Human evolution

Recently, a claim whistled through the pop science media: Bonobos help strangers without being asked, therefore human are not special. The claim is noteworthy only for the authors’ apparent assumption that most readers don’t realize that many animals help without being asked, provided they have any idea what to do. Usually, they don’t. The animals-are-just-fuzzy-people stuff caters to the growing conviction that humans are not special, — a conviction for which the best excuse would have to be “I never read or think much, I don’t care what happens politically. My big issue is, my dealer has gone to rehab.” Meanwhile, from Penny Spikins at Sapiens: There are, perhaps surprisingly, only two known cases of likely interpersonal violence in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated. In Tell Qaramel, an area of modern day northern Syria, the research demonstrates evidence of einkorn being affected up to thirty thousand years ago, and rice has been shown to be affected more than thirteen thousand years ago in South, East and South-East Asia. Furthermore, emmer wheat is proved to have been affected twenty-five thousand years ago in the Southern Levant — and barley in Read More ›

New Scientist offers this item by Colin Barras: The origins of our species might need a rethink. An analysis of an ancient skull from China suggests it is eerily similar to the earliest known fossils of our species –found in Morocco, some 10,000 kilometres to the west. The skull hints that modern humans aren’t solely descended from African ancestors, as is generally thought. (paywall) Paleontologist Gunter Bechly (the guy Wikipedia disappeared) responds at Evolution News & Views on what they leave out: Sometimes predictions are not only fulfilled but over-fulfilled. Writing here recently at Evolution News (Bechly 2017a), I listed seven major discoveries in paleoanthropology that have made 2017 an annus horribilis for the established scientific consensus on human evolution. Read More ›

At least where Neanderthals are concerned: A new study in Heliyon suggests that Neanderthals survived at least 3,000 years longer in Spain than we thought: The authors of the study, an international team from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalonian, German, Austrian and Italian research institutions, say their findings suggest that the process of modern human populations absorbing Neanderthal populations through interbreeding was not a regular, gradual wave-of-advance but a “stop-and-go, punctuated, geographically uneven history.” Over more than ten years of fieldwork, the researchers excavated three new sites in southern Spain, where they discovered evidence of distinctly Neanderthal materials dating until 37,000 years ago. “Technology from the Middle Paleolithic in Europe is exclusively associated with the Neanderthals,” said Dr. João Zilhão, from the Read More ›

From Paige Madison at Aeon: The assumption, then, was that death rituals were practised only by modern humans, or perhaps also by their very closest relatives. The possibility that primitive, small-brained Homo naledi could have engaged in the deliberate disposal of dead bodies not only challenges the timeline about when such behaviours appeared; it disrupts the whole conventional thinking about the distinction between modern humans and earlier species and, by extension, the distinction between us and the rest of nature. More. Actually, it does nothing of the kind. It suggests that the Naledi were able to think in an abstract way, but that fact casts doubt on the claimed importance of brain size as opposed to humanity. Death is a Read More ›

Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. It was sparked by British geneticist Richard Buggs pointing out in a journal that, strictly speaking, one fertile human pair could survive a bottleneck (Adam and Eve more or less, fig leaves optional). At first, he didn’t get mail. Then he got mail. Yesterday, we reported that Buggs (the Yes guy) was asking geneticist Dennis Venema (the big No guy) to provide sources for some claims. Over to Venema. Meanwhile, physicist Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, writes to say that adaptability is built into organisms by transposable elements and thus assumptions Read More ›

The last round was Adam, Eve, Richard Buggs, and Dennis Venema: Could Adam and Eve have existed?, where Dennis Venema (no) replied to Richard Buggs (yes). Now, Richard Buggs replies, Now to look in more detail at the points you raise about allelic diversity. This is where I think your argument is strongest, so I would like to examine it in some detail. To do this full justice, I want to start with what you say about this in your book chapter. One of your most explicit statements about this in your book chapter is as follows: …scientists have many other methods at their disposal to measure just how large our population has been over time. One simple way is Read More ›

Not in sub-Saharan Africa? Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species’ origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn’t evolve only in East Africa. … “Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a ‘Garden of Eden’ that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Now, “I would say the Garden of Eden in Africa is probably Africa — and it’s a big, big garden.” Hublin was one of the leaders of the decade-long excavation at the Moroccan site, called Jebel Irhoud. Ewen Callaway, Nature Read More ›

Dennis Venema replies to Buggs, insisting that Adam and Eve could not likely exist. Geneticist Richard Buggs thinks that they could have. Dennis VenemaFrom Venema at BioLogos: The key here is that one individual can only have at most two alleles of any gene. A population reduction to one breeding pair would mean that at most, four alleles of a given gene could pass through the bottleneck – in the case where both individuals are heterozygous, and heterozygous for different alleles. The population would then have to wait for new mutation events to produce new alleles of this gene – a process that will take a significant amount of time. Since this would happen to all genes in the genome at Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Previous studies have shown chimps working together in strictly alternating turn-taking scenarios. However, these results are the first to demonstrate that chimpanzees can cope with more complex permutations of turn-taking, with no external cues to help time their behaviour. … ‘Many animals, from insects through birds to primates, take turns during certain types of communication — as do we humans during conversational exchanges. But taking repeated, coordinated turns to achieve a common goal is much less well studied outside the communication domain, despite the possibility that all such behaviours draw on the same underlying cognitive skills for turn-taking. … ‘Besides turn-taking, our task may also provide insights into abilities for cognitive perspective-taking — in other words, the capacity Read More ›

From paleontologist Julien Benoit: Two of the three studies done in Europe are based on evidence collected in Greece. The third was conducted in Germany. Two of them claim that their fossil finds could be older than the oldest hominin fossils found in Africa. One of the Greek studies was based on a toothless jawbone and a few teeth. The authors claim that they represent an 8 million year old hominin; older than Toumaï. This research has been criticised – by me, among others. As we’ve concluded, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and a jawbone plus a few teeth aren’t enough to counteract all the documentary proof of humans’ African origins. Then came the second study. … The most Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Anthropologists call this process cultural transmission, and there was a time when it did not exist, when humans or more likely their smaller brained ancestors did not pass on knowledge. Luke Premo, an associate professor of anthropology at Washington State University, would like to know when that was. Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, he and three colleagues challenge a widely accepted notion that cultural transmission goes back more than 2 million years. How do we know that there was a time when human “cultural transmission” did not exist? That is, what decision-making guides are we using? Exhibit A in this debate is the Oldowan chopper, a smooth, fist-sized rock with just enough material removed to Read More ›

Recently, British geneticist Richard Buggs defended the view that a modern human pair could have escaped a genetic bottleneck: It is easy to have misleading intuitions about the population genetic effects of a short, sudden bottleneck. For example, Ernst Mayr suggested that many species had passed through extreme bottlenecks in founder events. He argued that extreme loss of diversity in such events would promote evolutionary change. The matter was taken up at The Skeptical Zone where population geneticist Joe Felsenstein, among others, replied, skeptical but not ruling the idea out. Now Buggs has replied at the Zone to comments by Felsenstein and Schaffner: First, I note that both Schaffner and Felsenstein agree with my point that the bottleneck hypothesis has Read More ›

We didn’t predict this one and it’s not the story you think. Recently, geneticist Richard Buggs defended the possibility in principle that a human population bottleneck could consist of one fertile couple. At the Zone (founded by former UD commenters among others), Vincent Torley writes: Geneticist Richard Buggs, Reader in Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London, has just written an intriguing article in Nature: Ecology and Evolution (28 October 2017), titled, Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis? Comments on a recent book chapter. It appears that Buggs is unpersuaded that science has ruled out Adam and Eve. He thinks it’s still theoretically possible that the human race once passed through a short, sharp population bottleneck of just two Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Fellow Neanderthals did not eat him either, even during hard times. “The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neanderthals,” said Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor. Paper. (public access) – Erik Trinkaus, Sébastien Villotte. External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal. PLOS Read More ›