The rise of the skulls!
Neanderthal, La Chapelle-aux-Saints Fossils matter. Fossils are evidence. That was Milford Wolpoff’s refrain in the 1987 NOVA documentary which heralded the long cresting of mitochondrial Eve and Out of Africa. Fossils remain highly relevant and important when it comes to deeper time phylogenetic relationships, but it does seem that they have only served to supplement […]
‘dem bones tell strange tales
There is a new paper in PNAS on remains from China which re-order and muddle our understanding of the emergence of anatomical and behavioral modernity in Eurasia. Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia:
The 2007 discovery of fragmentary human remains (two molars and an anterior mandible) at Zhirendong (Zhiren […]
Did cavemen eat bread?
Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of […]
Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance
The German magazine Der Spiegel has a rather thick new article out reviewing the latest research which is starting to reintroduce the concept of mass folk wanderings into archaeology. The title is How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe. In the story you get a good sense of the recent revision of the null model […]
The naked years
When I talk about sexual selection I usually make sure to have an accompanying visual of a peacock to go with the post. But really I could have used a dandy as an illustration, or perhaps in our day & age “The Situation”. Unlike the peacock much of what passes for human “plumage” is not […]
The New World in three easy steps
One aspect of human demographic expansions seems to be the fact that we often model them as a constant diffusion process, when in reality there were likely pulses (economic historians can conceive of this as the periodic gaps between land and labor factor inputs). I don’t know much about the human movements prior to H. […]
“Here be dragons”
I just stumbled onto two amusing articles, Ancient legends once walked among early humans?, and The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago is no surprise. The second is a letter from a folklorist:
Sir, The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin lineage […]
Others in Siberia?
The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia:
With the exception of Neanderthals, from which DNA sequences of numerous individuals have now been determined…the number and genetic relationships of other hominin lineages are largely unknown. Here we report a complete mitochondrial (mt) DNA sequence retrieved from a bone excavated in 2008 in […]