Killing it: From handaxes to hafted spears, no difference in hunting or meat-eating
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?
Last week Nature released an intriguing paper that demonstrates super-long-distance correlations in rainfall patterns, showing how the South Asian monsoon is...
This week in Science, a short commentary by William Ruddiman and colleagues challenges the idea that scientists should recognize an Anthropocene epoch as hav...
An interesting short article in ScienceNordic reports on ancient items melting out of Scandinavian glaciers: “Items lost in the Stone Age are found in meltin...
Notable paper: Roseman, CC, Auerbach BM. 2015. Ecogeography, genetics, and the evolution of human body form. Journal of Human Evolution 78: 80-90. doi:10.101...
In Nautilus David Grinspoon interviews science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his recent work, 2312 and the disconnect between technological optim...
Adam Van Arsdale comments on a new paper Donges:2011 that tries to correlate variability in paleoclimates with human evolutionary events: “Paleoanthropology ...
The Associated Press ran an article last week about Sergey Zimov and his attempts to “rewild” a small corner of Siberia:
Thanks to a reader:
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...
Theodosius Dobzhansky, concluding a paper titled, “Evolution in the Tropics”, which considered the role of physical environment versus other factors as evolu...
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
If you’re a regular reader, you may remember my comments on some geologists’ attempt to define an “Anthropocene” epoch to recognize the world-changing scope ...
There’s a really interesting animation of the spreading Iceland ash plume, made into a YouTube by Jonathan Crowe: “Eyjafjallajkull and European Airspace”.
Anne-Laure Daniau, Francesco d’Errico and Maria Fernanda Snchez Goi went looking for signs that Upper Paleolithic Europeans were using fire to control ecosys...
Lots of people have written about the collapse of the ancient Maya, often as some kind of “lesson” about how present-day society needs to change for its own ...
I am examining the pathways that climate might have influenced human evolution, and as I wrote earlier, I’m focusing first on the issue of relatively short-t...
I have from time to time written short pieces here about climate fluctuations and their effect on human evolution. This topic was a major theme in the recent...
John Tierney reports on an idea to link carbon tax increases to future global temperatures. The idea is that if warming doesn’t happen, there won’t be a tax,...
Anthropology.net reports on new work by François Paquay and colleagues that casts more doubt on the Younger Dryas impact event (“The Clovis comet that wasn’t...
In 2007, R. B. Firestone and colleagues published evidence of an extraterrestrial impact, roughly coincident with the onset of the cold climate event known a...
New Scientist is running a nice article titled, “1709: The year that Europe froze.” It hits many interesting points – at the very dawn of systematic temperat...
Here’s a story from earlier this month in New Scientist:
News on an interesting dissertation about the last glaciation:
I’ve been out of e-mail range for the past week. In the meantime several people e-mailed me this new paper:
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
Here in paleoanthropologyland, we are often subject to the whims of the nomenclatura. These folks come up with new “logical” ways to name things, and we eith...
On the subject of weeds and biological invasions, touched on in this week’s “Practical Evolution” essay, the NY Times ran a long piece last week about the re...
Elizabeth Pennisi, reporting from the Evolution meetings, has turned in an article about how biologists are using the 19th century plant records of Henry Dav...
The coming attractions bin at Journal of Human Evolution includes a paper by Kaye Reed, reviewing the evidence of paleoenvironment in the Hadar formation:
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 n...
A Cornelia Dean article explores a theme that concerns many primatologists, indeed anyone who studies threatened animals: When you confine a small set of an...
The current Nature is carrying an article by geochronologist Chronis Tzedakis and colleagues, claiming that Neandertals didn't succumb to climate change. I ...
Andrew Curry profiles ancient DNA researcher Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen. Willerslev is best known for the characterization of chloropl...
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
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 ...
I just love that line from this GSA press release (via Science Blog):
A concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene.
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 huma...
I'm sure you've seen the story:
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 th...
Should we return proboscids, lions and other megafauna to North America's Great Plains? Nature is running this commentary (subscription required) by Josh Do...
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...