Posted on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 by Beast Ape
A news brief from Science Daily details the lastest blow to the hypothesis of insular dwarfism in archaic hominins in Micronesia. This story was a bit unbelievable since it surfaced last spring in National Geographic, but managed to hang around human evolution discussion because of the interesting LB1 specimen found on Flores several years earlier. [...]
Filed under: Archaeology, Human Evolution, Paleoanthropology | Tagged: hobbits, Homo floresiensis, Human Evolution, modern human origins | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Sunday, 24 August 2008 by Beast Ape
The New York Times ran a great story today about a Floridian high school biology teacher (David Campbell) and his mission to convey the scientific principles of evolutionary theory to students raised in an deeply religious (evangelical Protestant) community in Florida. I recommend reading the article to anyone working to improve science education in the [...]
Filed under: Science Education | Tagged: evolution, Science Education | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Friday, 22 August 2008 by Beast Ape
A recent AAAS podcast brought my attention to this piece of research published during my time in the field. A team of researchers from Wake Forest University (Go Deacs!) compared the androgen levels and behavior of Nazca boobies (Sula granti) and blue-footed boobies (S. nebouxii). They discovered that Nazca booby hatchlings have higher perinatal androgen [...]
Filed under: Animal Behavior, Biology, Endocrinology | Tagged: Animal Behavior, challenge hypothesis, Endocrinology, Nazca booby, siblicide | Leave a Comment »
Posted on Thursday, 21 August 2008 by Beast Ape
Big news in the study of animal cognition was published this week in PLoS Biology. Magpies (Pica pica) were shown to engage in mirror-induced, self-directed behavior via a “mark test” (Prior et al. 2008). This research makes magpies the first bird species capable of self-recognition. The “mark test” is a common experiment used to test [...]
Filed under: Animal Cognition | Tagged: Animal Cognition, self-recognition, Animal Behavior | 2 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 by Beast Ape
A team of researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the mitochondrial (mtDNA) genome sequence of an individual neandertal in the current issue of Cell (Green et al. 2008). The sequence is of an individual neandertal from Vindija (Croatia), whose fossilized remains date to approximately 38,000 years ago (Green et al. 2008). The [...]
Filed under: Anthropology, Human Evolution, Paleoanthropology | Tagged: genetics, Human Evolution, modern human origins, mtDNA, Neandertal, Paleoanthropology | Leave a Comment »
