Departments

;

evolution

  • SOURCE: OUPblog
    3-19-17

    Human evolution: why we’re more than great apes

    by Robin Dunbar

    In this shortened excerpt from "Human Evolution: Our Brains and Our Behavior," evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explains the link between culture and the human brain—and how that connection distinguishes us from other primates.

  • SOURCE: New Historian
    2-18-16

    Earliest Neanderthal-Human Interbreeding Evidence Found

    Co-led by Professor Adam Siepel from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, NY, the team found evidence of interbreeding dating back to approximately 100,000 years in the past – several millennia before any other existing documented interbreeding event.

  • SOURCE: New Historian
    10-31-15

    Fossils of a New Ape Species Cause Rethink of Evolution

    The animal to which the bones belonged lived 11.6 million years ago, according to the researchers who analysed it, an international team from the Institut Catala de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont and George Washington University.

  • 2-9-15

    The Key to the Success of Homo Sapiens

    by Yuval Noah Harari

    In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn’t stand a chance. Why? Sapiens possess the ability to create fictions.

  • SOURCE: archaeologynewsnetwork
    10-22-14

    Origins of sex discovered

    A profound new discovery by palaeontologist, Flinders University Professor John Long, reveals how the intimate act of sexual intercourse first evolved in our deep distant ancestors.

  • SOURCE: The Tennessean
    8-3-13

    Scopes was a willing 'guinea pig'

    On May 26, 1925, The New York Times’ front page featured a story from Tennessee that would become one of the most famous court trials in our history.“John T. Scopes, young Dayton (Tenn.) high school teacher, tonight stands indicted for having taught the theory of evolution to students attending his science classes in violation of a law passed by the Tennessee Legislature and signed by the Governor on March 21, 1925. … The hearing of the case will bring many notables to the little mountain town, including William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow of Chicago and Dudley Field Malone of New York for the defense.”...

  • SOURCE: NYT
    2-4-13

    Darwin’s birds get new look

    In 1855, Charles Darwin took up a new hobby. He started raising pigeons....Pigeon breeding, Darwin argued, was an analogy for what happened in the wild. Nature played the part of the fancier, selecting which individuals would be able to reproduce. Natural selection might work more slowly than human breeders, but it had far more time to produce the diversity of life around us.Yet to later generations of biologists, pigeons were of little more interest than they are to, say, New Yorkers. Attention shifted to other species, like fruit flies and E. coli.Now Michael D. Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah, is returning pigeons to the spotlight....