Other researchers have offered some caution about the assumption that climate change is the cause, in part because of the sparseness of the fossil record.
Human evolution
New human salivary glands discovered
Because no one knew these glands existed, we haven’t had to hear a lot of just-so stories about how they evolved. Evolutionary biologists will need to make up for the lost time … 😉
There, that’s it! Environment changes made humans more adaptable
Hey, this is a good theory as to why people needed to branch out and develop more networks. But we’re overlooking a key issue here: Humans could only do that if something already differentiated us from hyenas… It wasn’t just the environment.
Did hominins from 300 kya use fire to enhance tools?
Those hominins get smarter every time we run into them.
This time, climate change helped do in the Neanderthals
Eventually, there will be more explanations for the demise of the Neanderthals as a separate group than there were Neanderthals. But never mind, the series has plenty of episodes to run in the meantime.
(Reformed) New Scientist 3: The Selfish Gene Is No Longer Cool
Readers may recall that New Scientist published an article three days ago on 13 ways we need to “rethink the theory of nature.” Their Number 3 rethink is … Move Over, Selfish Gene. It’s replaced not just by kin selection now but by cultural group selection. Most of the article is paywalled but here’s the Read More…
Researchers expected the human brain to be a tangled mess and found a street map instead
Funny that the brain would be organized just as if it were the work of a skilled programmer or something …
Revisiting the Neanderthals without a sense of superiority
Perhaps some are beginning to back away from Darwinism without speaking its name. Just quietly starting to adopt other views.
Cooking skills in Australia at 65,000 years ago
The researchers say that these complex food preparation skills show that these people groups were technologically innovative and did not just forage, eating shellfish and such.
Unexpected complexity found in human heart – a use for the myocardial trabeculae
Cold Spring Harbor: “The researchers discovered that the shape of trabeculae affects the performance of the heart, suggesting a potential link to heart disease. ” Is this true only of human hearts? What about ancient ones?
Humans 200,000 years ago made beds of ash and grass
Some of the ash was from camphor wood, a medicinal herb. They must have known how to control fire if they had easy access to ash. Like the Neanderthals, they get smarter with each cycle of papers.
Early hominins (480,000 years ago) were—wait for it!—more sophisticated than thought
Maybe Darwinians should canvass at LinkedIn for a new subhuman.
Did humans really make the artifacts found at 29 kya in a cave in Mexico?
One suggestion is that the misshapen tools were made by novices. We likely need more discoveries to tell.
Handax crafted by Homo erectus 1.4 million years ago
Researcher: the bone hand ax “suggests that Homo erectus technology was more sophisticated and versatile than we had thought”
The “evolutionary origin” of string
120 thousand years ago, people appear to have twisted flax stems (the plant from which linen is derived) to make string.