Category Archives: paleontology

The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 32: Tibetan Denisovans!Denisovan MandibleThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Dr. Frido Welker, a pioneer in the field of ancient protein phylogeneti…

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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 9: the genetics of AfricaThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss the genetics of Africa, and how our human story has become more complicated…

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As ancient DNA becomes a more standard part of archaeological science it’s going really yield up some doozies. You’ve probably read Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, and how it’s upended old paradigms. But with the human past we probably have a better […]

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The figure above is kind of hard to parse, but it’s from Body size downgrading of mammals over the late Quaternary, and it illustrates that in some periods larger animals tended to go extinct, while others there was no bias due to size (in fact, large animals tended to do quite well because of their […]

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Metaphors matter because they evoke images, and images are often one of the best ways to understand something in a deep fashion. Consider Charles Darwin’s musing:“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…”He brought something memorable and famil…

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Neanderthals, cousins we knew.In 2010, our understanding of Neanderthals, our human cousins, changed forever. Before this year, there was a live debate about whether they were human at all, whether they had fully elaborated language, or even culture.Wh…

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Update: That charlatan David Klinghoffer seems to be enjoying this. As a rule I don’t follow dishonest propagandists, but it’s interesting how appealing this sort of “two sides” story is to Creationists. End Update
Reading this …

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There’s a new paper out, Partial genetic turnover in neandertals: continuity in the east and population replacement in the west. The primary results are above. Basically, using 13 mtDNA samples the authors conclude that it looks as if there was a founder effect for Neanderthals in Western Europe ~50 K years ago, generating a very […]

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I missed this piece in Edge from Chris Stringer in November, Rethinking “Out of Africa”. He sums up his current thinking at the end: We’ve got the lineage of the hobbit, ‘Homo floresiensis’ (in quotation marks because its human status in not yet clear), perhaps diverging more than two million years ago, evolving in isolation in southeast […]

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Paintings at Lascaux, Prof saxx Behavioral modernity: Behavioral modernity is a term used in anthropology, archeology and sociology to refer to a set of traits that distinguish present day humans and their recent ancestors from both living primates and other extinct hominid lineages. It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a […]

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Image credit:ICHTO
Recently something popped up into my Google news feed in regards to “Neanderthal-human mating.” If you are a regular reader you know that I’m wild for this particular combination of the “wild thing.” Bu…

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Yesterday Dienekes had a post up, Homo erectus soloensis fades into the past…. In it he states:
Every year or so there seems to be a redating of a key fossil in human evolution. It’s nice to see scientific self-correction in action, and soo…

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Kennewick Man produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from John Hawks, “Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation&#…

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There was a reference to complex pre-Cambrian life in a book I’m reading, Kraken, and it made me double-check Wikipedia’s Cambrian explosion entry. Lacking total clarity, I decided to read a new paper which was published in Nature, Earth

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I was thinking a bit about H. floresiensis today. Probably my thoughts were triggered by John Hawks’ post on the propensity for paleontologists to be “splitters,” naming new finds as species when they’re not. The issue with H. floresiensis is a little more cut & dried: if they weren’t a separate species they were obviously […]

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Razib Khan