The Human Dynasty

Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets.

Here’s more information on the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome made by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He wants to know if earlier human genes were passed on to Neanderthals, and if the Neanderthal genome, when compared with what is known about modern human and chimpanzee DNA, [...]

Did a shift in the climate kill off the Neanderthals?

When it comes to our own security, says one behavioral ecologist, there is much we can learn from biology and evolution. Speaking at a symposium paying tribute to Charles Darwin a day after the 200th anniversary of his birth, Daniel T. Blumstein shared lessons and insights from Darwin that can be applied to our own safety — from using ATMs in unsafe neighborhoods to dealing with terrorist threats.

The recent developments of noninvasive techniques such as tracking mammals to gather feces, and sensitive assays for fecal hormone metabolites, have allowed the formulation of a more complete picture of the relationships among behavior, social systems and hormone function in mammals in the wild — sometimes contradicting findings in the lab.

(University of California – Los Angeles) What do biology and evolution teach us about our own security? In a symposium Feb. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago, paying tribute to Charles Darwin, UCLA behavioral ecologist Daniel T. Blumstein, shares lessons and insights from Darwin that can be applied to our own safety.

Evolution, we know, is the guiding thread of biology and explains life as we know it. But how that big idea was inspired and expanded over two centuries of natural history is really a tale of the adventures of a handful of intrepid scientists whose derring-do, perseverance and intellectual curiosity sparked a revolution that forever changed our view of the living world.

Scientists they have completed a first draft version of the Neandertal genome.

Our surnames and genetic information are often strongly connected, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, may help genealogists create more accurate family trees even when records are missing. It also suggests that the often quoted “one in ten” figure for children born through infidelity is unlikely to be true.

In an unusual intersection of materials science and anthropology, researchers have applied materials-science-based mathematical models to help shed light on the dietary habits of some of mankind’s prehistoric relatives.