HENRY

Everyone’s favorite evoblogger PZ Myers has a tutorial on the Superclades of the Cambrian:

Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I’ve mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief primer in some major animal groupings.

More about Metazoans here

Damn Interesting on Easter Island’s Rongorongo script:

Easter Island (…)‘s lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity. (…) Known as Rapa Nui to the island’s inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island’s history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists.

Continued…

Animal song is well known to be a way of attracting mates, however, it has recently been found that a group of gibbons in Thailand sing to scare off predators. The songs appear to be combinations of distinct structural units and appear to communicate information to other group members about the type of predators spotted. Moreover, these alarm calls directly deter large cats.

This group communication using structurally distinct call-elements been found in a number of monkey species (PDF), but this is the first in Gibbons. Moreover, the “scaring of predators”-function may suggest a possible evolutionary explanation for Celine Dion.

The full paper by Clarke et al is available at PLOS One and ScienceDaily coverage is here

Susan O’Connor has announced at the Australian Archaeological Association Conference that the Jerimalai site in Timor reinforces the view that Australia and the Sunda region were settled around 42,000 years ago, after a migration south through Timor and not via Borneo and Sulawesi.

Press coverage is here, and John Hawks has a write up too

Carl Zimmer in the NYTimes:

Green frogs are only one deceptive species among many. Dishonesty has been documented in creatures ranging from birds to crustaceans to primates, including, of course, Homo sapiens. (…) Natural selection can favor a mix of truth and lies, particularly when an animal has a big audience. From one listener to the next, honesty may not be the best policy.

Continued here

Children with lower self-esteem valued possessions significantly more than children with higher self-esteem.

The ability to recognise faces is one of the most important abilities humans have, enabling us to track social interactions. There appears to be a specialised region in the human brain (the fusiform gyrus, in the temporal lobe) dedicated to processing facial information.

However, there has been some debate as to whether this region is dedicated to processing faces, or is used for more general fine-grained recognition of familiar objects. A review in todays Trends in Cognitive Sciences surveys the evidence and concludes that face recognition “does not reflect merely a general practice phenomenon and that it might be supported by evolved mechanisms (visual or nonvisual) and/or a sensitive period in infancy.”

Whilst the TICS paper is not freely available, a similar paper by co-author Nancy Kanwisher is (PDF)