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...
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...
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...
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...
“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 paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
I am not philosophically opposed to building a mathematical model of Neandertal populations. Some of my best work has involved mathematical model-building. M...
Rich Borschelt is the communication director for science at the Department of Energy, and recently attended a science communication workshop. He describes at...
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...
Alex Tabarrok writes at Marginal Revolution: “Should we care if the human race goes extinct?”
It happens that I have a book chapter in press that examines Neandertals as a humanistic perspective. This seems to fit the zeitgeist.
NSF has released a great short video outlining a new discovery of hundreds of subfossil lemur remains from underwater caves in Madagascar: “Enormous underwat...
Guadalupe Sanchez and colleagues reported earlier this month that Clovis artifacts have been found in association with parts of two gomphothere skeletons in ...
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
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...
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...
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...
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...
This is such an incredible story about the “Clovis comet” hypothesis, I don’t know where to start: “Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth”.
OK, so maybe it wasn’t volcanoes.
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...
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
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.
The Observer has a nice article describing the “Frozen Zoo” of samples kept by the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research.
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...
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...
Re: “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:
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’s cover story in the current Scientific American, “The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals”, is also available online. It’s a great pleasure to ...
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...
Speaking of super-predators from the past, Natural History Magazine has a short article describing Australian rock art that may depict the extinct marsupial ...
Spanish scientists have cloned an extinct Pyrenean ibex:
I’ve been out of e-mail range for the past week. In the meantime several people e-mailed me this new paper:
Not a big story, but nice reminder that some extinct megafauna were still with us in historic times:
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
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...
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...
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...
On the topic of increasing scientific illiteracy, we have this frozen mammoth sperm puff piece from the AP:
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...
I'm sure you've seen the story:
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...