, A-M. (2014) Earliest Cranio-Encephalic Trauma from the Levantine Midd...
Nicole Herzog and colleagues spent half a year following a troop of vervet monkeys during the controlled burn season at Loskop Dam Nature Reserve in South Af...
In an open access article in PLoS ONE, Ruggero D’Anastasio and colleagues take a closer look at the internal structure of the hyoid bone from the Kebara 2 Ne...
Smithsonian magazine has a long profile article about my UW-Madison colleague Karen Strier: “Humans would be better off if they monkeyed around like muriquis...
National Geographic has an excellent article by David Quammen about the science of bonobo behavior: “The Left Bank Ape: An Exclusive Look at Bonobo Behavior”...
Ecology, diet, competition, and ease of movement all affect the size of primate groups. The structure of primate groups is primarily affected by the mating s...
The diversification of the first primates from other early mammals took place partly because the ancestors of the primates came to inhabit a unique environme...
El Pais has a fascinating story about the Paleolithic sites in the Lozoya river valley: “A Neanderthal trove in Madrid”.
Harry Jerison, famous researcher of brain sizes across classes and orders of animals, commented on the relation of “encephalization” to the intelligence of a...
Barbara King comments on Koko, Kanzi and Panbanisha, “Thoughts On Three Famous ‘Language Apes’”.
If you care about Neandertal behavior and haven’t read this 2004 article by John Speth, you really should treat yourself: “News flash: Negative evidence conv...
Captive chimpanzees do clever things, but how deep is their planning? Michael Balter describes a research study following how one chimpanzee harasses zoo vis...
Ed Yong reports on new research from Eila Roberts, with Jacinta Beehner’s research group at the University of Michigan, who was able to show that the rate of...
Daniel Lende has done a nice interview with Northwestern University anthropologist Lee Gettler (“On Testosterone and Real Men: An Interview with Lee Gettler”...
I enjoyed this article by Mo Costandi: “Sleights of hand, sleights of mind”.
An important difference among some primate species is their ability to get foods that are hidden or protected by natural defenses. A little cleverness may yi...
We have known for many years that Lower Paleolithic people were using shellfish, fish, and littoral resources at sites across the Old World, from Trinil Joor...
I have always wondered if autism could be an adaptive mutation. However, since I myself have autism, and specifically one of the more fortunate types of auti...
Wray Herbert notes the fallacy of interpreting fMRI and other brain imagery as especially meaningful: “The Brain Is Not an Explanation”. I’m pointing to this...
Noah Snyder-Mackler’s continuing series in the NY Times’ “Scientist at Work” blog has been providing a journal of his fieldwork on gelada baboons.
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
Carl Zimmer writes about theories of consciousness in today’s Science NY Times, and describes the work of my Wisconsin colleague, Giulio Tononi.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an “internal document” from the Marc Hauser investigation: “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard”. T...
Maybe by now everybody has seen the story about Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:
Jonah Lehrer in Wired has a long profile of Robert Sapolsky and his work on stress in baboons: “Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine”
Michael Balter writes in Science about a meeting called “Culture Evolves”: “Probing Culture’s Secrets, From Capuchins to Children.”
The science page of the NY Times has a conversation with Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Woods’ new book is Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in...
A short piece in Pan Africa News by Takumasa Yokoyama and Satoshi Yasumoto reports on their observations of a bonobo group after the discovery that one of th...
From an Iowa State press release:
Robot swarms programmed with genetic algorithms to “evolve” their behavior:
Will the swine flu lead to the next big evolutionary change for humans? No. But it has already begun to affect the way people interact with each other. I wan...
Edmund Blair Bolles has posted some entries about the proceedings at a protolanguage conference. There’s much of interest there, but I’ll give a provocative ...
Put dead fish in a scanner, push the button, and see what happens:
Time magazine has a nice article by Carl Zimmer, which profiles anthropologist Brian Hare, who’s been busy studying dogs:
A nice story about Crickette Sanz’ and David Morgan’s work with chimpanzees of the Goualango Triangle, and the tools they use to forage for army ants:
Michael Balter writes about the work of Liverpool archaeologist Natalie Uomini, who is studying the evolution of handedness by experiment and attempting to f...
William Saletan reviews Robert Wright’s book, The Evolution of God, with some discussion of Nicholas Wade’s upcoming book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion E...
One step closer to Ewoks:
Last week I pointed to a really stupid story in the Times (UK): “Women are getting more beautiful”. Once upon a time, I had a reader complain that I called t...
Dear Prof. Hawks,
Ann Althouse points to a “chilling locution” in a Wall Street Journal story about health spending: “Nearly 10% of Health Spending Due to Obesity, Report Says”
Wired’s science blog has a piece on cetacean culture and communciation: “Whales might be as much like people as apes are”. Dalhousie University researcher Ha...
For some reason, it’s “bash evolutionary psychology” week. First, Sharon Begley writes a 7-page essay in Newsweek, “Don’t Blame the Caveman.”, and now David ...
Jennifer Viegas writes about dogs as a model for human social evolution.
A long time ago, I got into a very heated argument with somebody about whether animals feel pleasure. I don’t think we disagreed really in the particulars – ...
Hmm….
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written a new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding to be released this spring, and the New York ...
Natalie Angier enters a nice article on deception in animals, focusing on primates.
When in doubt, cooling the brain always seems like a good answer:
Dienekes points to a study by Marieke van Leeuwen and colleagues, in which they assess the phenotypic correlation between IQ and brain volume in a sample of ...
There’s no end of bunkum just-so stories about the evolution of human behaviors. Not saying they’re all bunkum, just that many are, particularly when they’re...
So there’s this story about how your fear response may explain your politics:
I happened to be lecturing about cause-effect relationships in my Biology of Mind course today, and will continue the subject next time. So I was interested ...
Oliver Sacks reviews the new book, Hurry Down Sunshine in the current New York Review of Books. It’s an interesting read, coupled with Sacks’ own experiences...
Darwin, in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, p. 222-223, referring to the muscles involved in furrowing the brow during a frown:
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel prints a nice article about the work of my UW colleague, Jenny Boughman. Boughman studies adaptation and mating behavior in st...
Scientific American Mind has an interesting article in the September issue, called “High-aptitude minds”. The article ponders explanations for how smart brai...
If you’re interested in athletic performance and genetics, read Daniel Macarthur on ACTN3, sprinting, and Jamaica:
I missed this op-ed by David Barash when it came out last month. It is an argument that commentators on the political left would prefer to ignore evolution j...
Another sign I’m not expecting enough of my students: “Worms do calculus to find food”:
Jonah Lehrer went in to WALL-E (an enormously entertaining movie) and came out thinking of Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals:
At Mixing Memory, Chris describes a study that is just twisted enough to make you want to be a psychologist:
Dave Munger reviews a study of an experiment in reputation-building:
The New Yorker has a fascinating article about Irene Pepperberg and the way people are grieving over her deceased parrot, Alex:
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 criti...
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 : Evolutio...
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 ...
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 modul...
I'm reading through David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. It's a back-burner read for me; I pic...