Rear mortality
The headline is "Get Out Of Your Seat Or Die", which points to a rather less dramatic EurekAlert story, "Study links more time spent sitting to higher risk of death." They found that more leisure time...
View ArticleQuestioning the "evolution of an underclass"
A little life history theory can be a dangerous thing. Case in point: "Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass." The article discusses correlations among longevity, health, income, and age...
View ArticleQuote: SpongeBob on extra credit
MRS. PUFF: Congratulations, SpongeBob, you pass! SPONGEBOB: But Mrs. Puff, I don't feel like I've really done anything. MRS. PUFF: That's how extra credit is supposed to feel!
View ArticleNgandong interview
Nature News has run a nice interview with Russell Ciochon about the new excavations at Ngandong, Java. We've been excavating for 24 days without a break. The days blur together and we often lose track...
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Photo: Les Eyzies skyline
The statue above the Musée national de Préhistoire, in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, France.
View ArticleQuote: Huxley on traditions
Thomas Henry Huxley, the first line in On the Natural History of Man-Like Apes: Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere...
View ArticleStress on Sapolsky
Jonah Lehrer in Wired has a long profile of Robert Sapolsky and his work on stress in baboons: "Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine" Sapolsky slowly introduced himself to a troop of...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 3
Headline from The Telegraph: The Soviet penchant for Neanderthal art censorship is alive and well That's an explanation for the "Upper Paleolithic revolution" I hadn't thought of.
View ArticleQuote: Darwin hides the ball
Darwin, writing in his Autobiography about natural selection: In October, 1838, that is, 15 months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, … it at once struck me that under these circumstances...
View Article"Just-so stories" driving me crazy
NPR has been doing a special series of reports during their "Morning Edition" program called "The Human Edge", all about various aspects of human evolution. I think it's just wonderful that they're...
View ArticleBubbling through college
Bill Gates says college will be obsolete in 5 years: “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake...
View ArticleSamurai lead poisoning
An interesting study has shown how people in the samurai class of Edo period Japan were poisoning their children with lead. The results are reported in a current paper in the Journal of Archaeological...
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Sketchbook
Today's sketchbook: The mandible from the Kebara skeleton, top; Qafzeh 3, bottom.
View ArticleOpening a bibliography database for human evolution
I'm announcing today the new availability of a bibliography section here on the weblog. At present this database includes more than 11,500 entries. These represent a large fraction of the historical...
View ArticleMarc Hauser misconduct findings
Maybe by now everybody has seen the story about Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser: Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser — a well-known scientist and author of the book “Moral Minds’’ — is taking...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 4
Headline from Radio New Zealand: Brawling gang members Neanderthal, say police They were ostentatiously wearing stripes of red ochre and manganese dioxide beneath their right eyes.
View ArticleInvasive argument
I've been reading a lot about invasive species lately, for reasons which will soon become apparent. This morning, Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine has an essay about biological invasions: "Invasion of...
View ArticleAustralopithecus afarensis used stone tools
Shannon McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged and colleagues working at the Dikika field site in Ethiopia have found evidence of stone tool use 3.39 million years ago [1]. That's 800,000 years earlier than...
View ArticleQuote: Dave Winer on bootstrapping
From Dave Winer's discussion of bootstrapping and Web 2.0 technologies: One of the spookiest bootstraps is the process of writing a Pascal compiler (or any language, nothing special about Pascal). You...
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Photo: Neandertal plaque
The remaining fragment of the rock wall of the Neander valley, with a plaque commemorating the discovery of the first Neandertal specimen.
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