A look at the glacial lakes of Siberia
Many readers in North America have heard of Glacial Lake Agassiz, Glacial Lake Missoula, Glacial Lake Bonneville, and many other large bodies of water in Nor...
All posts tagged with Pleistocene
Carnivores and early Homo
Ann Gibbons reports on a recent conference investigating the interaction of climate change and Plio-Pleistocene human evolution “Where’s the beef? Early huma...
Anthropology 105, lecture 5: Hemoglobin
In this lecture, I do a bit of a departure by discussing a body part that is microscopic: the hemoglobin molecule that carries oxygen inside of our red blood...
Rewilding Siberia
The Associated Press ran an article last week about Sergey Zimov and his attempts to “rewild” a small corner of Siberia:
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...
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...
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...
The Pleistocene "land grab"
Holy stratigraphy, Batman!
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
End of the ice age, cored
A Danish newspaper reports on some recent ice core research: