Hippos in South America
The Washington Post has an opinion piece by Robert Gebelhoff asking the tough questions about a South American herd of African herbivores: “The great conundr...
All posts tagged with South America
Notable: Glyptodonts and megatheres were herbivores
Notable: Bocherens, Hervé, Martin Cotte, Ricardo A. Bonini, Pablo Straccia, Daniel Scian, Leopoldo Soibelzon, Francisco J. Prevosti. 2017. Isotopic insight o...
Scientists working to understand how monkeys rebound in wake of yellow fever epidemic
My University of Wisconsin–Madison colleague, Karen Strier, has studied the muriqui monkeys of Brazil for her entire career. Now, the in small patch of fores...
Link: Peanut origins
Peanuts have an interesting origin: “Modern Peanut’s Wild Cousin, Thought Extinct, Found in Andes”.
Did humans approach the southern tip of South America more than 18,000 years ago?
Tom Dillehay has for many years investigated the archaeological remains at Monte Verde, Chile. These provide some of the earliest evidence of human habitatio...
Recent adaptive evolution to resist the toxic effects of arsenic
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution provides an interesting new example of recent adaptation in a human population. Carina Schlebusch and colleagu...
A look at early South American sites
Nature last week carried a great article by Barbara Fraser about the growing research into the earliest peoples of South America: “The first South Americans:...
Across the waters
Japanese tsunami debris has been arriving on the northwest coast of the United States, carrying exotic Asian marine species along for the ride. Earth magazin...
Heyerdahl hyperdiffusion
Martin Rundkvist has been giving a series of lectures about pseudoarchaeologists. Today he writes about Thor Heyerdahl, setting his ideas into the mid-20th-c...
Sloth bombers
Brian Switek notes a new study on the locomotor dynamics of sloths. I perked up when reading this passage…
Last of a tribe
I want to pass along a story from Slate’s Monte Reel, about a modern-day Ishi in remote Brazil: “The most isolated man on the planet.”
Mailbag: Haplogroups of Peruvian mummies
Now that we have looked at the DNA of the Tarim Basin mummies, when is somebody going to do the same for the mummies found at Paracasa, Peru? I know that an...
Amazon structures
More evidence of dense Precolumbian habitation of the Amazon basin: