Evolution of Birds: New Evidence for Foraging Behavior
Birds evolved during the Mesozoic, during the various “Ages” of the dinosaurs, as a subset of those dinosaurs. Many researchers believe that these early birds were different from their then very close...
View ArticleStudy Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of...
View ArticleHuman Evolutionary Rate Study
There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted...
View ArticleLife history trade-offs and human pygmies
Every few years a paper comes out “explaining” short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case...
View ArticleThe Flores Hominid and the Evolution of the Shoulder
Homo floresiensis more widely known as the “Hobbit,” may have had arms that were very different from those of modern humans. A paper in the current issue of the Journal of Human Evolution explores the...
View ArticleWhat did the immediate ancestor of chimps and humans look like?
Comparing living chimpanzees to living humans, in reference to the species that gave rise to these two closely related species, is one way to frame questions about the evolution of each...
View ArticleThe Potato and Human Evolution
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can’t find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the...
View ArticleWhy the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.”From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous...
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