HENRY - The human evolution news relay

Stephen Shennan in the 2008 Annual Review of Anthropology (doi):

The term evolution in archaeology has accumulated an enormous range of meanings, with different implications, over many years. Traditionally, however, when not referring to the biological evolution of putatively ancestral species, it has occurred most commonly in the phrase cultural evolution (sometimes used interchangeably with social or sociocultural evo- lution), referring to the history of what are conceived as the key long-term trends in human history: from foraging to farming, or from farming to the origins of civilization and the state, accompanied by such developments as increased population, greater social complexity and inequality, and more complex technologies.

More recently, the term has increasingly come to refer to the idea that the processes producing cultural stability and change are analogous in important respects to those of biological evolution: On this view, just as biological evolution is characterized by changing frequencies of genes in populations through time as a result of such processes as natural selection, so cultural evolution refers to the changing distributions of cultural attributes in populations, likewise affected by processes such as natural selection but also by others that have no analog in genetic evolution. In fact, to understand changing patterns of human behavior and organization we need to take account of both the biological and the cultural dimensions.

Remember the amazing lost tribe that was being hawked all over the news a few weeks ago? Ahh, not so lost after all. The real story is actually a whole lot more interesting:

…far from being unknown, the tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry….

According to his account, the Brazilian state of Acre offered him the use of an aircraft for three days. ‘I had years of GPS co-ordinates,’ he said. Meirelles had another clue to the tribe’s precise location. ‘A friend of mine sent me some Google Earth co-ordinates and maps that showed a strange clearing in the middle of the forest and asked me what that was,’ he said. ‘I saw the co-ordinates and realised that it was close to the area I had been exploring with my son – so I needed to fly over it.’…

…’When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy,’ he said. ‘Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.‘

Robin McKee in The Guardian talks about “How Darwin won the evolution race”:

In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island’s elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. ‘Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,’ he later recalled.

Thoughts of money or women might have filled lesser heads. Alfred Russel Wallace was made of different stuff, however. He began thinking about disease and famine; about how they kept human populations in check; and about recent discoveries indicating that the earth’s age was vast. How might these waves of death, repeated over aeons, influence the make-up of different species, he wondered?

Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 - 150 years ago last week - at Darwin’s estate in Downe, in Kent.

Darwin, in his own words, was ’smashed’.

Research misconduct at U.S. institutions may be more common than previously suspected, with 9 percent of scientists saying in a new survey that they personally had seen fabrication, falsification or plagiarism.

In PNAS: Intraspecific phylogenetic analysis of Siberian woolly mammoths using complete mitochondrial genomes (doi):

We report five new complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of Siberian woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), sequenced with up to 73-fold coverage from DNA extracted from hair shaft material. Three of the sequences present the first complete mtDNA genomes of mammoth clade II.

Analysis of these and 13 recently published mtDNA genomes demonstrates the existence of two apparently sympatric mtDNA clades that exhibit high interclade divergence. The analytical power afforded by the analysis of the complete mtDNA genomes reveals a surprisingly ancient coalescence age of the two clades, ~1–2 million years, depending on the calibration technique.

Furthermore, statistical analysis of the temporal distribution of the ¹⁴C ages of these and previously identified members of the two mammoth clades suggests that clade II went extinct before clade I. Modeling of protein structures failed to indicate any important functional difference between genomes belonging to the two clades, suggesting that the loss of clade II more likely is due to genetic drift than a selective sweep.

John Hawks has a nicely detailed discussion about handling exponential growth in demographic models. Very interesting, and hopefully he’ll keep them coming:

Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic history. However, “exponential” can mean different things to different people, if you’re not used to thinking mathematically about growth. So I need to lay out some definitions…

Su et al in today’s PLoS One show that Asiatic honeybees can understand the “Waggledance” (video) language of European honeybees:

The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other.

This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source.

We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.

Very very neat indeed. The full paper is available here: East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees (doi), and ScienceDaily coverage is here.