Blog articles
Remembering my journey among the kurgans
During my recent travel to Siberia I was able to visit many sites of prehistoric cultures.
Some say humans are apes, but I disagree
I don’t know why so many people who accept and promote evolution have such a dim view of phylogenetic systematics. How else to explain why I so often hear the canard, “Humans are apes”? My children can tell what an ape is. I work very hard to tell them
Growing genetic data suggest a two-phase model for prehistoric population expansions in Africa
I describe results from two papers of African genetic variation, which show that the population growth from agriculture followed an earlier demographic expansion.
Did Neandertals live at or above the Arctic Circle?
Examining work by Ludovic Slimak and coworkers on the Byzovaya site, with Mousterian artifacts near the Arctic Circle in Russia.
Modern human origins was more interesting than a single point of dispersal
A study of SNP variation across Africa enables us to look at a structured ancestral population long before 100,000 years ago.
Did humans colonize the northern latitudes without fire?
An article by Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa argues that fire was not present in Europe before 400,000 years ago.
Did human language evolve as a spandrel?
A critical look at the point of view that human language did not originate from its adaptive role in communication, but from other cognitive functions.
How much of human evolution was due to polygenic adaptation?
This has been an eventful week for those of us who study the dynamics of recent selection in humans. The most significant event was the publication of a paper describing genetic analysis of a long selection experiment in Drosophila. Although the experiment differs from most natural instances of selection in
Why do some invasive species start to succeed only after a delay?
Reviewing a body of evolutionary theory that tries to understand the ultimate success of some invasions after a lag.
