Lawn Chair Anthropology

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Topics in biological anthropology, with special focus on human evolution, paleontology, and evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).

zacharoo
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  • December 13, 2011
  • 01:53 PM
  • 3,019 views

Humans and snakes, beyond the Garden

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

There's a paper in press in PNAS describing human-snake relations among Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. The paper is pretty neat, as it describes a pretty complex relationship between, in this case, reticulated pythons and humans (and generally between other snakes and primates). Humans have been attacked (and presumably eaten) by large pythons. Conversely, Agta have killed and eaten pythons. There is also a good deal of overlap in prey species eaten by humans and pythons. So at once, ........ Read more »

  • December 16, 2011
  • 02:49 PM
  • 2,861 views

Small-stranded insanity inside your cells

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

The Nature News Blog posted a fascinating video showing how RNA interference (RNAi) works within a cell. RNAi refers to the regulation of gene expression by short-length RNAs. So far as I understand it, there are a number of types of small stretches of RNA that do not code for proteins but rather target other RNAs (e.g. siRNA, piRNA), and then latch onto them via proteins to ensure the other RNA's demise.  RNAi is implicated in expression of lots of genes, for instance HOTAIR is a long........ Read more »

  • May 27, 2011
  • 02:14 PM
  • 945 views

Culinary trends in an extinct hominid

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

A few weeks ago I discussed a recent paper that analyzed the carbon and oxygen isotope ratios from Australopithecus boisei molars (Cerling et al. 2011). The major finding here was that an enlarged sample (n=24 more) corroborated earlier isotopic (van der Merwe et al. 2008) and tooth wear evidence (Ungar et al. 2008) that A. boisei probably did not subsist on as much hard foods as previously thought. Although this strange hominid probably ate mostly grass/aquatic tubers, some researchers think it........ Read more »

  • September 18, 2011
  • 09:06 PM
  • 865 views

[insert clever quip about australopithecus hips]

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

A week and a half ago, Kibii and colleagues (2011) published reconstructions and re-analyses of two hips belonging to the 1.98 million-year old Australopithecus sediba. As with many fossil discoveries, these additions to the fossil record raise more questions than they answer. Unless the question was, "did A. sediba have a pelvis?" It did. Here's a good summary from the paper itself:Thus, Au. sediba is australopith-like in having a long superior pubic ramus and an anteriorly posit........ Read more »

Haile-Selassie Y, Latimer BM, Alene M, Deino AL, Gibert L, Melillo SM, Saylor BZ, Scott GR, & Lovejoy CO. (2010) An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(27), 12121-6. PMID: 20566837  

Kibii, J., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Reed, N., de Ruiter, D., & Berger, L. (2011) A Partial Pelvis of Australopithecus sediba. Science, 333(6048), 1407-1411. DOI: 10.1126/science.1202521  

Simpson, S., Quade, J., Levin, N., Butler, R., Dupont-Nivet, G., Everett, M., & Semaw, S. (2008) A Female Homo erectus Pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia. Science, 322(5904), 1089-1092. DOI: 10.1126/science.1163592  

Zipfel, B., DeSilva, J., Kidd, R., Carlson, K., Churchill, S., & Berger, L. (2011) The Foot and Ankle of Australopithecus sediba. Science, 333(6048), 1417-1420. DOI: 10.1126/science.1202703  

  • April 25, 2011
  • 10:58 PM
  • 862 views

What big teeth you have indeed

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

If our friend Little Red Riding Hood was dumb enough to've thought a wolf in babushka threads was her grandma, well, she probably would have played Bingo with a grandmother-mimicking Australopithecus anamensis.... Read more »

Kunimatsu, Y., Nakatsukasa, M., Sawada, Y., Sakai, T., Hyodo, M., Hyodo, H., Itaya, T., Nakaya, H., Saegusa, H., Mazurier, A.... (2007) A new Late Miocene great ape from Kenya and its implications for the origins of African great apes and humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(49), 19220-19225. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706190104  

White, T., WoldeGabriel, G., Asfaw, B., Ambrose, S., Beyene, Y., Bernor, R., Boisserie, J., Currie, B., Gilbert, H., Haile-Selassie, Y.... (2006) Asa Issie, Aramis and the origin of Australopithecus. Nature, 440(7086), 883-889. DOI: 10.1038/nature04629  

  • March 9, 2011
  • 01:35 AM
  • 847 views

Have I uncovered an epigenetic conspiracy?

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Nope! In an effort to reduce plastic water bottle waste, UM has been installing these badass water fountains around campus that automatically fill a bottle - I suppose it could fill a shoe, too - and tell you how many plastic bottles they've saved you from wasting. I have to say they're pretty convenient...... and repressive? I noticed the contraption is named "EZH2O." Of course, Elkay meant 'easy H2O,' but I just took an epigenetics seminar where we learned about EZH2, a key enzyme in the Polyc........ Read more »

Hansen, K., Bracken, A., Pasini, D., Dietrich, N., Gehani, S., Monrad, A., Rappsilber, J., Lerdrup, M., & Helin, K. (2008) A model for transmission of the H3K27me3 epigenetic mark. Nature Cell Biology, 10(12), 1484-1484. DOI: 10.1038/ncb1208-1484  

Tsai MC, Manor O, Wan Y, Mosammaparast N, Wang JK, Lan F, Shi Y, Segal E, & Chang HY. (2010) Long noncoding RNA as modular scaffold of histone modification complexes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 329(5992), 689-93. PMID: 20616235  

  • May 9, 2011
  • 08:08 PM
  • 845 views

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Life as we know it has taken some strange courses. Of all the things an animal could do with its time, pretending to be an ant is apparently pretty popular. According to a review article in the latest Current Biology, there are probably over 2000 abhorrent species of myrmecomorphs (ant impersonators), including spiders, caterpillars, mites, beetles, and other types of arthropod biodiversity I'm not familiar with, that have come to resemble ants in some form or another.
It's interesting how and ........ Read more »

Florian Maderspacher, & Marcus Stensmyr. (2011) Myrmecomorphomania. Current Biology, 21(9). info:/doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.04.006

  • May 16, 2011
  • 08:41 PM
  • 798 views

Good olde dentistrie

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

I'm reading up on mandibular rotation, which is the change in orientation of the mandibular corpus relative to the rest of the skull during growth (the corpus is the horizontal part of your jaw that holds up your teeth; check out the shape changes in the mandibles in the blog header). So far as I can tell, the original classic paper on the topic is by Bjork (1955). Growth was studied by implanting metal pins into the jaws, then seeing how they move across ontogeny via X-rays (which were once cal........ Read more »

  • December 29, 2010
  • 11:03 AM
  • 784 views

Iron Chef: Middle Paleolithic

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

New evidence suggests Neandertals ate cooked foods, and plants at that.
Amanda Henry and colleagues (in press) extracted phytoliths - small mineralized parts from plants - and starch grains from dental calculus found on 2 Belgian (Spy) and 1 Iraqi (Shanidar) Neandertal fossils. I've never seen a study look at this kind of evidence before, I have to say it's pretty neat. Calculus, not just a badass type of mathematics, is mineralized plaque that can build up on teeth. As the Neandertals chewed th........ Read more »

  • August 24, 2011
  • 05:13 PM
  • 764 views

Back to the backbone of Homo erectus

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Of course the title is referring to all of the back bones. An alternate title may be "The backbone's connected to the - what bone?" but that's also kinda lame. I'll do better next time.
Martin Hausler and colleagues (in press) report on newly identified vertebral fragments of the WT 15000 Homo erectus skeleton, perhaps the most complete of an early hominid (this one ~1.5 million years ago). This skeleton, and other early hominids (i.e. Australopithecus africanus), were described as having six lu........ Read more »

Martin Haeusler, Regula Schiess, Thomas Boeni. (2011) New vertebral and rib material point to modern bauplan of the Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton. Journal of Human Evolution. info:/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.004

  • August 31, 2011
  • 04:40 PM
  • 750 views

How old is the Acheulian tool industry and why does it matter?

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Two views of an Acheulian handaxe adorn the cover of this week's Nature (right). Always happy to see paleoanthropology stuff be classy, front-page news. The cover highlights Christopher Lepre's and colleagues' announcement of what may be the oldest Acheulian tools known.
To recap stone tools: The first good evidence of tool use by humans' ancestors are the Oldowan lithics from the 2.6 million year old site of Gona in Ethiopia (Semaw et al. 2003). McPherron and others (2010) reported 2 possibly-c........ Read more »

Ferring, R., Oms, O., Agusti, J., Berna, F., Nioradze, M., Shelia, T., Tappen, M., Vekua, A., Zhvania, D., & Lordkipanidze, D. (2011) From the Cover: Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85-1.78 Ma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(26), 10432-10436. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106638108  

Lepre, C., Roche, H., Kent, D., Harmand, S., Quinn, R., Brugal, J., Texier, P., Lenoble, A., & Feibel, C. (2011) An earlier origin for the Acheulian. Nature, 477(7362), 82-85. DOI: 10.1038/nature10372  

Semaw, S., Rogers, M., Quade, J., Renne, P., Butler, R., Dominguez-Rodrigo, M., Stout, D., Hart, W., Pickering, T., & Simpson, S. (2003) 2.6-Million-year-old stone tools and associated bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. Journal of Human Evolution, 45(2), 169-177. DOI: 10.1016/S0047-2484(03)00093-9  

  • September 12, 2011
  • 11:24 PM
  • 689 views

Test Tossed Tyrone

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

What's the secret to becoming a good father? What would William Cosby do?I for one have no idea BUT! a study published today in PNAS early edition finds an association between studly vs. paternal behavior, and levels of everyone's favorite hormone, testosterone (T).Using longitudinal data, researchers (Gettler et al. in press) found that, in general, a young guy with higher levels of circulating T is more likely than a guy with low T to become a father w/in a few ye........ Read more »

Lovejoy, C. (1981) The Origin of Man. Science, 211(4480), 341-350. DOI: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341  

  • February 11, 2011
  • 01:37 AM
  • 667 views

Why Lucy, what sweet kicks you had

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

For decades people have debated whether Australopithecus afarensis was an obligate biped like us, or whether our ancestor was a little less lithe in life on land. They asked, sort of, "Would Lucy have rocked some sweet Air Jordans, or would she have put some flat-foot orthotics in her new kicks?"
Carol Ward and colleagues report on a new fourth metatarsal of Australopithecus afarensis from Hadar in Ethiopia, over 3.2 million years old. The foot bone shows that A. afarensis had the two foot arche........ Read more »

  • January 7, 2011
  • 02:13 AM
  • 638 views

Human Tears Are Not Sexy

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology


Let's have a mature, adult conversation for a moment. I understand that there are lots of things in the world that turn people on in a sensual sort of way. People get aroused by the strangest things, stuff that when you hear about it you think you're being lied to. But women's teardrops are not such a fetish, at least not among the men in a recent study.
Shani Gelstein and colleagues report in the journal Science that human tears not only fail to arouse male test subjects, but the smell of tear........ Read more »

  • January 1, 2011
  • 05:31 PM
  • 602 views

01/01/2011: Looking forward and backward, so fast you may barf

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

2010 was a big year for anthropology and lawn-chair-anthropologists. There was laughter and crying, and maybe also some yelling. And smiling. Let's take a look back at some of the big events of the past year.Ancient DNA. What a great year for ancient human DNA! In April, Krause and colleagues (2010) announced the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA from a ~50,000 year old girl from Denisova in Siberia. This sequence was twice as divergent from humans as Neandertal mtDNA, which really shocked a lot o........ Read more »

Berger, L., de Ruiter, D., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Dirks, P., & Kibii, J. (2010) Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa. Science, 328(5975), 195-204. DOI: 10.1126/science.1184944  

Cann, R., Stoneking, M., & Wilson, A. (1987) Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature, 325(6099), 31-36. DOI: 10.1038/325031a0  

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M.... (2010) A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science, 328(5979), 710-722. DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021  

Haile-Selassie, Y., Latimer, B., Alene, M., Deino, A., Gibert, L., Melillo, S., Saylor, B., Scott, G., & Lovejoy, C. (2010) An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(27), 12121-12126. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004527107  

Krause, J., Fu, Q., Good, J., Viola, B., Shunkov, M., Derevianko, A., & Pääbo, S. (2010) The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature, 464(7290), 894-897. DOI: 10.1038/nature08976  

Liu W, Jin CZ, Zhang YQ, Cai YJ, Xing S, Wu XJ, Cheng H, Edwards RL, Pan WS, Qin DG.... (2010) Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(45), 19201-6. PMID: 20974952  

Reich D, Green RE, Kircher M, Krause J, Patterson N, Durand EY, Viola B, Briggs AW, Stenzel U, Johnson PL.... (2010) Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature, 468(7327), 1053-60. PMID: 21179161  

Zalmout IS, Sanders WJ, Maclatchy LM, Gunnell GF, Al-Mufarreh YA, Ali MA, Nasser AA, Al-Masari AM, Al-Sobhi SA, Nadhra AO.... (2010) New Oligocene primate from Saudi Arabia and the divergence of apes and Old World monkeys. Nature, 466(7304), 360-4. PMID: 20631798  

  • January 18, 2011
  • 11:11 PM
  • 580 views

Speciation and reticulation

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Hey, "all you lovers out there," which is how Marvin Berry introduced "Earth Angel" at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance back in good-olde 1955. And by "lovers" I mean "geneticists."
Poring over the recent Neandertal nuclear genome paper (Green et al. 2010) for seminars, we're struck by two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate pretty convincingly that Neandertals and the more 'anatomically modern' humans of Europe and Asia interbred. This doesn't come from genetic com........ Read more »

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M.... (2010) A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science, 328(5979), 710-722. DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021  

  • February 27, 2011
  • 11:27 AM
  • 567 views

Got beef with worms?

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Photo: {http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2009/09/bilateral}, by Eric Rottinger at kahikai.orgFlipping through the current issue of Current Biology, it sounds like someone has some serious beef with acoelomorph flatworms. Apparently these critters have been used as a model for the 'missing link' between simple-bodied cnidarians (like jellyfish) and bilaterians (bilaterally symmetrical animals like you and me and flies and fish, and really a good deal of animal biodiversity); and this may be pr........ Read more »

  • January 26, 2011
  • 10:26 PM
  • 547 views

Statistics: Friend or Foe?

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

In this week's Science, Greg Miller describes recent uproar about a study that claims to have scientific support for the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP). Of course, ESP being in the realm of the paranormal, it ought to be somewhat outside the purview of Big Science.But who cares about ESP?! What comes under scrutiny is statistics, the mathematical theory underlying hypothesis testing. And inference. The brief story is worth a read, as it cites statisticians on what these statistical t........ Read more »

  • January 27, 2011
  • 11:05 PM
  • 520 views

A species by any other name...would leave us with the same problem

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

This is a great big week for anthropology coverage. The sequencing of the orangutan (Pongo species) genome made the cover of Nature. It's grant-writing-dissertation-formulating-prelim-studying time for me so I haven't had a chance to read this one yet. Science has a couple paleoanthropology-related stories, including two by Ann Gibbons. The first is about recent research on ancient DNA, and how this informs the debate about 'modern human' origins. But there's also a short blurb on what the eff "........ Read more »

  • January 20, 2011
  • 11:00 AM
  • 505 views

Dobzhanksy on Posh Hybrids

by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology

Long-time readers may recall that one thing I wish I did active research on is hybridization: the crossing of divergent species or lineages, the developmental abnormalities arising from hybridization, and the potential role of hybridization in human evolution. One such developmental abnormality is "heterosis," a.k.a. 'hybrid vigor.' In general, heterosis refers to any trait in hybrids that is larger than the average of the two parents' (or the parents' species) values for that trait. The phenome........ Read more »

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