The Human Dynasty

Biologists today are doing what Darwin thought impossible. They are studying the process of evolution not through fossils but directly, as it is happening. Now, by modeling the steps evolution takes to build, from scratch, an adaptive biochemical network, biophysicists have gone one step further. Instead of watching evolution in action, they show that they can predict its next best move.

[From the BBC]
Researchers estimate that as many as one in 17 men from the Mediterranean may have Phoenician ancestry – the sea-faring civilisation which dominated the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.

Archaeologists have succeeded in dating layers in South Africa that provide information about stone tool innovation on the Middle Stone Age. This archaeological epoch began at the same time as the earliest appearances of humans (homo sapiens sapiens), about 200,000 years ago, in Africa and differs from the European Middle Stone Age chronologically. It is categorized as an era of change and marked by the development of regional stone tool traditions, the appearance of many innovations and the emergence of significant new behavior such as the production of art and jewelery.

Rice is the world’s foremost cereal crop as a human food source. Today’s cultivated varieties derive from the species Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrina, domesticated respectively in Asia and West Africa. Besides these two domestic taxa, there are around 20 species of wild rice of the genus Oryza, all located in the tropics. Their common ancestor appears to have emerged from Eurasia about 50 million years B.P.

The ability to make fire millennia ago was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia, according to an archaeologist studying the findings at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov archaeological site in Israel.

Rivers once flowed from the central Saharan watershed all the way to the Mediterranean,  This might have enabled modern humans to spread beyond their ancestral homeland about 120,000 years ago.

A unique set of fossils indicates that 525 million years ago marine animals congregated in Earth’s ancient oceans, most likely for migration, according to an international team of scientists. Fossil evidence of collective behavior is extremely rare. But what makes the find even more intriguing is that it indicates that such behavior was occurring at the beginning of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ — a major event that saw a vast profusion of complex organisms enter the fossil record for the first time.

If you want to know what utopia looks like just look around you. The human race has reached the point where it can step off the evolutionary treadmill says Steve Jones in a lecture on human evolution…

The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was just published. Bird wings only have three fingers, having evolved from remote ancestors that, like humans and most reptiles, had five fingers. Biologists have typically used embryology to identify the evolutionary origin (homology) of structures; the three fingers of the bird wing develop from cartilage condensations that are found in the same positions in the embryo as fingers two, three and four of humans (the index, middle and ring fingers). However, the morphology of the fingers of early birds such as Archaeopteryx corresponds to that of fingers one, two and three in other reptiles (thumb, index and middle finger).