Chimpanzees learn to crack nuts faster than humans
Early this year, Christophe Boesch and coworkers released a paper describing their observations on how fast chimpanzees and humans learn to crack nuts. They ...
All posts tagged with learning
Notable: Culture and compressibility
Notable paper: Tamariz, Monica and Simon Kirby. 2015. Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science 39:171-183. doi:10.1111/cogs.12144
Neandertals lacked mental eminence
If you care about Neandertal behavior and haven’t read this 2004 article by John Speth, you really should treat yourself: “News flash: Negative evidence conv...
Primate extractive foraging and tool use
An important difference among some primate species is their ability to get foods that are hidden or protected by natural defenses. A little cleverness may yi...
Crows hate cavemen
Stephanie Pappas reports on experiments with social learning in crows.
Boas goes low
While researching another question, I have been reviewing some Franz Boas. In 1936, American Anthropologist ran a piece by Alfred Kroeber which reviewed some...
Jebel Faya and early-stage reduction
Simon Armitage and colleagues Armitage:2011 describe archaeological remains from Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates. The assemblages come from a rock sh...
Babies and dominance
I have a reader chock full of articles from this week’s Science. One that I found interesting may not get a lot of attention: “Big and Mighty: Preverbal Infa...
Robot genetics
Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller describe experiments that combine genetic algorithms and robots. It’s a review essay rather than a description of new resea...
Mailbag: Easier to receive than to give
With reference to “We have ways of changing behavior”, a reader writes:
Learning, population size, and "modern human behavior"
I’m a big booster of the idea that human demographic expansion helped drive our recent evolution. So you might expect me to like the new paper by Adam Powell...
Darwin smiling
Fig. 20 from Darwin 1872. "Terror"
Not the parrot sketch
The New Yorker has a fascinating article about Irene Pepperberg and the way people are grieving over her deceased parrot, Alex: