The Human Dynasty

(Elhuyar Fundazioa) The micropalaeontology team at the Department of Stratigraphy and Palaeontology at the University of the Basque Country is working on the study of microfossils under the direction of Mr. Julio Rodríguez Lázaro. The concentrations of these types of fossils and the composition of their shells can provide much information about the conditions of life thousands or even millions of years ago.

(California Institute of Technology) Most evolutionary changes happen in tiny increments. But when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made? According to a team led by scientists at Caltech, such changes may at least sometimes be the result of random fluctuations, or noise (nongenetic variations), working alongside a phenomenon known as partial penetrance.

Metaphors like the “selfish gene” paint a vivid picture of how evolution works, but the reality is more subtle

(Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) Recent research has highlighted the need to include other species such as gorillas and orangutans, as well as other extinct primate groups prior to hominids, in order to situate, for the first time in history, the full evolution of human behavior within a greater biological context. With this aim, an international group of researchers from different universities, among them Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, proposes to create a new interdisciplinary field called primate archaeology. The new field is described in detail in Nature.

(University of Calgary) University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader is joining his colleagues in establishing a discipline devoted to the history of tool use in nonhuman primate species in order to better understand human evolution.

A series of extraordinary discoveries over the past decade has transformed our ideas about the evolution of early animals, and of the world they lived in

(FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists has analyzed the dental wear of the fossils of herbivorous animals hunted by Homo heidelbergensis. It is the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed.

(University of Nottingham) Drifting across the world’s oceans are a group of unicellular marine microorganisms that are not only a crucial source of food for other marine life — but their fossils, which are found in abundance, provide scientists with an extraordinary record of climatic change and other major events in the history of the Earth.

(Rice University) Rice University biologists are offering a new theory for the long-standing mystery of why male lemurs are no larger than females. Featured on the cover of this month’s Journal of Evolutionary Biology, the theory posits that male lemurs guard their mates just like other primates. But whereas evolution favors larger males in gorillas and other species that guard females by fighting, lemurs have evolved to passively guard their mates.

Two mouse-deer species in Asia have been discovered swimming underwater, providing further clues to the origin of whales.