Human evolution

Died out as a distinct ethnic group, that is. We are also told that current humans and Neanderthals definitely interbred. From LiveScience: Neanderthals may have died off because they failed to harness the power of fire to the extent their human cousins did, a new data analysis suggests. Using fire for cooking would have allowed these other groups of ancient human relatives to get more calories from the same amount of food, thereby edging out the Neanderthal population. Over time, the anatomically modern human population would have risen, while the Neanderthal population plummeted toward extinction, according to the model. Last month, a speculation walloped through the pop science media that wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals. That thesis is vulnerable Read More ›

From Scientific American A happy accident led to the discovery of the ancient tools. Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University and her team had been en route to a known fossil site on the western shore of Lake Turkana one morning in July 2011 when the group took a wrong turn and ended up in a previously unexplored area. The researchers decided to survey it and by teatime they had found stone artifacts. They named the site Lomekwi 3, and went on to recover dozens of tools—including flakes, cores and anvils–from both the surface and below ground. Harmand described the findings April 14 in a talk given at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco. “The cores Read More ›

They weren’t shopping at Bulk Barn? Here. The image of a Stone-Age man grasping the bony end of a bloody mammoth leg and chomping down on it with powerful gnashers is taking a bit of a battering. We already know that Neanderthals were partial to delicacies such as fish and small birds, with a healthy helping of plants. Now some are saying they might have flavoured their meaty feasts with wild herbs, too. Without a time machine to take us back 40,000 to 50,000 years, the suggestion remains highly speculative. But our long-lost cousins were clearly not the carnivorous beasts we once assumed them to be. And you assumed them to be so because … oh yes, once upon a Read More ›

New Scientist’s usual inventive PC gabble: Allegedly, women invented weapons Women could have been the first humans to use weapons to hunt. An analysis of spear-wielding chimps, most of which are females, suggests the idea may not be as eccentric as it might sound. It is still pretty eccentric. Aw come on. “Pitches like girl” is an epithet. “Pitches like boy” is not. If you do not understand what you are reading, you have spent too much time with politically correct trash.

From ScienceDaily: The ability to make a Lower Paleolithic hand axe depends on complex cognitive control by the prefrontal cortex, including the “central executive” function of working memory, a new study finds. PLOS ONE published the results, which knock another chip off theories that Stone Age hand axes are simple tools that don’t involve higher-order executive function of the brain. “For the first time, we’ve showed a relationship between the degree of prefrontal brain activity, the ability to make technological judgments, and success in actually making stone tools,” says Dietrich Stout, an experimental archeologist at Emory University and the leader of the study. “The findings are relevant to ongoing debates about the origins of modern human cognition, and the role Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Neanderthals from the French region of Poitou-Charentes cut, beat and fractured the bones of their recently deceased companions, as revealed by the fossil remains of two adults and a child found at the Marillac site. These manipulations have been observed at other Neanderthal sites, but scientists still do not know whether they did this for food or ceremony. Since the Marillac site in France was unearthed, the discovery of fossil remains of animals (90% belonging to reindeer), humans and Mousterian tools has enabled the site to be identified as a hunting area for Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). But the most surprising thing about the site is the presence of a large quantity of bone remains of these hominids, many Read More ›

So says New Scientist: Once the fragments had been pieced together, the skeleton was declared to be of the species Australopithecus afarensis. But the skeleton became known as Lucy, inspired by a Beatles song that blasted out of a cassette player as the researchers celebrated their discovery that evening. Forty years later, thanks to its age and completeness, Lucy remains an important specimen. It shows, for instance, that our distant ancestors began to walk upright on two legs long before they developed big brains. It’s no surprise, then, that replicas of the skeleton are on display at museums across the world. But when Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently began Read More ›

… we wouldn’t find this?: From ScienceDaily: “In addition to being incredibly small in overall size, this jaw has a mixture of traits that combine typical modern human anatomy, such as the presence of a protruding chin, with traits that are more common of our archaic ancestors like Neandertals — for example, very thick bone to hold the molars in place,” said University of Illinois anthropology professor Laura Shackelford, who led the study with anthropologist Fabrice Demeter, of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This combination of archaic and modern human traits is not unusual, Shackelford said. … Not unusual? For sure not, if you have ever taken the bus or train between Toronto and Ottawa (Canada). In Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It is easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing. But in a new paper, an MIT linguist contends that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the ones we use today. “The hierarchical complexity found in present-day language is likely to have been present in human language since its emergence,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, and a co-author of the new paper on Read More ›

That’s reasonable because if you look carefully, there are only two holes, which would be consistent with an animal biting down. They need to find one with three equally spaced holes. Or a hyena with three equally spaced fangs. See also: Human evolution at your fingertips

We spotted a Darwin profbot earlier, and now over at The Blaze, Casey Luskin comments: Wood and Grabowski are both fully committed to an evolutionary paradigm, but they close their chapter with a striking admission. Although “it is difficult to believe,” they note, “the last time a review looked at the whole of what we now call the hominin fossil record” was in 1964 in a book by the British primatologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark. Since that time, they explain that paleoanthropologists have enjoyed “an order of magnitude increase in the [amount of] fossil evidence,” but at the same time have seen “the absence of equivalent progress in how we analyze the fossil record.” If their meaning isn’t clear, they’re Read More ›

From the Guardian: Humans are evolving more rapidly than previously thought, according to the largest ever genetics study of a single population. Scientists reached the conclusion after showing that almost every man alive can trace his origins to one common male ancestor who lived about 250,000 years ago. The discovery that so-called “genetic Adam”, lived about 100,000 years more recently than previously understood suggests that humans must have been genetically diverging at a more rapid rate than thought. Kári Stefánsson, of the company deCODE Genetics and senior author of the study, said: “It means we have evolved faster than we thought.” The study also shows that the most recent common male ancestor was alive at around the same time as Read More ›

… can’t resist this first – evolution of metabolizing booze: From The Scientist: How we are able to metabolize booze: A mutation in an ethanol-metabolizing enzyme arose around the time that arboreal primates shifted to a more terrestrial lifestyle, perhaps as an adaptation to eating fermented fruit. Why are humans so attracted to alcohol, and why do so many struggle with its abuse? These are questions that science still can’t answer. The “drunken monkey” hypothesis proposed by University of California, Berkeley, biologist Robert Dudley posits that, unlike our attraction to other addictive drugs, our use and sometimes dependence on alcohol stems from the millions of years our ancient primate ancestors spent consuming ripe, fermented fruits. Perhaps these predecessors evolved some Read More ›

From BBC Humans are possibly the weirdest species to have ever lived. We have freakishly big brains that allow us to build complicated gadgets, understand abstract concepts and communicate using language. We are also almost hairless with weak jaws, and struggle to give birth. How did such a bizarre creature evolve? Huh? 1. In a world packed with unusual creatures, what reason have we to assume that humans are “possibly the weirdest species to have ever lived”? Publicly funded broadcasters, like the BBC, can buy this stuff. Whether they could sell it in an open market is another question. 2. “freakishly big brains”? What is the point> of such a claim? Why is it “freaking” to have a big brain when Read More ›

Did we mention Scientific American before? Yes, we did, here, on the Neanderthal mystique (but you have to pay for way too much of it). Now here, we are informed that the purpose of the strange wiring of our eyes is “unveiled.” Wow. Such mystical language. The human eye is optimised to have good colour vision at day and high sensitivity at night. But until recently it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light travelling through a mass of neurons before it reaches the light-detecting rod and cone cells. New research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision-enhancing function for this puzzling structure. So, Read More ›