Month: March 2010
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The temple that time forget
Aziz points me to a Newsweek article, History in the Remaking, on the Göbekli Tepe temple complex. The piece is a bit breathless: Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt…
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Eating like your ancestors
The ideas of gene-culture coevolution have percolated all the way to the foodie-sphere, over at Epi-Log at Epicurious, The Health Trend of the Future: The Ethnic-Group Diet?: So, maybe at some point in the future, a visit to the doctor will involve a full genetic workup followed by a prescribed diet tailored to our individual…
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Alcoholism, genes, and genetic background
PNAS has a new study out on the “modest” association between GABRA2 and “alcohol dependence.” The odds ratios pretty weak. But what struck me is that the populations they looked at was mostly European and African American. I wonder why these research programs just don’t focus on Native Ameicans; who are operationally an admixed population…
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The cultural animal as an evolving animal
Nicholas Wade has an article in The New York Times, Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force. One point to highlight: By this criterion, many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease.…
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Ostrich shell art in South Africa 60,000 years ago
There’s a new paper in PNAS reviewing the tradition of etching on ostrich shells. Since it’s PNAS, the paper isn’t on the website, but Edward Edmund Yong is able to cover the major points thanks to his access. This stuff is of interest because there was a long time lag between the emergence of anatomically…