From ScienceDaily (August 3, 2011) we learn: “Six Million Years of Savanna: Grasslands, Wooded Grasslands Accompanied Human Evolution”:

Scientists have spent a century debating the significance of savanna landscape in human evolution, including the development of upright walking, increased brain size and tool use.

Why?

Part of the problem has been a fuzzy definition of “savanna,” which has been used to describe “virtually everything between completely open grasslands and anything except a dense forest,” Cerling says. He adds the most common definition is a fairly open, grassy environment with a lot of scattered trees — a grassland or wooded grassland.

Here’s the main thing you need to know: Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (July 17, 2011), we learn, “Non-Africans Are Part Neanderthal, Genetic Research Shows”: Dr. Labuda and his team almost a decade ago had identified a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome that seemed different and whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared 6000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype. The Neanderthal sequence was present in peoples across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia. “There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details,” says Dr. Nick Patterson, Read More ›

From (ScienceDaily, July 13, 2011), we learn: “African and Non-African Populations Intermixed Well After Migration out of Africa 60,000 Years Ago, Genome Studies Show”:

Researchers have probed deeper into human evolution by developing an elegant new technique to analyse whole genomes from different populations. One key finding from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s study is that African and non-African populations continued to exchange genetic material well after migration out-of-Africa 60,000 years ago. This shows that interbreeding between these groups continued long after the original exodus.

Good to know. But surely no surprise? Isn’t “non-exchange” almost always enforced by law, custom, or taboo? Read More ›

The “grandmother” thesis is that the reason our ancestors didn’t kill granny was that she helped out. (And then somehow religion got involved, and …) An actual study showed that “The hazard of death for Dogon children was twofold higher if the resident paternal grandmother was alive rather than dead. This finding may reflect the frailty of elderly grandmothers who become net consumers rather than net producers in this resource-poor society.”

Oh, and so did the comparison between a human group and co-operatively breeding animals: Read More ›

At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, we learn that “growing crops made us smaller” (June 20, 2011), John Roach tells us that the beginnings of agriculture were not obviously successful for our ancestors, as is often assumed:

People got shorter and sicker everywhere in the world when they started to farm about 10,000 years ago, according to a recent study that suggests the transition to an agricultural lifestyle came at a biological cost.

[ … ]

As people gave up the diverse diet of foraged foods and settled on eating a few staple food crops they “experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress,” Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student at Emory University, said in a news release.

Compounding the problem, growth in population density spurred by agricultural settlements led to an increase in unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading infectious diseases and the transmission of novel viruses from livestock to humans, she added.

Some would add that the earliest crop plants were probably just pampered weeds, from the modern farmer’s perspective. The precious seed stock for food grains that are well suited to human stomachs must have been a work of centuries, done with only the knowledge of plant genetics that one might gain from observation and experience. It’s doubtful our ancestors would have persisted without Read More ›

By now, so many things made us human. Better to say we don’t know?

Here we are told about “How fatherhood made us human.”

According to Alan Boyle at MSNBC‘s Cosmic Log (06/2011/17):

Other research suggests that early humans diverged from chimps in the organization of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups of chimpanzees are generally organized along kinship lines, and there’s a high level of aggression between those kin groups. But Arizona State University anthropologist Kim Hill and his colleagues reported in the journal Science that today’s human hunter-gatherer groups are more mixed up, genetically speaking. Read More ›

Here’s the intro to the contest, riffing off the bewildering soap opera of claims about the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals, followed by the question, for a free copy of The Nature of Nature , tell us: Do you think we understand the human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? In what ways?

The responses here went down a range of paths, only some being on topic, perhaps due to the specificity of the question.

Two book prizes are awarded, Read More ›

The author of a new study claims that humans learned to walk upright primarily to beat each other:

“The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females,” says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. “Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.”

That also explains, Carrier says, why women find tall men attractive.

Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.”Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It’s an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are,” he says.

In the age of Evilicious, few others have noted this trend among academics. The study demonstrates that men hit harder in an upright position. Read More ›