MSA from Karungu, Kenya and the patchy landscape of Late Pleistocene Africa
J. Tyler Faith and colleagues report in the current Journal of Human Evolution on their work understanding the context of the Middle Stone Age archaeological...
All posts tagged with paleoclimate
The sea shall give up her dead
I really like this ScienceNOW account by Traci Watson of new work that has uncovered ancient DNA in deep-seafloor contexts: “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below S...
Science and piracy
Paul Salopek has a story for National Geographic about the impact of Somali pirates on oceanographic science: “A Hidden Victim of Somali Pirates: Science”. O...
Chris Henshilwood profile
Nature News has an article written by Jeff Tollefson, which profiles archaeologist Chris Henshilwood and his work at Blombos, South Africa: “Human evolution:...
Rick Potts interview
Discover magazine has interviewed Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, featured in a special “evolution” issue “How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All t...
Dead Dead Sea prehistory
Emily Sohn reports on a drilling project that is bringing to light ancient drying episodes in the Dead Sea basin: “A dry Dead Sea before biblical times”.
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 ...
La Cotte de St. Brelade profiled
The BBC is running a nice article about the ongoing excavations on the island of Jersey at La Cotte de St. Brelade. “Neanderthal survival story revealed in J...
The paleolakes of Egypt
A paper in the December issue of Geology, by Ted Maxwell and colleagues Maxwell:Tushka:2010, describes evidence for a “Lake Erie-sized” paleolake in southwes...
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...
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 ...
"Obviously [spores] are not nanodiamonds"
John Roach reports on the latest episode in the Younger Dryas impact scenario: “Fungi, Feces Show Comet Didn’t Kill Ice Age Mammals?” A key piece of evidence...
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...
Shaken by a monkey-maker
The end of the Eocene was a rough time for a lot of Earth’s flora and fauna – it is recognized as a major extinction event, the Grande Coupure. Substantial g...
Mailbag: Migration and Malthusianism
Re: “Misinformation about brain evolution”
Red beds
I’ve been browsing the Smithsonian’s</i> website supporting their Human Origins hall. There’s a nice feature about the archaeological work at Olorgesai...
Misinformation about brain evolution
Due to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore: “Colin Blakemore: How the human brain got bigger by accident and not thr...
Genetics and archaeology, 2
I’ve just received the book, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, by William Burroughs. I’ll be reading it and reviewing it during th...
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...
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...
NOVA: Becoming Human
OK, I’m going to live-blog this show. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while – I loved the old NOVA series with Don Johanson and have often showed it in...
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...
Did an ice age boost human brain size?
What is going on? I mean, the heat this summer seems to have gotten to people’s heads. Except, it hasn’t been that hot. Heck, nothing could be hot enough for...
Bigfoot biogeography
So a couple of weeks ago, the Journal of Biogeography published a paper arguing that humans and orangutans are sister taxa.
Warfare, catastrophes, six of one, half dozen of the other
I’m reading through the paper by Samuel Bowles, “Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors?” I’ve done some...
Paleoclimate in southern Africa
The Tswaing Crater is around 40 km from Pretoria, South Africa. It was created by an asteroid impact some 200,000 years ago, which released roughly the energ...
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...
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:
End of the ice age, cored
A Danish newspaper reports on some recent ice core research: