Link: A deep dive into Cahokia
Annalee Newitz has a detailed and fascinating story in Ars Technica about the Cahokia site, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis: “Fi...
All posts tagged with Holocene
Third molar agenesis: a puzzling case of recent human evolution
One of the most obvious cases of recent human evolution is the increasing frequency with which individuals don’t develop third molars, what is called “M3 age...
Lactase persistence in review
Nature this week has a nice news article about the evolution of lactase persistence by Andrew Curry: “Archaeology: The milk revolution”. The article discusse...
Culture-gene coevolution and language
Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley, in a recent essay in Science, discuss the relationship between the genetic mutations that distinguish humans and other primates...
My review of "Paleofantasy"
I have a review of Marlene Zuk’s new book, Paleofantasy, in this week’s Nature: “Evolutionary biology: Twisting the tale of human evolution” Hawks:Paleofanta...
Coprolite microbial ecology
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Recent evolution of coding variants
How did I get myself quoted in a story as the skeptic about recent human evolution? (“Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase”). After all, I’ve been a ...
Indus health
Anthropology News interviews Gwen Robbins Schug and Veena Mushrif Tripathy on their work documenting health and mortality in the Indus Valley civilization: “...
The sign of four
Gene Expression this morning is worth some thought, a post about the mtDNA of Andaman Islanders and their connections to mainland Asian populations. “Present...
Spatial dispersal, parallel adaptation, and the "Stooge effect"
Peter Ralph and Graham Coop have an interesting paper in the current Genetics, titled, “Parallel Adaptation: One or Many Waves of Advance of an Advantageous ...
Mailbag: The teacher who wouldn't believe in shrinking brains
My son, a student at [redacted university], was recently ridiculed by his professor in class when my son suggested that the human brain has been shrinking fo...
More on Tibet, demography and selection
My post about the Tibetan high altitude selection story last Friday summarized the research and included some criticism of the demographic model applied in t...
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast?
Did the altitude of the Tibetan plateau lead to the fastest instance of human adaptation yet known?
Humans still evolving…
Time has a story about Stephen Stearns and colleagues’ work characterizing ongoing selection using the Framingham Heart Study sample:
Neolithic migrationism
Dienekes has a nice post about the relation of Neolithic Europeans, migration models, and how anthropological views of migration have changed over the last c...
End of the ice age, cored
A Danish newspaper reports on some recent ice core research:
Weaknesses of evolution
The NY Times reports on evolution and education in Texas:
FOXP2 is really recent, it really did introgress (if it's not contamination)
That's the thrust of a technical comment by Graham Coop and colleagues, now online in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The letter refers to the extraction o...
Why human evolution accelerated
n. b. This is a story about my work on recent human evolution, describing some of the main results and how the work came about. The story refers to my paper ...
EVOLUTION IS OVER…WATCH MORE TV
That was the message that just flashed surreally on my TV screen, from the old U2 "ZooTV" tour. Yes, that's the one where the Edge is wearing a beret.
Iceman pseudo-aneurysm
That's the story in this article by Patrizia Pernter and colleagues:
Recent megatsunamis
The NY Times has an article by Sandra Blakeslee describing geological evidence for recent (i.e. Holocene) megatsunamis:
Recent evolution and future evolution
Wired has a short article by Annalee Newitz about recent evolutionary changes and their implications for futurists:
The rats of Easter Island
A new article in Science is claiming that the Easter Island population did not have a long duration on the island, and probably did not cause its own popula...
Body size in Holocene southern Africa
I was just taking notes on this paper by Sealy and Pfeiffer (2000), and found some good quotes about body size in the Bushmen, both historically and in arch...
Paleodemographic correlates of population growth
Not much to do but link to this and wait for the paper to appear:
At least 10 percent of human genes under recent selection
It's hard to beat the abstract of this paper by Eric Wang and colleagues (2006):
Diamond on skin color
Jared Diamond has a short review article in Nature on the evolution of skin color. This is an old story in anthropology, but it has taken some interesting t...
The origin and evolution of the Western diet
There is a very nice review paper with that title in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, by Loren Cordain and colleagues. The basic story is in the ...