HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries in the ' human prehistory ' category
Written July 9, 2008 in africa, americas, anthropology, europe, genetics, human prehistory, mtDNA
Scientific American covers the human diaspora in a nice broad-brush overview:
Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans—a few hundred or even several thousand—crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return.
The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish [...]
Written July 4, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, europe, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, it-was-better-in-my-day, language, music, stupidity
….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like [...]
Written June 24, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, people
Paul Ehrlich talks about his recent study of Polynesian canoes, and whether human culture evolves via natural selection:
Biologists have a pretty good idea of both how flies become resistant to DDT and how humans and primates have diverged over time. That’s because the mechanism underlying these processes is the same. Using evolution we can understand [...]
In the latest PNAS, Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat (doi):
The pristine island ecosystems of East Polynesia were among the last places on Earth settled by prehistoric people, and their colonization triggered a devastating transformation. Overhunting contributed to widespread faunal extinctions and the decline of marine [...]
Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing crucial new data on voyages from [...]
National Geographic has a fantastic special edition on the Lapita culture and the settlement of Polynesia:
Much of the thrill of venturing to the far side of the world rests on the romance of difference. So one feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he “discovered” Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it.
Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: “How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?”
Continued at: How ancient voyagers settled the far-flung islands of the Pacific. Don’t miss the videos of Jared Diamond and Pat Kirch either.
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Lee Berger defends himself against the attack on him by Nature (which we mentioned a few days ago):
In fact, it is Mr. Dalton’s attempts to find a story where there was none that may have done damage to our ability to conduct research on human remains on Palau. We who do field research are very [...]
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