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?
All posts tagged with climate
Long-distance weather ‘teleconnections’
Last week Nature released an intriguing paper that demonstrates super-long-distance correlations in rainfall patterns, showing how the South Asian monsoon is...
Writing Anthropocene with a small ‘a’
This week in Science, a short commentary by William Ruddiman and colleagues challenges the idea that scientists should recognize an Anthropocene epoch as hav...
Link: Artifacts melting out of Norwegian glaciers
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: Ancestry matters to ecogeography
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...
Link: Kim Stanley Robinson looks at our future in the Anthropocene
In Nautilus David Grinspoon interviews science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his recent work, 2312 and the disconnect between technological optim...
Finding where datasets line up
Adam Van Arsdale comments on a new paper Donges:2011 that tries to correlate variability in paleoclimates with human evolutionary events: “Paleoanthropology ...
Rewilding Siberia
The Associated Press ran an article last week about Sergey Zimov and his attempts to “rewild” a small corner of Siberia:
Toba "cut down to size"
Thanks to a reader:
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...
Quote: Dobzhansky on the tropics
Theodosius Dobzhansky, concluding a paper titled, “Evolution in the Tropics”, which considered the role of physical environment versus other factors as evolu...
"Neandertal stimulation": Weckler and biogeography
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
Anthropocene redux
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 ...
Ash plume
There’s a really interesting animation of the spreading Iceland ash plume, made into a YouTube by Jonathan Crowe: “Eyjafjallajkull and European Airspace”.
Where there's not smoke…
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...
Defenestrating deforestation
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 ...
Climate reconstruction and human evolution, 2: Tracking climate change
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...
Climate reconstruction and human evolution, 1
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...
Smeersh spionum
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,...
Flying rock skepticism
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...
The Younger Dryas impact fizzle?
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...
Little Ice Age
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...
Comets in the dark ages
Here’s a story from earlier this month in New Scientist:
Late advance of the Swedish ice
News on an interesting dissertation about the last glaciation:
"Competitive exclusion" and the extinction of Neandertals: should we believe it?
I’ve been out of e-mail range for the past week. In the meantime several people e-mailed me this new paper:
Columbus, smallpox and global cooling
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
"Anthropocene"? WhaAAAH?!
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...
Weeds and climate change
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...
"Walden", evolution and climate change
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...
Paleoecology at Hadar
The coming attractions bin at Journal of Human Evolution includes a paper by Kaye Reed, reviewing the evidence of paleoenvironment in the Hadar formation:
A hard bolide to swallow?
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...
Will climate change leave threatened species behind?
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...
Brushing aside a climate red herring
The current Nature is carrying an article by geochronologist Chronis Tzedakis and colleagues, claiming that Neandertals didn't succumb to climate change. I ...
Metagenomics under 2 kilometers of ice
Andrew Curry profiles ancient DNA researcher Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen. Willerslev is best known for the characterization of chloropl...
Quote of the day
Joel Allen (1877:139), quoted in Virginie Millien and colleagues (2006):
Tropical African climate after LGM
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 ...
Unappreciated supervolcanoes
I just love that line from this GSA press release (via Science Blog):
Sahara at least 7 million years old
A concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene.
Leading me to climate frustration
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...
Nothing says "Christmas" like a dodo death assemblage
I'm sure you've seen the story:
Rise in atmospheric oxygen and patterns of mammalian evolution
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...
Pleistocene Park, USA
Should we return proboscids, lions and other megafauna to North America's Great Plains? Nature is running this commentary (subscription required) by Josh Do...
The mammoth tundra
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...