Anthropology
laelaps | June 8, 2008Even though I still have less than 100 pages left to go, I thought I would share a few thoughts about Ann Gibbons' recent book The First Human (specifically since Pierce asked for my thoughts on it). I do have a few criticisms, but outside of a few minor points of contention the book is highly enjoyable and serves as a good primer for anyone interested on catching up on some of the major discoveries of fossil hominids in the last two decades.
Prior to a class about African prehistory last fall I had never heard the names Ardipithecus, Orrorin, Sahelanthropus, or Australopithecus anamensis,…
laelaps | June 5, 2008The skull of Machairodus, from Owen's A History of British Fossil Mammals, and Birds.Digging through the seemingly endless mass of 19th century paleontological literature that I have collected via Google Books, I happened across a very interesting quote from Richard Owen in his 1846 textbook A History of British Fossil Mammals, and Birds. Earlier in the week, while researching William Buckland's relationship to the bewitching "Red Lady" during the 1820's, I was struck by some of the rhetorical techniques used by Buckland to diminish the importance of the skeleton. Among them was the notion…
laelaps | June 4, 2008Given that I have 23 single-spaced pages written for my human evolution chapter (which is about as long as the essay I wrote that was included in The Open Laboratory) I suppose I should be fairly pleased with myself. The truth of the matter is that I am not; I still have to get to major discoveries of fossil hominids post-1920, integrate evidence from primatology, and explain the genetic similarity between our species and living apes. It would be all-too-easy to let the chapter become a book by itself, and the sheer volume of information that needs to fit within a chapter will definitely test…
laelaps | June 2, 2008Of all the concepts of nature I have so far encountered in my research on the history of evolution as an idea, few (if any) are as virulent as the Great Chain of Being. Although Stephen Jay Gould claimed that White's 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables represents the last gasp of the Great Chain of Being the idea was not simply discarded or forgotten. While the concept ultimately failed to make sense in terms of the ordering of nature it found a refuge in evolutionary theory, particularly in considerations of how humans are related to…
neurophilosophy | May 13, 2008
The procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is scraped or drilled in the skull, is an ancient form of neurosurgery that has been performed since the late Stone Age. Exactly why ancient peoples performed trepanation has remained a matter of debate: some researchers argue that it was performed for medical reasons, as it is today, while others believe it was done for magical or religious reasons.
A new study by two American anthropologists now provides evidence that the Incas performed trepanation to treat head injuries; that the procedure was far more common than was previously…
laelaps | May 7, 2008Mr. Bergh to the RescueTHE DEFRAUDED GORILLA: "That Man wants to claim my Pedigree. He says he is one of my Descendants."MR. BERGH: "Now, Mr. Darwin, how could you insult him so?"This cartoon was published in Harper's Weekly in 1871, the year Darwin's The Descent of Man was first published. The "Mr. Bergh" being referred to is Henry Bergh, who founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. As for the gorilla, the great ape prominently featured in political cartoons and satire as the public was fascinated with them, and some naturalists placed them closer to…
laelaps | May 5, 2008As I've learned first-hand during my time in human osteology this semester, identifying bone fragments can be a very tricky process. It is easy to identify the differences between a radius and a fibula or a scapula and a pelvis when you have the whole bones in front of you, but if you only have a handful of broken pieces the task becomes exponentially more difficult. In reviewing the dirty & dusty collection available to me in preparation for my final exam next week, I've been focusing on some of the errors I consistently made and thought "What better way to remind myself than to write…
laelaps | April 30, 2008The skull of Paranthropus boisei (AKA "Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.). From Ungar et al. 2008.Ever since the discovery of the hominds we call Paranthropus robustus in 1938 and Paranthropus boisei in 1959, the dietary habits of these "robust australopithecines" have been controversial. With skulls that seem to have more in common with gorillas than with Homo habilis, another hominid more closely related to us that lived during the same time, it has long been thought that Paranthropus was a dietary specialist. The saggital crest, large and thickly-enameled teeth, and huge jaws of…
laelaps | April 23, 2008A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx Zoo.By the year 1799, the Great Chain of Being had effectively been sundered, although some still clutched the shattered links in the hope that some linear order to the Creation would be found. The concept was no longer tenable, Charles White having to base his entire case for the superiority of Europeans over people of Asian and African descent (each "race" acting as a species to fill in a slot in the chain of "lower" to "higher") in An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables on…
laelaps | April 21, 2008
During the 17th and 18th centuries, when taxonomy was being sorted out and suffering from growing pains, the term "nondescript" was a useful placeholder for any creature that was known but not yet described. This fairly straightforward use of the term was used less and less often as more of the natural world was cataloged until it was more of an admission of ignorance than anything else. This doesn't mean that it went away, however. Giving the name "nondescript" to potentially unidentifiable fossil fragments or to things that seemingly bent the rules of nature became more popular in the 19th…
gregladen | April 20, 2008I have to confess that I really like Sim City. I have not touched it since I started blogging .... but I have many fond memories of firing all the hospital workers and unleashing tornadoes on wealthy neighborhoods, or using the terraforming tools to build landscape with a barely hidden but rich geological history then paving it over with suburbs, slums, and mixed used residential projects.
But somehow, having all this power is a little unsatisfying. Maybe it would be more fun to be ... I dunno, maybe ....
God!
Well, Will Wright, who invented The Sims, starting this whole thing out, has…
laelaps | April 17, 2008When Linnaeus was attempting to organize "the Creation," he gave the chimpanzee the binomial Homo troglodytes. Since Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a "pigmie" (a juvenile chimpanzee [see Gould's essay "To Show An Ape" in The Flamingo's Smile]), the close resemblance between apes and humans has been recognized, even if a recognition of our actual evolutionary relationship has been harder won.
Sometimes Tyson's landmark work is heralded as a true understanding of the relationship between humans and apes, but in fact it was primarily an attempt to weld on a "missing link" in the Great Chain…
gregladen | April 16, 2008Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets.
You already know Sagan's argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of…
gregladen | April 9, 2008Recently published research shows that individual humans will be nicer (more altruistic) when there is the possibility that the recipient of an act can respond verbally. The paper, "Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior" is published in Evolution and Human Behavior for March.
These results are not particularly surprising, but it is important to confirm these things through experimental work. From the abstract:
[Humans may be...] motivated by concerns for praise and blame. ... we experimentally investigate the impact of anticipated verbal feedback on altruistic behavior…
gregladen | April 6, 2008If you came here with the question "Is blood blue" or "Is blood ever blue" or "Is the blood in our veins blue?" then please visit this post: "Is Blood Ever Blue, Science Teachers Want To Know!"
Here, we look at the question "What does the term "Blue Blood" mean?
A "Blue Blood" is an upper classer, or one with new money, or nobility, or something along those lines (the use of the term varies, as is the case with almost all terms in any language, of course). The meaning of the term came up in discussion of actual blue (or not) blood, here. Well, I looked it up on Wikipedia and following is…
edyong | April 1, 2008You could argue that life is all about cheating death and having enough sex to pass on your genes to the next generation, as many times as possible. From this dispassionate viewpoint, human reproduction is very perplexing for our reproductive potential has an early expiry date. At an average age of 38, women start becoming rapidly less fertile only to permanently lose the ability to have children some 10 years later during menopause.
From an evolutionary point of view, this decline is bizarre. Other long-lived animals stay fertile until close to the end of their lives, with elephants…
gregladen | March 27, 2008The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split…
laelaps | March 26, 2008Among the phrases that are most likely to make my hackles rise, "missing link" has to be among the most irritating. There is no good reason to continue to use it, the idea that evolution is a "chain" of progress being closely associated with the terminology, but this seems to be of little concern to some journalists. Even if we put accuracy aside, the phrase "missing link" is terrible because it has a sort of "half-joking" connotation to it, often being associated with bigfoot and cartoons rather than the remains of ancient humans.
Maybe they feel like they're trying to help by creating a "…
gregladen | March 24, 2008Significant cultural and physical differences ... the stuff of race and ethnicity ... are prominent when people move across continents or between them. Eventually, the ponderous events of history, which involve occasional foldings in the continuum of human variation, causing apparent patchiness, are offset by the frequent events of human activities, resulting in genetic and cultural admixtures. What colonialism, invasion, and migration do is undone.
A new study out in PLoS Genetics examines this phenomenon for Latin America, with a study of genetic admixture.
From the Author's Summary:…