If your coins keep coming up heads instead of tails, millions of years after millions of years, something is happening that isn’t mere chance.
Human evolution
Your daily dose of COVID crazy: Neanderthals are to blame for COVID-19
At Phys.org: This September, Pääbo and colleague Hugo Zeberg announced that the major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals.
Claim: Blue-eyed humans have a single common ancestor
They are saying that there were no blue-eyed people before 10,000 years ago. Someone should interview the prof on whether he believes that all humans are, in any event, descended from a single pair, Adam and Eve. Just for fun. See what he says.
Dear Darwin, We have finally found an explanation for teaching! – Researchers
The problem that would be obvious to anyone but the researchers (apparently) is that everyone involved in the study knew what was going on in the big picture and that what they were doing didn’t really matter. The opposite would be true of our ancestors.
The Guardian: Maybe our early human ancestors hibernated
Others seem just as certain that they didn’t hibernate. As Harrison points out, humans also discovered fire and clothes in the meantime. One might add, storytelling around the fire.
Researchers: There is new evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead
Researchers: This new information proves that the body of this two-year-old Neandertal child was purposefully deposited in a pit dug in a sedimentary layer around 41,000 years ago; however, further discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical extension of Neandertal burial practices.
Primate visual systems “totally indistinguishable” after 55 million years
“55 Million years of separation on different continents is a very long evolutionary path to travel. I would have expected some mix of general similarity and characteristic differences between species in these neural modules. But the fact of the matter simply is: It is practically impossible to tell them apart.” … It sounds a lot like a designed system. The basic core of the hardware and software hasn’t changed in 55 million years.
Tens of thousands of rock paintings from 12,500 ya discovered in Colombia
From The Guardian: Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
Asked at Sapiens: Did Processed Foods Make Us Human?
Well, at least the guy isn’t arguing that processed foods make us inhuman or that turkey dinners kill people. Instead, he tried living off the land in a really big way: (including climbing a tree to eat raw eland marrow). Such experiences led him to come up with an interesting theory of human origins.
Did climate change cause the extinction of two hominin species?
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.
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…