Zebra stripes and flies
A fun story by Ed Yong in The Atlantic looks at an experiment that put horses in zebra suits to test whether the stripes confound biting flies: “The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes”. When it...
View ArticleBlack Tudors
Last year Atlas Obscura published a review of the book Black Tudors, by Miranda Kaufmann: “The Africans Who Called Tudor England Home”. As Black Tudors details, Africans weren’t just members of society...
View ArticleQuote: Two competing hypotheses
A 2015 review paper on archaic human introgression by Fernando Racimo and coworkers has a wonderfully succinct summary of the modern human origins debate: The relationship between modern humans and...
View ArticleLink: Origins of human languages
The online magazine Sapiens has a fascinating piece by Elizabeth Svoboda looking at the ways that new languages form: “Where Do “New” Languages Come From?” I’ll just quote a passage from the middle of...
View ArticleA Denisovan news article
A nice article by Ewen Callaway has just come out in Nature looking at the current scientific scene regarding the mysterious Denisovans: “Siberia’s ancient ghost clan starts to surrender its secrets”....
View ArticleLink: Archaeology of nonhuman tool use
Scientific American is previewing an article by Michael Haslam from their March issue, “The Other Tool Users”. The article focuses on the use of archaeological methods to recover information about tool...
View ArticleThe naming of X and Y
The Scientist this month has a nice short article by Joseph Keierleber that recounts some of the early history of scientific investigation of the sex chromosomes: “How Chromosomes X and Y Got Their...
View ArticleLink: When should academic scientists retire?
The Scientist has a nice piece by Katarina Zimmer on the idea of mandatory retirement ages for academic scientists: “Is Mandatory Retirement the Answer to an Aging Workforce?” The lede covers a...
View ArticleLink: The women behind early anatomical illustration
The University of Toronto has a really nice article by Romi Levine that looks at the work of anatomical illustrators in the history of Canadian medical science: “Body of work: The pioneering women...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New species of hominin from Luzon
The online journal Sapiens invited me to write up my thoughts about the announcement of Homo luzonensis yesterday. I do have more to say about this cool discovery, but I wanted to share that article...
View ArticleLink: So easy to match DNA to names
Forensic genealogy is now mainstream. From Bloomberg Businessweek, a report by Kristen Brown: “A Researcher Needed Three Hours to Identify Me From My DNA”. It wasn’t hard. I’d previously sent a DNA...
View ArticleLink: Anatomical models
The Age has an article describing the work of two anatomists who want to bring new high-fidelity plastic models into medical anatomy training: “Buster, the perfect human made of plastic, is the future...
View ArticleBroadening participation in research beyond research jobs
The current issue of American Anthropologist has a series of short essays by biological anthropologists, featured as a “Vital Topics Forum” in the journal. The essays come from anthropologists of a...
View ArticleConspiracy theories in pseudoarchaeology
Science magazine has a recent online article by journalist Lizzie Wade looking at the growing influence of ancient aliens and other pseudoarchaeological nonsense in the United States: “Believe in...
View ArticleQuote: 'Disciplinary integration' in anthropology is a myth
I’ve been reading a new open access book by the anthropologist Rob Borofsky: An Anthropology of Anthropology: Time to Shift Paradigms?. The book is available for free download. Borofsky has become well...
View ArticleHandaxes trailing up the coastline
In The Conversation this week, archaeologist Amanuel Beyin and his colleagues Ahmed Hamid Nassr and Parth Chauhan describe their work surveying the Red Sea coast of Sudan for early archaeological...
View ArticleLink: Long-read on Cayo Santiago
The New York Times Magazine today has a long-read article about Cayo Santiago, the island just off Puerto Rico where a large colony of rhesus macaques was introduced back in the 1930s to supply the...
View ArticleQuote: Darwin on human variation
There is much that could be said about Charles Darwin’s discussion of human races in Descent of Man. In Chapter 7 he embarked on a long discussion of whether races of humans should be considered as...
View ArticleProbabilistic calls of the titi monkeys
A fascinating paper in Science Advances today looks at the way that a small platyrrhine monkey species conveys information about predators in its vocal communication system: “Titi monkeys combine alarm...
View ArticleProbing ancient pheomelanin
Living organisms create spatial patterns of trace elements in their bodies. Clever means of detecting those spatial patterns are arriving. These have given new avenues into the biology of extinct...
View Article
