HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in March 2008
Written March 31, 2008 in africa, anthropology, books, evolution, fossils, genetics, human prehistory, people, stupidity
No doubt you’ve all seen some of the hype surrounding the new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. The book argues that a long-extinct hominin species, the “Boskops”, were much smarter then we are:
Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely [...]
When facing oncoming dinosaurs (particularly those less than 13 meters away), waving is not the best course of action. RUN LIKE HELL.
Source: Wikipedia.
Written March 30, 2008 in it-was-better-in-my-day, language, language preservation, linguistics
An analysis of the top 8,000 girls’ and boys’ names registered on birth certificates last year shows that parents are increasingly eschewing spellings that their parents would have recognised in favour of making up their own phonetic versions.
For hundreds of children born in 2007, Samuel became [...]
“Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux, France, has found crafted lumps of pigment – essentially crayons – left behind by Neanderthals across Europe.
He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins. And, since body art is a form of communication, this implies that the Neanderthals could speak, d’Errico says.”
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Mareike Fischer and Mike Steel in Evolutionary Bioinformatics discuss the expected anomalies in the fossil record:
The problem of intermediates in the fossil record has been frequently discussed ever since Darwin. The extent of ‘gaps’ (missing transitional stages) has been used to argue against gradual evolution from a common ancestor. Traditionally, gaps have often been explained [...]
Dr Tatiana Olivia Judson continues her series on mutations. This week, beneficial ones:
Adaptation is the “wow!” factor of nature: when we see something spectacular or exquisite, we are typically looking at an adaptation. And what underpins adaptation is the appearance and spread of beneficial mutations: the process is not possible without them. Yet despite their [...]
I am so buying one of these t-shirts.
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