Incredible human journeys (and more)
A reader pointed out that the BBC series The Incredible Human Journey is online on YouTube thanks to the WhyEvolutionIsTrue channel. You can find all the episodes here. I’ve embedded episode 1 below. For what it’s worth I am no longer am co…
Adam was African, but perhaps barely
The figure to the left comes from a short paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa. The paper is interesting because of two factors: 1) …
Fashionable bipedalism
There’s a new story blowing up in the media about the origins of bipedalism through male-male competition. The hook is good enough that the headlines write themselves. For example, io9 has a sober and skeptical review of the paper, but the title …
Saudi Arabia, where monkey became man?
As late as the 1980s it is reputed that prominent Saudi clerics were making the case for geocentrism. Of course presumably most Saudis are not geocentrists, but their religious establishment is so calcified that medieval science still retains some hold…
Neandertals not gone in haste?
John Hawks weighs in on the paper I pointed to yesterday. As someone who couldn’t make heads or tales of the stratigraphy I’m a little relieved that John took time out from his tour of Rome to comment. Not too surprisingly it seems that the…
No 10,000 years of coexistence?
When the draft sequence of the Neandertal genome was analyzed it turned out that there was little difference across non-Africans in their proportion of admixture from this other human lineage. It was a rather strange finding as Neandertals seem to have…
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
How the “fierce people” came to be
The pith: there are differences between populations on genes which result in “novelty seeking.” These differences can be traced to migration out of Africa, and can’t be explained as an artifact of random genetic drift.
I’m not …
“Out of Africa” vs. “Multi-regionalism” revisited
A few months ago I exchanged some emails with Milford H. Wolpoff and Chris Stringer. These are the two figures who have loomed large in paleoanthropology and the origins of modernity human for a generation, and they were keen in making sure that their …
Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule
Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with
The continuing tangling of the human tree
Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations…
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Horses from Chauvet Cave
I’m not particularly a fan of Werner Herzog films, but I think I might check out his new documentary on Upper Paleolithic art, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Chauvet Cave in France is the subject of the film, which is in 3-D….
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
Evolution may explain why baby comes early
Image credit
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
The African ur-language
Several people have emailed/tweeted at me about the new paper in Science, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa:
Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predict…
Africa in 12 ADMIXTURE chunks
Some have asked what the point is in poking around African population structure when Tishkoff et al. and Henn et al. have done such a good job in terms of coverage. First, it is nice to run your own analyses so you can slice & dice to your preferen…
Paleoanthropological “telephone”
A few people have emailed me a link to this weird story, Kashmiri Neanderthal soup not scoop:
The study, conducted by the UC Davis Anthropology Department at the US, found that about four percent (ranging from two to five percent) of all modern humans,…
Pruning the family tree, chance & inevitability
I picked up Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived mostly for its alternative history value. By this, I mean that it was published in the fall of 2009, less than a year before research which sugge…
Where in the world did anatomically modern humans come from?
The Pith: I review a recent paper which argues for a southern African origin of modern humanity. I argue that the statistical inference shouldn’t be trusted as the final word. This paper reinforces previously known facts, but does not add much th…
The evolution of man is no cartoon
I was semi-offline for much of last week, so I only randomly heard from someone about the “Science paper” on which Molly Przeworski is an author. Finally having a chance to read it front to back it seems rather a complement to other papers…