Some dissatisfaction with review articles
John Ioannidis often speaks out on abuses of confidence and statistics in science. He recently did an interview with Retraction Watch in which he commented u...
All posts tagged with Pliocene
Is Little Foot really 3.67 million years old?
Darryl Granger and colleagues report in Nature this week on the date of the StW 573 specimen, commonly known as “Little Foot”, from Sterkfontein, South Afric...
Link: A visit to Ethiopian paleoanthropology
I’m frankly amazed I didn’t link to this Nautilus article when it came out last year: “Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard”. In it, Amy Maxmen trave...
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...
The Malapa Soft Tissue Project FAQ
These are a few of the questions that I think are essential to understand our aims with the project and how we expect it will unfold. The future depends on w...
Announcing the Malapa Soft Tissue Project
I am pleased to announce a new open science initiative, focused on a discovery that is unique in paleoanthropology. Together we are going to find out if the ...
Cutmarked bones from Dikika critiqued
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovi...
Australopithecus afarensis used stone tools
UPDATE (2011-09-06) Note: The conclusions of the research were later critiqued, I posted on that criticism after this post.
Fishy story from Koobi Fora
I have to credit a reader for that headline, and for forwarding the paper. It’s another case of the infamous PNAS release policy. The press that came from th...
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the pelvis
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
Ardipithecus backlash begins
John Noble Wilford reports in the NY Times on today’s technical comments that challenge various aspects of the interpretation of Ardipithecus.
A virtual walk into the past
Via a reader:
Why didn't they let Kenyanthropus save them?
In the fossil record, a species is a hypothesis. We can’t test that hypothesis in the way we do with living animals. Even in the dark, after all the paleonto...
The teeth that didn't bark
Earlier in the week, I wrote about the new interpretation of fossil teeth from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia (“Woranso-Mille: A ladder not a bush”). There was one ...
Woronso-Mille: A ladder not a bush
In a new paper, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues describe new hominin fossils from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. A good thing: It gives somebody like me a r...
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...
Lomekwi muckraking
Michael Balter asks a question I’ve hit here a few times: “What ever happened to Kenyanthropus platyops?”
Ardipithecus FAQ
Today is Ardipithecus day. Eleven papers in tomorrow’s issue of Science describe the research on one exceptional skeleton (numbered ARA-VP-6/500, nicknamed “...
The Pleistocene "land grab"
Holy stratigraphy, Batman!
Pliocene blahs
While writing that last post, about the redefinition of “Pleistocene”, I went browsing through my archives. I was surprised to see that I haven’t tagged a po...
Is a lack of fossils the problem with early Homo?
Just noticing, in this John Noble Wilford article:
Links that won't waste your time, Sept. 17 edition
Gene Expression contributor p-ter expresses his (un)excitement about the Ventrome:
The Bili chimpanzees
A nice piece in The Guardian about the chimpanzee population near Bili, DRC. The lede is the suspicion of an apparent leopard kill -- that's chimpanzees kil...
Miocene hominids and a crisis of confidence
Out of this week's Science Times special on evolution, I clicked into John Noble Wilford's article first, titled "The Human Family Tree Has Become a Bush Wi...
HIV susceptibility locus protects against an extinct virus
What's behind the headline about "resurrecting an ancient virus"?
Three million years of unwanted guests
Well, I guess they've got a plot for the pilot of that caveman show:
Has the dam broken on mtDNA selection?
The current Science has a paper by Eric Bazin and colleagues comparing mtDNA diversity with population size, history and ecology of 3000 animal species.
"Spacecraft all over the Pliocene"
Rex Dalton has a great two-page article in Nature about the bush vs. ladder dispute. It keys off of the Middle Awash Australopithecus anamensis article by Wh...
A ladder, not a bush?
Tim White and colleagues (2006) report on new fossils from Aramis and a new site, Asa Issie, with estimated dates between 4.1 and 4.2 million years ago.
Sahara at least 7 million years old
A concise 4-paragraph article by Mathieu Schuster and colleagues reports on dune deposits that show the Sahara formed during the Late Miocene.
Mojokerto site rediscovered?
An upcoming paper in Journal of Human Evolution by O. F. Huffman and colleagues reports on a possible location for the Mojokerto skull. A 1994 paper by Carl...
Leading me to climate frustration
Science seems to have had a stealth theme going last week on climate change, and it included this perspective by Anna Behrensmeyer on climate change in huma...
When chimpanzees stand
The current (February 2006) issue of AJPA carries an article by Craig Stanford describing the context of bipedal posture for chimpanzees in the Bwindi Impen...
Tilting at absent Asian australopithecines
In Nature a couple of weeks ago, Robin Dennell and Wil Roebroeks had a provocative paper exploring the possibility that early humans (i.e. Homo erectus) ori...
Buller on mental adaptations
I'm reading through David Buller's Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. It's a back-burner read for me; I pic...
The first Neanderchimp?
McBrearty and Jablonski (2005) report on the first discovery of chimpanzee fossil remains. The described fossils are three teeth: left and right upper centr...
Tuber or not tuber? Rats are the question
From a new paper by Greg Laden and Richard Wrangham:
Sexual dimorphism in A. afarensis, again
Earlier this year, Michael Plavcan et al. (2005) had a critique in Journal of Human Evolution of the 2004 paper by Philip Reno et al. in PNAS concerning sex...
Technological sophistication of the earliest toolmakers
One study reported at the meetings brought to mind a growing literature on the sophistication of Pliocene archaeological assemblages, grouped as "Oldowan" o...
PhyloCode and human evolution
The April issue of Discover has a feature article on PhyloCode, focusing on the roles of Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in trying to revise the code ...
Age of hominids from Sterkfontein
A recent spate of articles has carried on a debate about the age of the Sterkfontein hominids. Sterkfontein is a complicated site, including several distinc...
Earliest hominids :: thoughts and roundup
Today I lectured on the earliest hominid samples for my graduate course on australopithecines. This is the first time I have been able to give a full lectur...
Speciation
Speciation is the cessation of interbreeding between one animal population and all other populations with which it formerly exchanged genes. When interbreed...
Ardipithecus remains from Gona
News story at MSNBC
Forelimbs and climbing in early hominids
Compared to their small body mass, the forelimbs of early hominids are both longer and more muscular than those of recent humans. The arms are shorter than ...
Lufengpithecus :: overview
Lufengpithecus lufengensis is a fossil ape from China, dating to the latest Miocene and Pliocene. A single mandible from the site of Longgupo argues that Luf...
The Great Rift Valley
The climate of the Early Pliocene differed from that of the Miocene primarily by the appearance of a cooling and drying trend across Africa, where early hom...
Fossil apes
The hominoids--the group including humans and living and fossil apes--originated sometime during the Oligocene period, between 34 and 24 million years ago. ...
What restrained the chimpanzees?
Working on a paper about early hominid lineage diversity, Milford [Wolpoff] has pointed out a sticking point in consideration of niche breadth in early homin...