Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers
a previously unknown period from 80 to 20 thousand years ago is shown to have diffuse interbreeding across the entire continent of Africa.
a previously unknown period from 80 to 20 thousand years ago is shown to have diffuse interbreeding across the entire continent of Africa.
Science, June 25 by Ann Gibbons Almost 90 years ago, Japanese soldiers occupying northern China forced a Chinese man to help build a bridge across the Songhua River in Harbin. While his supervisors weren’t looking, he found a treasure: a remarkably complete human skull buried in the riverbank. He wrapped up the heavy cranium and …
The thesis of this blog is that pre-Homo sapiens hominins existed within a collective mentality as a single creature and were fundamentally not war-like because the advantages of their divisions of labor were so predominant; similarly, for 100 million years after the initial formation of organisms in the Cambrian a half-billion years ago, early species, …
We would still be competing for dominance over our cousins in our African refuges
. . . Justice is The Human Instinct Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has been a pioneer in documenting in nomadic hunter-gatherers their “deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males including ridicule, shunning, and even killing those with persistently selfish dominance behavior,” giving detailed examples from tribes on every continent. Why …
A rule of human evolution research is that the milestones in the progression of becoming human are always getting earlier. The most prominent of those backward-creeping milestones is the date of the appearance of our own Homo sapiens species. Driven by new dating techniques, the fossils in Jebel Irhoud Morocco were revealed to be 300,000 …
Every once in a while, an article captures my imagination. Such is the case with one written by Axel Timmermann & Tobias Friedrich entitled “Late Pleistocene climate drivers of early human Migration” (Nature, Vol. 538: 6 Oct. 2016). This is big data applied to a most fascinating topic. Here is the abstract: On the basis …
The main function of these posts is to interpret new scientific findings in the paradigm of human evolution portrayed in this blog. In the last few months, I have lapsed in keeping up with breaking developments in the field because I have been busy writing an essay on the subject, having posted some of the …
In the January 26th issue of Science, Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum and colleague, Julia Galway-Witham have an article that accompanies a research paper of a major fossil find in Israel: The skeletal features of our species, Homo sapiens, include a globular braincase, brow ridges that are divided into central and side portions, …
In a review article in this week’s Science (358:1269), a review article by Christopher Bae, Katarina Douka, and Michael Retraglia review the progress in elucidating the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Abstract: The traditional “out of Africa” model, which posits a dispersal of modern Homo sapiens across Eurasia as a single wave at …
