If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”: What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal […]
Human evolution
Did fatness rule the Stone Age?
Not all Stone Age Venus figurines, of which 200 have been found, were fat. It doesn’t seem as though much has changed over 25 millennia except that many more people have much more to eat. So fatness wouldn’t signify success in more modern cultures.
Are synthetic chemicals altering the fabric of our bodies?
It’s certainly worth reflecting on: It’s fair to say that PCBs and fluorocarbons have altered the biochemical composition of the food web and the interior of the human body, and in the case of the PFASs, the water we drink. (Some PFASs can even fall with rain.) These have been swift, sweeping changes over the […]
What interests does “poor design of the human body” rhetoric serve?
One of the interesting things about this type of rhetoric is that it doesn’t need to be in sync with anything in particular and it can be repeated indefinitely without facing challenges.
First human couple still in the news
And the advent of genome mapping has kept them in the science news too. Think “mitochondrial Eve” and quarter million-year-old Adam. It’ll get more interesting still with new finds, we can be sure.
Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?
Perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate “blue” without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don’t have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we “categorize”.)
Evolution or art? The chicken as a human artifact
We’ve probably had even more influence on the dog, of course. But here’s the interesting thing: When dogs run wild, they just go back to being wolfhounds after a few generations. Apparently, feral chickens just breed with still wild fowl and revert to ancestral types. Just how really significant irreversible changes occur remains unclear.
Does human mortality really slow down between 105 yrs and 110 years?
Remember the story earlier this year about the anomalous plateau found in the human lifespan, such that “after the age of 105, human mortality seems to hit a plateau. That is, you aren’t any more likely to die at 110 than at 105”? It’s been challenged by a study in PLOS Biology which suggests that the […]
Human extinction as collateral damage
Recently, Clemson U philosopher Todd May whistled through the system on the pros and cons of human extinction: May’s reasoning is fascinatingly nihilistic. He argues that human extinction would be tragic because we have a tragic flaw – our shortsighted use of the environment – which would be recitified by our extinction. “Humanity,” he says, […]
Little Foot, 3.67 mya, died in a conflict with a baboon-like monkey?
It’s amazing how detailed finds can be these days, whether or not the story offered at New Scientist is the correct account of what happened.
“Adam and Eve” researchers say their work does NOT disprove Darwin
Remember the recent study in which Adam and Eve practically reappeared and extant species turned out to be only about 100,000 years old? The researchers, who found their own conclusion “very surprising” and “fought against it” are anxious that the world know that none of it disproves Darwin: Shortly after the Daily Mail published its […]
Mitochondrial DNA from Dad might affect claims about “mitochondrial Eve,” says biologist
He thinks the Central Dogma of mitochondrial DNA needs to be rethought.
Smithsonian: We really don’t know why humans don’t have fur
Some genomics experts and molecular biologists are looking into it. But apart from that, it has remained the province of evolution storytelling
A gene that sets primates (apes and humans) apart from other mammals
From ScienceDaily: University of Otago researchers have discovered information about a gene that sets primates — great apes and humans — apart from other mammals, through the study of a rare developmental brain disorder. … Dr O’Neill and research collaborators from Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, then set forth to test the point that […]
Researcher: Teeth are an “astonishing” source of information
Reflections on a recent study of Neanderthal children’s teeth and one other (5000 ya): Teeth are a really useful indicator of past environments. This is possible because teeth have biological rhythms, and key events get locked inside them. These faithful internal clocks run night and day, year after year, and include daily growth lines and […]