March 11, 2013
There’s much to recommend in Carl Zimmer’s profile of David Reich in Discovery Magazine, not least of which are details on our favorite extinct human cousins, Neanderthals. While Neanderthals are the rock stars of the piece, Zimmer also gives a good primer on human evolution, ancient migration out of [...]
October 11, 2012
Not everyone would embrace their inner caveman, but in today’s Slate Ann Gibbons sure did. Gibbons, who also writes for Science, is the author of the book The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. Over almost two decades, she’s delved into the discoveries around human [...]
February 23, 2010
The journal Current Biology has a special review issue on the global genetic history of Homo sapiens. The articles are written for a fairly technical audience, but if it's a topic you're interested in, you might want to check it out. All of the articles are available online for free. Archaeogenetics [...]
June 4, 2009
Great apes really do giggle when tickled, new research says - just like you and me. Researchers from the University of Hannover in Germany recorded the tickle-induced vocalizations from three human infants and 21 infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos and analyzed this acoustic [...]
May 28, 2009
Type 1 diabetes is on the rise in European children, says a new report. Researchers studied type 1 diabetes data collected between 1989 and 2003 at 20 centers in 17 European countries. Their results, published online yesterday in the Lancet, show that more children, especially younger children, are being [...]
February 20, 2009
Almost since the 1871 publication of "The Descent of Man," in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the dramatic series of evolutionary events that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens continues to this day. Some have argued [...]
February 13, 2009
Generally when you think about what separates humans from other species, features like upright walking, large brains and language come to mind. But diet has actually played an enormous role in human evolution. Today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel [...]
October 27, 2008
The Spittoon has pointed out several times in the last few months (here, here and here) that when researchers look for evidence of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals, they often fail to find any. But there are still a number of geneticists who would like us to pay heed to the words of [...]
October 2, 2008
Before efforts to sequence the human genome began, scientists thought they’d find about 100,000 protein coding genes in the three billion bases pairs of DNA that are found in almost every cell. But much to everyone’s surprise, the true number turned out to be much lower. It’s now thought that the [...]
August 21, 2008
An animal's ability to survive often depends on how well it can avoid predators. Many species of fish, birds, and mammals have evolved ingenious methods of staying hidden from predators by blending into the background in one form or another. But what about animals that do the opposite? How and why would [...]
