Human evolution

From Lizzie Wade at Science: The “necklaces” are tiny: beads of animal teeth, shells, and ivory no more than a centimeter long. But they provoked an outsized debate that has raged for decades. Found in the Grotte du Renne cave at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France, they accompanied delicate bone tools and were found in the same layers as fossils from Neandertals—our archaic cousins. Some archaeologists credited the artifacts—the so-called Châtelperronian culture—to Neandertals. But others argued that Neandertals were incapable of the kind of symbolic expression reflected in the jewelry and insisted that modern humans must have been the creators. Now, a study uses a new method that relies on ancient proteins to identify and directly date Neandertal bone fragments from Read More ›

With all this talk of language, what with Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech coming out, here’s an interesting new approach: From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words. But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds – as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations. The study found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, Read More ›

From Ian Tattersall’s review of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky at New York Review of Books: Around 300,000 years ago a conceptually new type of stone implement began to be made in both Africa and Europe… But significantly, in this time range there is only one putative—and hugely arguable—symbolic artifact known: a vaguely anthropomorphic lump of rock from the Golan Heights that may have been slightly modified to look more human. More. So, readers, is it an artifact? Is it an accident? Note: The copy quoted is behind a paywall. The whole article is worth the price because it is a good overview of the background to Tom Wolfe’s attack on Chomsky Read More ›

From Jane Qiu at Nature: Keen to get to the bottom of its people’s ancestry, China has in the past decade stepped up its efforts to uncover evidence of early humans across the country. It is reanalysing old fossil finds and pouring tens of millions of dollars a year into excavations. And the government is setting up a US$1.1-million laboratory at the IVPP to extract and sequence ancient DNA. … “Many Western scientists tend to see Asian fossils and artefacts through the prism of what was happening in Africa and Europe,” says Wu. Those other continents have historically drawn more attention in studies of human evolution because of the antiquity of fossil finds there, and because they are closer to Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was Read More ›

From Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello at Scientific American: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that Read More ›

Here. Fire-Maker Book: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet (The Privileged Species Series) Paperback – July 18, 2016 From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire and remake their world. This book is a companion to the documentary of the same name, available at www.privilegedspecies.com. See also: The whole vid online: Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals. Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them… to do with as we wish. (pp 262-263, Read More ›

“Lucy” is the iconic imputed human ancestor from 3.2 mya, Austropithecus afarensis. From Deborah Netburn at Los Angeles Times: After examining high-resolution CT scans of broken bones in Lucy’s right shoulder, as well as the damage to other parts of her skeleton, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin propose that the small hominid’s life ended shortly after a catastrophic fall from a great height — probably from a tree. “What we see is a pattern of fractures that are well documented in cases of people who have suffered a severe fall,” said John Kappelman, a UT professor of anthropology and geological sciences. “This wouldn’t happen if you just fell over.” More. But there are doubts: From Washington Post: Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

From Tom “Bonfire of the Vanities” Wolfe’s interview with NPR on his new book, The Kingdom of Speech: The Kingdom of Speech is Tom Wolfe’s first non-fiction book in 16 years. Wolfe tells NPR’s Scott Simon that speech is “the attribute of attributes,” because it’s so unrelated to most other things about animals. “We’ve all been taught that we evolved from animals, and here is something that is totally absent from animal life,” he says. More. … On whether he’s worried that creationists will begin to cite his work as scientific proof I wouldn’t think so, because there’s not a shred of whatever that depends at all on faith, on belief in an extraterrestrial power. In fact, I hate people who go Read More ›

Interesting new thesis from ScienceDaily: A team of psychologists, kinesiologists and archaeologists at Indiana University and elsewhere are throwing new light on a longstanding archaeological mystery: the purpose of a large number of spherical stone artifacts found at a major archaeological site in South Africa. IU Bloomington professor Geoffrey Bingham and colleagues in the United Kingdom and United States contend that the stones — previously thought by some to be used as tools — served instead as weapons for defense and hunting. The research, which combines knowledge about how modern humans perceive an object’s “throwing affordance” with mathematical analysis and evaluation of these stones as projectiles for throwing, appears in the journal Scientific Reports.More. Paper. (public access) – Andrew D. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and its reduced rates of producing offspring. A new study may help explain why-comparing genetic information of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution.… “Our findings suggest that schizophrenia vulnerability rose after the divergence of modern humans from Neanderthals,” said Andreassen, “and thus support the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a by-product of the complex evolution of the human brain.” More. Paper. (public access) – Saurabh Srinivasan, Francesco Bettella, Morten Mattingsdal, Yunpeng Wang, Aree Witoelar, Andrew J. Schork, Wesley K. Thompson, Verena Read More ›

From : Nori Satoh, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, has identified what he sees as the moment the notochord, and hence the chordate lineage, was born. “I have proposed that the occurrence of tadpole-like larvae is a key event that caused the evolution of chordates,” he explains. Early in life, many deuterostomes pass through a larval stage. But while acorn worm or sea urchin larvae might swim about by rhythmically moving tiny hair-like structures – cilia – on their bodies, chordate larvae have a tail that they beat. “The notochord is the supporting organ of the beating tail,” says Satoh.More. Yeah, just happened. How? August. See also: The highly engineered transition to vertebrates: Read More ›