Did fist fighting change the course of human evolution? Are Neanderthals Human? By Carl Zimmer Posted 09.20.12 NOVA scienceNOW In August 1856, in the German valley of Neander—Neanderthal in German—men cutting limestone for the Prussian construction industry stumbled upon some bones in a cave. Looking vaguely human, the bones—a piece of a skull, portions of limbs, and fragments of shoulder blades and ribs—eventually made their way to an anatomist in Bonn named Hermann Schaafhausen. Do Neanderthals belong within Homo sapiens? Paleoanthropologists cannot agree. Here, a skull cast of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal discovered in 1908. Enlarge Photo credit: © Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis Schaafhausen pored over the fossils, observing their crests and knobs.
The Neanderthal Man challenged Schaafhausen with a simple yet profound question: Was it a human, or did it belong to another species? It's been over 150 years since the bones first emerged from the Neander Valley—a time during which we've learned a vast amount about human evolution. Variations on a theme. Clues to the Origin of Snake Venom. The Loom. Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old. Before then, they were fins, which your fishy ancestors used to swim through oceans and rivers. Once those fins sprouted digits, they could propel your salamander-like ancestors across dry land.
Fast forward 300 million years, and your hands had become fine-tuned for manipulations: your lemur-like ancestors used them to grab leaves and open up fruits. Within the past few million years, your hominin ancestors had fairly human hands, which they used to fashion tools for digging up tubers, butchering carcasses, and laying the groundwork for our global dominance today. We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. A team of Spanish scientists has provided us with a glimpse of that story. Both fins and hands get their start in embryos.
In search of ant ancestors. The Daily Gazette - Google News Archive Search. Clues to Fighting Cancer Are Found in the Genes of Yeast. New DNA evidence could explain what happened to the Neanderthals. The earliest split in modern humanity was 100,000 years ago. What's interesting is that as a result of this split, populations within the Khoisan group should about as much genetic diversity as the rest of humanity does combined.
And that's including every other genotype within Africa. Once you eliminate the African populations from the pool it gets even narrower, to the point that the genetic differences between Eurasians, Amerinds, and Australian aborigines are remarkably small comparatively. On a related note, I remember going through the different Y-chromosome haplogroups of the world and was fascinated to find that the population group closest to Western Eurasians (including Europeans, Near Easterners, and East Indians) with Haplogroup R were the Amerinds, among whom the closely related Haplogroup Q is very common. In fact, the ancestral link through Y-chromosome between both groups appears stronger than that between East Eurasians and either of the two.
Why Haven't Bald Men Gone Extinct? Breasts « Mike's Meandering Mind. For some reason, breasts have been in the news lately. Not one but two scholarly works are out, one of which is nicely skeptical about all the received wisdom about their form, function etc. Apart from my Y-chromosome issues, I find this subject interesting because of the discussions about precisely why men are attracted to women with large breasts.
It’s simply amazing to read all the debates in evolutionary psychology which pass themselves off as science but are often little more than speculation (check out this baby for an example). I’ve heard all the “theories”, few of which are actually falsifiable. And all of them sound like rubbish to me. Men are attracted to women’s breasts because they want their young to be well-fed. To be honest, this debate tends to fill me with anger. These theories also ignore something very important: there may not be a reason. That having been said, I recently encountered a theory that makes some sense to me. We are animals. Allergies Could Have Evolved to Protect Us.
What Color Were Tomatoes Before All the Dinosaurs Died? Birds are the only reason you're not fighting giant insects. Birds go back to the Jurassic at least... Well... according to Matthew E. Clapham and Jered A. Karr of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the University of California, the information you present is disputed. The study linked in the article above says, at the start: "Here we show, using a dataset of more than 10,500 fossil insect wing lengths, that size tracked atmospheric oxygen concentrations only for the first 150 Myr of insect evolution. [...]
Maximum insect size decreased even as atmospheric pO2 rose in the Early Cretaceous following the evolution and radiation of early birds, particularly as birds acquired adaptations that allowed more agile flight The information you quote was maybe the standard thinking in the past, and maybe this study will turn out to be mistaken and we will go back to an earlier explanation, but you're pretty much not even responding to the evidence presented in the article...
Either way, though, fascinating stuff. :) Long-distance running and evolution: Why humans can outrun horses but can’t jump higher than cats. By Chris McGrath/Getty Images. At first glance the annual Man vs. Horse Marathon, set for June 9 in Wales, seems like a joke sport brought to us by the same brilliant minds behind dwarf tossing and gravy wrestling. It was, after all, the product of a pints-fueled debate in a Welsh pub, and for years its official starter was rock musician Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. But the jokiness is misleading: When viewed through science’s clarifying lens, the funny marathon is one of the few sports that isn’t a joke. Hear me out, sports fans—I'm a basketball nut myself, and so the joke is as much on me as anyone. To see where I’m coming from, you can’t do better than examining basketball’s most physically talented player, Michael Jordan. There's no denying it—our kind started substituting brains for brawn long ago, and it shows: We can't begin to compete with animals when it comes to the raw ingredients of athletic prowess.
But how did we get this way? Artificially evolved enzyme could protect us against nerve gas attacks. What the deep seas tell us about life on other planets. Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history - Technology & science - Science.