Human evolution

An interesting listicle features ten topics you’d think we’d know the answer to, but don’t. Here’s one: Here’s #8: Often when we are about to fall asleep, we experience a kind of a falling sensation which causes us to wake up with a start. It happens to almost everybody, and the sensation is known as a hypnic jerk. It also sometimes happens when you tilt the chair you’re sitting on too far—somehow you can sense when you’re about to fall, and you wake up with a hypnic jerk. We really have no idea what causes them or whether they serve any modern purpose, but science has come up with some interesting theories.One hypothesis suggests that our bodies developed this mechanism Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Rich array of artifacts shows mix of techniques dating to early Upper Paleolithic The rich array of artifacts shows a mix of techniques for making points, blades, scrapers and cutting flakes. “These toolmakers appear to have achieved a division of labor that may have been part of an emerging pattern of more organized social structures,” Stutz says. The theory that greater social division of labor was important at this prehistoric juncture was first put forward by anthropologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner. “Our work really seems to support that idea,” Stutz says. “The finds from Mughr el-Hamamah give us a new window onto a transitional time, on the cusp of modern human cultural behaviors, bridging the Middle and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr John Stewart, Associate Professor in Paleoecology and Environmental Change at Bournemouth University (BU), is part of a team which analysed data on rabbit bone remains, found in archaeological excavations of caves in the Iberian Peninsula. They found that while rabbits were a crucial part of the modern humans’ diet, they were relatively under-utilised by Neanderthals. “Rabbits originated in Iberia and they are a very special kind of resource, in that they can be found in large numbers, they are relatively easy to catch and they are predictable,” said Dr Stewart. “This means that they are quite a good food source to target. The fact that the Neanderthals did not appear to do so suggests that this was Read More ›

New Scientist asks Island of wild children: Would they learn to be human? … The sound comes again across the tops of the trees. Hooting, and then distant replies. High-pitched and repetitive, the sounds are not words. But they mean something anyway: the hunters are coming home. They emerge one by one from the foliage, stepping out cautiously into a wide and sandy bay. There are five of them, all males. The basic concept was done fifty years ago by William Golding in Lord of the Flies (1954). The difference is, in these times, the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurry. What Golding meant as a parable of universal (and contemporary) human nature told as fiction, dollars to Read More ›

From a book excerpt at Salon, a mag you’d read if you believe you are smart despite evidence: Over the next two decades Darwin revised the “Origin of Species” five times. Even in his final revision, he did not take the theory to its logical end; but he had already privately concluded that his principles of natural selection applied to the human race as well. “As soon as I had become . . . convinced that species were mutable productions,” he wrote in his later “Autobiography,” “I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.” In 1871 he finally published “The Descent of Man,” an extension of his evolutionary principles to the human race. The “Descent” brought Read More ›

Explained at Real Clear Science: As a genus, humans, from Homo sapiens (that’s us) to our extinct ancestors Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, are wanderers. Over the vast majority of our history, which spans hundreds of thousands of years, we have roved from place to place, inhabiting a wide range of habitats. We moved with the seasons, we moved to find food, we moved — perhaps — just to move. Our adaptability was our key adaptation, an evolutionary leg-up on the competition. The ability to store fat was vital to this lifestyle. Body fat cushions internal organs, but it also serves as a repository of energy that can be readily broken down and used to power muscles. Humans might fatten Read More ›

This rubbish was written by a person who still has a human body: 3. A too-narrow pelvis Problem: Childbirth hurts. And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger. Okay, so Big Brains (like a whale?) would be some kind of advantage? No insult intended, but what have whales ever contributed to the stock of science knowledge? Fix: Sure, you could stretch out the pelvis, Latimer says, but technologists may already be onto a better solution. “I would bet that in 10,000 years, or even in 1,000 years, no woman in the developed world will deliver naturally. A clinic will combine the sperm and egg, Read More ›

Here. In this way, the researchers looked back at selection events that occurred up to 500,000 years ago, revealing the evolutionary forces that shaped the dawn of modern humans, thought to be around 200,000 years ago. Most previous methods for uncovering such changes reach back only about 30,000 years, says Stephen Schaffner, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The analytical approach that Tang’s team used is promising, he adds. “It’s treating all kinds of selection in a uniform framework, and it’s also treating different eras of selection in a more or less uniform way.” But Schaffner says that further research is needed to confirm that the method is broadly applicable. Still, even the most powerful genomic-analysis Read More ›

Alternatively, when do we finally get to the end of the Darwin stupid? Humans are supposed to have an “evolutionary” fear of snakes. In large numbers, snakes can seem disgusting. But snakes are rarely present in large numbers. See the vid below for an explanation of a very rare exception to this rule* in Canada. In my own background (News), the Fat Broad ruled, and venomous snakes can be an endangered species. So I’d never heard that humans were “naturally” afraid of snakes until I encountered the writings of tenured evolutionary psychologists proclaiming their apes’r’us truth to the masses. In real off-campus life, where News grew up, we were always far more worried about rabid mammals. (Look, if you simply can’t Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The discovery is the first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools. The stone tools mark “a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” say the authors of a new paper about the discovery, published today in the leading scientific journal Nature. “The whole site’s surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts. The tools “shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a Read More ›

Let’s start our day off right with some nonsense from the BBC The average human height has gone up in industrialised countries ranging from the United Kingdom to the United States to Japan, with gains of up to 10 centimetres. But for height gains over the last 150 years, one nation stands head and shoulders above all others. Today, young Dutch men and women average around 184cm and 170cm in height, respectively – both, on average, 19cm taller than their mid-19th Century counterparts. “That’s a good number to shock people with,” says John Komlos, professor emeritus of economic history at the University of Munich. Why have humans in general, and the Dutch in particular, got taller? Does this altitudinous trend Read More ›

This month, the Neanderthals died out because they couldn’t harness fire and last month wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals (as noted at the time, these theses are vulnerable to the first Neanderthal burial that turns up a wolfhound skeleton and/or the remains of fires. Anyway, there is a cottage industry of speculations as to why the Neanderthals “died out,” when the genetic evidence points to them simply being submerged in the general human population and losing a separate identity. That happens to distinctive groups today. Okay, the month isn’t even up yet but here at ScienceDaily we find a contrarian thesis: Modern humans did not bring about the demise of the Neanderthals due to superior weapons: There has Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In a new study, a research team led by Yale University found that even the oldest known human ancestors may have had precision grip capabilities comparable to modern humans. This includes Australopithecus afarensis, which appears in the fossil record a million years before the first evidence of stone tools. … Manual dexterity is traditionally viewed as a key adaptation that separated the earliest primates from other early mammals. It is thought that such abilities evolved in response to no longer needing hands for locomotion, as well as the mechanical demands of using tools. Yet there remains debate about the gripping capabilities of early fossil hominins, especially regarding the use of tools. The new study may shed light on Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: These white-tailed eagle bones, discovered more than 100 years ago, all derive from a single time period at Krapina. Four talons bear multiple edge-smoothed cut marks, and eight show polishing facets or abrasion. Three of the largest talons have small notches at roughly the same place along the plantar surface. The authors suggest these features may be part of a jewelry assemblage, like mounting the talons in a necklace or bracelet. Some have argued that Neandertals lacked symbolic ability or copied this behavior from modern humans, but the presence of the talons indicates that the Krapina Neandertals may have acquired eagle talons for some kind of symbolic purpose. They also demonstrate that the Krapina Neandertals may have made Read More ›

Skulls used as bowls, the rest discarded. From ScienceDaily: Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum’s Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, “The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we’ve identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We’ve found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow.” The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the Read More ›