Building Bodies | Becoming Human Primate Bipedalism: Understanding Standing Up <p>This site requires Javascript, please update your browser...</p><p></p> Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists agree that upright posture and the subsequent ability to walk on two legs was a crucial major adaptation associated with the divergence of the human lineage from a common ancestor with the African apes. Main Concepts Human evolution is marked by a mosaic pattern. Assessible Objectives Students will... identify key anatomical similarities and differences between the great apes and humans.infer likely anatomical features in ancient human ancestors.list principal anatomical changes in primates necessary for adaptation to fully bipedal locomotion.sequence particular anatomical features in hominids as part of a series of broader evolutionary trends. Teaching Strategy & Preparation This activity can be effectively and easily inserted into any one of several parts of your course. Preparation For each pair of students... Directions Materials
Wonkette — The D.C. Gossip Unique ancient spider attack preserved in amber Researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attack on prey caught in its web -- a 100 million-year-old snapshot of an engagement frozen in time. The extraordinarily rare fossils are in a piece of amber that preserved this event in remarkable detail, an action that took place in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar in the Early Cretaceous between 97-110 million years ago, almost certainly with dinosaurs wandering nearby. Aside from showing the first and only fossil evidence of a spider attacking prey in its web, the piece of amber also contains the body of a male spider in the same web. This provides the oldest evidence of social behavior in spiders, which still exists in some species but is fairly rare. "This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus of zoology at Oregon State University and world expert on insects trapped in amber.
Pharyngula Wiki Human Evolution & Archaeology Blag Hag Hundreds of people showed up to my mother’s funeral. We were lucky the room adjacent to ours wasn’t also booked for a funeral, because we filled the seats in that room in addition to ours. In addition to that, about 40 people had to stand, and that doesn’t count the 50 or so people who came to visitation but didn’t stay for the memorial. My mother was much loved, and we lost her too soon. I wanted to share the eulogy I gave for my mother yesterday. “My mother was the kindest, most self-sacrificing person I knew. My mother was also one of the most creative people I knew. Related to her creativity, I always loved her willingness to be a little silly and dance to the beat of her own drummer. But most of all, my mom knew how to appreciate the little things, even if she had already experienced them a thousand times before. It’s difficult to summarize all of the wonderful memories I have of my mom in a small amount of time.
The Tree of Life If you want a hardcopy of this poster, you can either (1) download the PDF file here for free and take it to a print shop (Kinkos will work) and get it printed as a large poster (it prints 24" x 48"), or (2) buy it online at Zazzle.com (click here to jump to the poster). The words in the image above may look a bit blurry because this web page is displaying a compressed JPEG image on this web site (to improve download time). If you make a print from the PDF file (or zazzle) all the words and lines will be crisp and clear. I created the poster with the Xara Xtreme drawing program. Keywords: Tree of Life, evolution, cladogram, cladistics, darwin, phylogenetic tree, phylogenetics, evolutionary tree, darwin, poster. Permission to copy and modify this illustration is given under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License (
Pharyngula Probably not. But the New York Times reports: A review of studies has found that the health benefits of infant male circumcision vastly outweigh the risks involved in the procedure. Actually, it doesn’t. Not at all. The paper is all about the frequency of circumcision in the US; this is the only real data in the paper, and notice that a good chunk of it is speculation. Prevalence of adult circumcision in the United States during the past 6 decades (1948-2010). It does toss in a table purporting to show the tremendous risks of not circumcising baby boys, but this is not new — these are the same sloppy data that the author has been peddling for over a decade. The author is Brian Morris, better known as the Man Who Hates Foreskins. Take that first condition, the likelihood of urinary tract infections. Or look at his claim of much greater rates of HIV infection. Armed with this hunch, rather than set up a website I chose to do some research. It’s also an argument that can cut both ways.
The Origin and Evolution of Life the basic outline of the origin of life is believed to be: formation of earth 4.6 bya formation of monomers (simple amino acids, sugars, etc) formation of polymers (proteinoids, nucleic acids, etc) lipid synthesis for membranes (phospholipids) formation of a protobiont RNA is believed to be the first information molecule; DNA likely came later 3 different scenarios exist regarding how life began: tidal pools, with drying and rewetting, offered an excellent medium to accumulate monomers and polymerize them; then form coascervates which would have been precursors of protobionts panspermia - a cosmic origin of life where organisms from other planets seeded earth via a meteor undersea thermal vents, which provide the necessary energy and catalysts for life's origins one scenario: required 60°C heat, produced polymers of 100 amino acids (MW > 10,000) this may have occurred in tidal pools where periodic drying occurred adding polymers to water forms larger structures an early life form would have required:
Human Evolution Evidence Scientists have discovered a wealth of evidence concerning human evolution, and this evidence comes in many forms. Thousands of human fossils enable researchers and students to study the changes that occurred in brain and body size, locomotion, diet, and other aspects regarding the way of life of early human species over the past 6 million years. Millions of stone tools, figurines and paintings, footprints, and other traces of human behavior in the prehistoric record tell about where and how early humans lived and when certain technological innovations were invented. Study of human genetics show how closely related we are to other primates – in fact, how connected we are with all other organisms – and can indicate the prehistoric migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, all over the world. Advances in the dating of fossils and artifacts help determine the age of those remains, which contributes to the big picture of when different milestones in becoming human evolved.
BBC Nature - History of life on Earth