How Women May Have Shaped Men’s Penises. Evidence of Human Inbreeding from Skull Fossils | Skull Deformities. Inbreeding may have been a common practice among early human ancestors, fossils show. The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report today (March 18) in the journal PLOS ONE.
The fossil, now dubbed Xujiayao 11, is just one of many examples of ancient human remains that display rare or unknown congenital abnormalities, according to the researchers. "These populations were probably relatively isolated, very small and, as a consequence, fairly inbred," study leader Erik Trinkhaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. The human skull fossil has a hole at its top, a disorder known as an "enlarged parietal foramen," which matches a modern human condition of the same name caused by a rare genetic mutation. 100,000-year-old skull that shows signs of inbreeding adds evidence to theory that our ancestors regularly practised incest. Remains were found in northern China's Nihewan BasinThe discovery adds to growing evidence that early humans inbred oftenThat could be because populations were so small, researcher suggests By Damien Gayle Published: 16:02 GMT, 19 March 2013 | Updated: 16:10 GMT, 19 March 2013 Skull pieces from an early human who lived 100,000 years ago in northern China suggest that inbreeding might have been common among our ancestors, a new study claims.
The remains found at Xujiayao, in the Nihewan Basin, have a now-rare congenital deformation usually only found in incestuously conceived offspring. It adds to a growing body of archaeological evidence that human ancestors regularly inbred at least until the end of the Palaeolithic era. Incest: A view of the Xujiayao site and internal and external view of the Xujiayao 11 skull piece with its position indicated on the drawing of a complete skull It occurs in about one out of every 25,000 modern human births and is associated with inbreeding.
DNA Tracks Ancient Mediterranean Farmers To Scandinavia. Genes and the Human Brain Evolution. May 9, 2012 (Ivanhoe Newswire)– The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but it´s than expected. According to a pair of studies, a partial, duplicate copy of a gene appears to be responsible for the critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin. The momentous gene duplication event occurred about two or three million years ago, at a critical transition in the evolution of the human lineage. The studies are the first to explore the evolutionary history and function of any uniquely human gene duplicate. “There are approximately 30 genes that were selectively duplicated in humans,” Franck Polleux, an expert in brain development at The Scripps Research Institute, was quoted saying.
Intriguingly, many of these genes appear to play some role in the developing brain. SOURCE: Cell Press, May 2012. Chris Stringer on the Origins and Rise of Modern Humans. Lone Survivors | Chris Stringer. 400,000-Year-Old Human Remains Found in Israel. By Stephanie LamEpoch Times Staff Created: January 5, 2011 Last Updated: February 28, 2011 OLDEST HUMAN TEETH FOUND: Archaeologists found evidence that humans lived in Israel 400,000 years ago, including these teeth, some of which are dated from 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. ( Avi Gopher/Tel Aviv University) Archaeologists have found evidence of modern humans, Homo sapiens, living in Israel 400,000 years ago. The remains found are the oldest known of the species. The discovery was made in Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha’ayin in central Israel, which has been excavated by Drs. Avi Gopher and Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University since 2000.
Researchers from Israel, the United States, and Spain analyzed the shape of eight teeth recovered from Qesem Cave. Using CT scans and X-rays, they found that the teeth are very similar to the teeth of today’s people. They also found evidence that the humans who occupied the site used fire regularly and had a systematic way of producing flint blades. Did Hunger Drive the Evolution of Homo sapiens? This time last year, science news headlines blared a spectacular claim – the first members of our species evolved 200,000 years earlier than previously thought. The evidence consisted of a small collection of teeth. Discovered in roughly 200,000 to 400,000 year old deposits in Israel’s Qesem Cave, these fossils were said to herald the archaic beginnings of our own species. We didn’t evolve in Africa, reports claimed, but got an earlier start along the eastern border of the Mediterranean in the Levant.
I wasn’t convinced. The teeth in question fell within the range of variation for both early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Now I feel as if it’s 2010 again. News sites have reiterated what was said last year, with elephants added. “Modern humans.” As the classification of varieties of the genus Homo is problematic, we refrain in this paper from any taxonomic designations that would indicate species or subspecies affiliation for the hominins of Qesem Cave. References: Belmaker, M. (2009). TAU: Modern man emerged out of hunger Out of the Mouth of Babes | The Primate Diaries. Extended breastfeeding is the norm in most human and primate societies. So why are we the weird ones? "Attachment (with respect to Martin Schoeller)" by Nathaniel Gold My son will be three-years-old next month and is still breastfeeding. In other words, he is a typical primate. One thing I’ve learned in my research on human evolution is that people are quick to assume that what they do is “natural” simply because they don’t know of other examples where things are done differently.
In their classic paper, “Life History Variation in Primates” published in the premier scientific journal Evolution, the British zoologists Paul H. One especially strong correlation was that adult female body weight was closely tied to their offspring’s weaning age, so much so that knowing the first would allow you to predict the second with a 91% success rate. How well does this prediction hold for our species? Figure 1. This piece has been corrected from how it originally appeared. Fossil Finds Challenge View of Man's Place in Evolution. August 9, 2007 By Steve Bloomfield Two fossils discovered in northern Kenya directly challenge the established view that there was a linear progression from apes to humans. Scientists have long believed that humans today, Homo sapiens, descended from Homo erectus, which in turn evolved from Homo habilis. But new research, led by the world-renowned palaeontologist Meave Leakey, suggests that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived side by side in eastern Africa for more than 500,000 years.
Dr Leakey’s team discovered two fossils in Turkana, northern Kenya, in 2000, but it took seven years of research and laboratory work by the Koobi Fora Research Project in Kenya to uncover their importance. One of the fossils, an upper jaw bone of Homo ha-bilis, is 1.44 million years old, making it far more recent than all previous discoveries of Homo habilis bones. The second discovery, of a skull of Homo erectus, was dated to 1.55 million years ago. (c) 2007 Independent, The; London (UK). Paleoanthropologist Leakey Says Evolution Debate Nearing The End.
May 27, 2012 The debate over evolution will be a thing of the past within the next three decades, the son of archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey has proclaimed. In an interview with the Associated Press (AP), Richard Leakey, a 67-year-old, Kenyan-born Stony Brook University professor, paleoanthropologist, and avowed atheist, said that he believed scientific discoveries over the next 15 to 30 years will have reached the point that “even the skeptics” will be able to accept the theory put forth by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book Origin of Species.
“If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges,” he said. “If you don’t like the word evolution, I don’t care what you call it, but life has changed. Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports. Worm Discovery Illuminates How Our Brains Might Have Evolved. Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery. "It must have evolutionary roots somewhere, but where? " wrote Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, in an essay published in the journal's March 15 issue.
(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Years of study of common invertebrate lab subjects, such as amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) or nematodes, have yielded scant evidence as to the origins of the big, centralized brains we all develop as embryos. These unlovely, simple little worms live most of their brainless lives buried in deep-sea beds. But not everyone in the invertebrate community is convinced that the early antecedent to the vertebrate brain has been discovered.
Complexity from simplicity All of our features—from our brains to our bones—emerged from elaboration on the simplest of genetic patterns found in primitive gunk. Fossilised finger points to previously unknown group of human relatives. A fossilised little finger discovered in a cave in the mountains of southern Siberia belonged to a young girl from an unknown group of archaic humans, scientists say. The missing human relatives are thought to have inhabited much of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago, and so shared the land with early modern humans and Neanderthals.
The finding paints a complex picture of human history in which our early ancestors left Africa 70,000 years ago to rub shoulders with other distant relatives in addition to the stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals. The new ancestors have been named "Denisovans" after the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia where the finger bone was unearthed in 2008. Field workers excavating the site have found various stone tools and bones that suggest the cave was occupied by early humans for 125,000 years.
A large molar tooth, measuring around 1.5cm on each side and found at the site in 2000, also belongs to a Denisovan individual. Humans ventured as far as Torquay more than 40,000 years ago | Science. A fragment of human jaw unearthed in a prehistoric cave in Torquay is the earliest evidence of modern humans in north-west Europe, scientists say. The tiny piece of upper jaw was excavated from Kents Cave on the town's border in the 1920s but its significance was not fully realised until scientists checked its age with advanced techniques that have only now become available. The fresh analysis at Oxford University dated the bone and three teeth to a period between 44,200 and 41,500 years ago, when a temporary warm spell lasting perhaps only a thousand years, made Britain habitable.
The age of the remains puts modern humans at the edge of the habitable world at the time and increases the period over which they shared the land with Neanderthals, our close relatives who evolved in Europe and Asia. "It confirms the presence of modern humans at the time of the earliest Aurignacian culture, and tells us a great deal about how rapidly our species dispersed across Europe during the last ice age. How a gene duplication helped our brains become 'human' A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.
What genetic changes account for the vast behavioral differences between humans and other primates? Researchers so far have catalogued only a few, but now it seems that they can add a big one to the list. A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.
Surprisingly, the added copy doesn't augment the function of the original gene, SRGAP2, which makes neurons sprout connections to neighboring cells. Polleux is the senior author of the new report, which was published online ahead of print on May 3, 2012 by the journal Cell. New findings solve human origins mystery. October 10, 2007Los Angeles, California - An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans. On October 10th, online, open-access journal PLoS ONE will publish the report based on research from Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology and from the Cedars Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders that connects several recent fossil discoveries to older fossils finds that have eluded adequate explanation in the past.
Recent advances in the field of homeotic genetics together with a series of discoveries of hominoid fossils vertebrae now strongly suggest that a specific genetic change that generated the upright bipedal human body form may soon be identified. Public Library of Science. Climate and Human Evolution. The Evolution of Grief, Both Biological and Cultural, in the 21st Century | Culturing Science. Three months ago, I received an email informing me that a high school friend, Pat, had died. I read his obituary and my body stopped functioning. I froze on the spot, limbs tense but trembling. My mouth went dry, my vision blurred.
As I waited for my train in the packed station, I could barely stand as my muscles turned to jelly and legs folded beneath my body. It was shocking to me: I felt real physical pain — a biological response brought about by stress hormones — in response to death. Evolutionary biologists think that grief is passed on not because it provides benefit in itself, but rather it is a side effect of having relationships. In more social animals, such as humans, those reciprocal relationships extend beyond parent-child. This idea was endlessly comforting in my mourning. Grief is the price we pay for friendship. Digital love But these clear ideas became muddled when Steve Jobs died last month. The onslaught of mourning continued, nonetheless. The mark of a technophile. Fast-Evolving Brains Helped Humans out of the Stone Age. Just like our animal skin–clad ancestors, we gather food with zeal, lust over the most capable mates, and have an aversion to scammers.
And we do still wear plenty of animal skins. But does more separate us from our Stone Age forebears than cartoonists and popular psychologists might have us believe? At first blush, parsing the modern human in terms of behaviors apparently hardwired into the brain over eons of evolution seems like a tidy, straightforward exercise. And 30 years ago, when the field of evolutionary psychology was gaining steam, some facile parallels between ancient and modern behaviors lodged themselves in the popular conceptions of human evolution. "It's very easy to slip into a very simplistic view of human nature," says Robert Kurzban, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, citing the classic Flintstones stereotype.
"It seems implausible that all of that change has been going on without changing how the brain works," Laland says. The DNA of Human Evolution. Human Evolution Still Tied to Darwinian Selection. How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C. : Krulwich Wonders... First of Our Kind: Could Australopithecus sediba Be Our Long Lost Ancestor? Early Meat-Eating Human Ancestors Thrived While Vegetarian Hominin Died Out. Fossils point to a big family for human ancestors.