Looking for the vulture assist with Neolithic burials
The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, is one of the most significant early Neolithic villages to have been excavated. It was occupied between around 7100 and 6000 BC, and at its...
View ArticleGetting species diagnoses non-destructively from collagen
A neat paper by Naomi Martisius and coworkers in Scientific Reports: “Non-destructive ZooMS identification reveals strategic bone tool raw material selection by Neandertals”.The introduction of the...
View ArticleHow mice became house mice
A new paper from Thomas Cucchi and coworkers in Scientific Reports probes the early history of the house mouse: “Tracking the Near Eastern origins and European dispersal of the western house mouse”.A...
View ArticleGoat immunity modified by introgression during and after domestication
Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A new paper in Science Advances by Zhuqing...
View ArticleTwins from an adaptive point of view
The biological anthropologist Rebecca Sear looks at the evolution of human twinning in a post for This View of Life: “Solving the Evolutionary Puzzle of Twinning”.She reviews the results of a recent...
View ArticleLink: Online learning metaconversation
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about how to help students transition more effectively to online learning. Obviously this is a topic on the minds of many teachers and professors this...
View ArticleReplicability and archiving of geological samples
In Nature this week, Noah Planavsky and coworkers, including the present director of the National Museum of Natural History, Kirk Johnson, have an opinion piece calling for mandatory archiving of...
View ArticleTending museums through the crisis
Atlas Obscura has an article by Jessica Leigh Hester looking at how curators and staff are tending museum collections and infrastructure while hallways are empty: “The Strange, Smelly Chores That Keep...
View ArticleWhen will we have concerts again?
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has an essay in The Atlantic reflecting on our need for live music: “The Day the Live Concert Returns”.In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing, it's...
View ArticleHunting the ghost dogs with camera traps
Cara Giaimo in the New York Times covers a recent research paper that combines camera trap evidence from across a large swath of the western Amazon to examine an elusive canine: “The Ghost Dogs of the...
View ArticleHow much of the Neandertal genome came from contemporaries in Africa?
Back in June of last year, Melissa Hubisz, Amy Williams, and Adam Siepel coworkers put out a preprint with a new method for looking at introgression using the ancestral recombination graph: “Mapping...
View ArticleThe genetic ancestry of modern lions
Marc de Manuel and coworkers have a new paper in PNAS that presents some new findings about lion population history from whole-genome sequencing. The paper has the title, “The evolutionary history of...
View ArticleLink: Bioarchaeology and the resilience of past societies
Gwen Robbins Schug has a piece in Anthropology News looking at the lack of any simplistic relationship between climate change, crisis, and cultural change in the past: “The Long View of Climate Change...
View ArticleQuote: Robert Broom has no apologies
Robert Broom, in the first paragraph of his paper, “Further Evidence on the Structure of the South African Pleistocene Anthropoids”, says it better than I could.NO apology need be given for publishing...
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Neandertal ancestors of African populations
Earlier this year, Lu Chen and coworkers from Joshua Akey’s research group published an assessment of the amount of Neandertal ancestry in the genomes of present-day African people: “Identifying and...
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Denisovan ancestors of the Iceland population
Last week in Nature, Laurits Skov and collaborators from Aarhus University and from Kari Stefansson’s research group in Iceland gave a high-resolution look at Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression in...
View ArticleBabies get their intestinal viruses in stages
A fascinating new paper by Guanxiang Liang and coworkers in Nature looks at how infants end up with a community of viruses in their guts: “The stepwise assembly of the neonatal virome is modulated by...
View ArticleStone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I make a brief appearance to help explain the...
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Killing it: From handaxes to hafted spears, no difference in hunting or...
The change in technology from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age in Africa was a major event in human prehistory. Or was it?If there is one generalization that we can make from the African record, with all...
View ArticleWhat ancient DNA is telling us about the prehistory and history of the horse
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domestication and Management Dynamics”. The review...
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