Looking at linguistic echoes of extinct species
Priscilla Wehi and coworkers have a neat article in The Conversation describing a recent research paper that looked at traditional sayings in Māori, to try t...
All posts tagged with extinction
Chimpanzees don’t necessarily live where biologists thought they did
Distribution maps of wild species are inaccurate for lots of reasons. When it comes to distribution maps of wild primates in tropical Africa, one of the bigg...
The so-called Toba bottleneck didn’t happen
Chad Yost and colleagues have a long and detailed article in the current Journal of Human Evolution about why the Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago did...
Link: Biologists working for political initiative on anti-extinction
“Making a Mass Anti-Extinction Movement” in Pacific Standard covers some of the concerns that led a group of 49 biologists to pen an open letter calling for ...
Notable: Penguin population turnover from ancient DNA
Notable paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
Culture, mathematical models, and Neandertal extinction
I am not philosophically opposed to building a mathematical model of Neandertal populations. Some of my best work has involved mathematical model-building. M...
Link: The futility of science communication conferences
Rich Borschelt is the communication director for science at the Department of Energy, and recently attended a science communication workshop. He describes at...
Link: Extinction of other human species
Melissa Hogenboom of BBC Earth asks, “Why are we the only human species still alive?” The article features Jean-Jacques Hublin, John Shea and Nicholas Conard...
Link: Will humans extinct themselves into cyborghood?
Alex Tabarrok writes at Marginal Revolution: “Should we care if the human race goes extinct?”
Neandertals from a humanist perspective
It happens that I have a book chapter in press that examines Neandertals as a humanistic perspective. This seems to fit the zeitgeist.
Link: Underwater lemur trove
NSF has released a great short video outlining a new discovery of hundreds of subfossil lemur remains from underwater caves in Madagascar: “Enormous underwat...
Clovis gomphotheres
Guadalupe Sanchez and colleagues reported earlier this month that Clovis artifacts have been found in association with parts of two gomphothere skeletons in ...
Quote: Craig Stanford on gorilla habitat threats
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
Extinction in perspective
A recent question and answer item in BMC Biology focused on human-induced extinctions, featuring expert Baron Robert May May:extinction:2012 (Open access). I...
Mailbag: Volcanic winter for Neandertals, continued
I happened upon your weblog a couple of months ago and find it fascinating, thanks for your effort. If the timeline/data of http://www.sciencedaily.com/rele...
Thinking about the dark days
When it comes to the long term future of humanity, I’m fundamentally an optimist. But The Atlantic has an interview with Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford Uni...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...
"I would run screaming away"
This is such an incredible story about the “Clovis comet” hypothesis, I don’t know where to start: “Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth”.
Neandertals and the death rays from outer space
OK, so maybe it wasn’t volcanoes.
The Neandertals of Mount Doom
Well, I already snarked on the science headlines that have been claiming volcanoes “wiped out” the Neandertals. Some variation of this story, swapping in a d...
"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 ...
Mailbag: Neandertal backbreeding
In your blog, you have commented on the prospect of re-creating a neandertal from a "completed" genome.....I agree with your views and predictions.
Frozen zoo
The Observer has a nice article describing the “Frozen Zoo” of samples kept by the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research.
Genyornis in Australian rock art?
Lots of cave paintings in Europe depict animals now extinct. Australian researchers have recently identified a rock painting as a depiction of the extinct th...
Megafaunal meth
I’ve seen this story around the net today, so I thought I would link to the short research paper by Felisa Smith and colleagues: “Methane emissions from exti...
Mailbag: Back-breeding aurochsen
Re: “Back-breeding aurochsen”:
Back-breeding aurochsen
I was just talking in class today about how people want to back-breed aurochsen out of extinction. Here’s a new story about the idea, from the Telegraph:
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...
Kate Wong on Neandertal twilight
Kate Wong’s cover story in the current Scientific American, “The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals”, is also available online. It’s a great pleasure to ...
The bad side of island life
It’s not news that island populations are vulnerable to invasion by alien competitors and predators. A new study by Helena Berglund and colleagues in America...
Extinct marsupial lion in Australian rock art
Speaking of super-predators from the past, Natural History Magazine has a short article describing Australian rock art that may depict the extinct marsupial ...
Cloning the extinct
Spanish scientists have cloned an extinct Pyrenean ibex:
"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:
Dutch aurochsen 600 AD
Not a big story, but nice reminder that some extinct megafauna were still with us in historic times:
When disease strikes an island species
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
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...
Is language extinction a good thing?
That's the question posed by Ronald Butters in a recent book review, discussed by Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log. The book is Language in the USA, edited b...
Pig extinctions in Polynesia
I happened across an interesting article from last year by Christina Giovas that looks at pigs in Polynesia. People carried pigs with them to most of the is...
Another use for that frozen mammoth testicle trove
On the topic of increasing scientific illiteracy, we have this frozen mammoth sperm puff piece from the AP:
Taint of the quagga
Slate has an interesting slide-show by Jon Lackman about efforts to resurrect the quagga. The quagga was either a species or subspecies of Plains zebra, liv...
Nothing says "Christmas" like a dodo death assemblage
I'm sure you've seen the story:
The Neandertal mtDNA story: 2004 edition
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We have learned vastly more about Neandertal genetics since then. These two papers are important to the history of discoveri...