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Going Ape
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- March 27, 2010
- 02:49 PM
- 367 views
The sex chromosomes: keys to the evolution of human intelligence?
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
Recent surveys of educational attainment and schooling suggest that girls are outperforming boys all the way through from primary school to A-levels. The reason for this discrepancy, though, remains unknown. Many explanations have been suggested, ranging from the fact that there are simply more boys who fall into the category of disadvantaged" to boys lacking interest, having shorter attention spans, or not being encouraged to take learning seriously by male role-models.But could there be a simp........ Read more »
Zechner, U., Wilder, M., Kehrer-Sawatzki, H., Vogel, W., Fundele, R., & Hameister, H. (2001) A high density of X-linked genes for general cognitive ability: a run-away process shaping human evolution?. Trends in Genetics, 17(12), 697-701. DOI: 10.1016/S0168-9525(01)02446-5
- March 26, 2010
- 04:09 PM
- 427 views
How Shoes Can Change Your Life - And Your Skeleton
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
A cross-section of a foot inside a shoe. Taken by Mattes, and downloaded from the Wikimedia Commons 26/03/2010.You might think that shoes can only change your life if you are a sex-and-the-city type shoe lover, spending huge amounts of money on designer footwear. And for most of us, that kind of dedication to shoes is fairly incomprehensible - after all, they're just things to wear to keep your feet safe from broken glass and tarmac, right? Wrong....In fact, footwear doesn't just change your lif........ Read more »
ZIPFEL, B., & BERGER, L. (2007) Shod versus unshod: The emergence of forefoot pathology in modern humans?. The Foot, 17(4), 205-213. DOI: 10.1016/j.foot.2007.06.002
- March 19, 2010
- 03:28 PM
- 378 views
Linking Footballers, Fingers and Sexual Selection
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
Footballers, particularly those who play at national or international levels, sometimes seem to have it all: celebrity, fitness, money and success. But rather than just supposing that this is the result of football's cultural status and importance, researchers have also suggested that it is the result of natural selection - not the survival of the fittest, as modern medicine and cultural systems ensure that in the Western world at least, most people have the chance to live, but perhaps the succe........ Read more »
Manning JT, & Taylor RP. (2001) Second to fourth digit ratio and male ability in sport: implications for sexual selection in humans. Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 22(1), 61-69. PMID: 11182575
- March 11, 2010
- 03:36 PM
- 336 views
It’s Official – Fathers ARE Important to their Childrens’ Upbringing
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
David Cameron’s “Broken Britain”, with its image of moral decay driven by the breakdown in family life and poverty, may be inciting a lot of debate in parliament and the public press, but to read many studies of human evolution, you might be mistaken for thinking that the human male has never actually played a meaningful role in childcare. Most evolutionary studies focus on female life history – age at first reproduction, number of offspring and interbirth interval, for example – to th........ Read more »
Gettler, L.T. (2010) Direct male care and hominin evolution: why male-child interaction is more than just a nice social idea. . American Anthropologist, 112(1), 7-21. info:/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01193.x
- March 7, 2010
- 11:16 AM
- 324 views
Human and Chimpanzee Handedness
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
Of the many mysteries surrounding human evolution, the question of why humans, alone out of all the apes, display a strong tendency towards being right-handed is perhaps less well known than uncertainties about our locomotion, brain size and cultural capacity. Yet the fact remains, over 90% of humans are right handed, and strongly so - there are proportionally few left-handed individuals and very few ambidextrous ones. Handedness is a manifestation of laterality - having a behaviourally dominant........ Read more »
Braccini S, Lambeth S, Schapiro S, & Fitch WT. (2010) Bipedal tool use strengthens chimpanzee hand preferences. Journal of human evolution, 58(3), 234-241. PMID: 20089294
- March 6, 2010
- 03:04 PM
- 346 views
Fossilisation and Vegetation Patterns: Another Study of Decay and its Implications
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
Following on from my recent post about the decay of chordate animals, I have encountered a related paper, this time from Quaternary Research and focusing on the preservation of plants in middens (rubbish dumps) constructed by woodrats. This paper, written by Nowak et al. (2000), explores the question of how well these middens represent the vegetation surrounding them, by developing a method which calculates the probability that species that are missing from the midden are actually not present in........ Read more »
Nowak, R. (2000) Probability That a Fossil Absent from a Sample Is Also Absent from the Paleolandscape. Quaternary Research, 54(1), 144-154. DOI: 10.1006/qres.2000.2143
- March 1, 2010
- 02:29 PM
- 342 views
Decay Processes and Chordate Phylogeny
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
I have just read a Nature paper reporting some experimental work studying the pattern of decay in two soft-bodied species, Lampetra and Branchiostoma, which are thought to be the best proxies of the early chordates (chordates are the group of animals that includes the vertebrates and those invertebrates that are their closest relatives). The authors, Sansom et al. (2010), note that our understanding of the early evolution of the chordates is very sparse, in large part because the early chordates........ Read more »
Sansom, R., Gabbott, S., & Purnell, M. (2010) Non-random decay of chordate characters causes bias in fossil interpretation. Nature, 463(7282), 797-800. DOI: 10.1038/nature08745
- February 28, 2010
- 02:04 PM
- 359 views
The Emergence of Human Limb Proportions
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
The current issue of PNAS carries an interesting paper on the evolution of human limb proportions. The authors, Young et al. (2010), propose that one key change in the evolution of humanlike limb adaptations is a reduction in the strength of the developmental links between fore- and hindlimbs, and moreover, that this change actually occurred in a non-hominin ancestor we shared with other great apes.The quadrupedal primates, like most vertebrates, have strong serial homologies between their limbs........ Read more »
YOUNG, N., WAGNER, G., & HALLGRIMSSON, B. (2010) Development and the evolvability of human limbs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(8), 3400-3405. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0911856107
- February 28, 2010
- 04:06 AM
- 372 views
Ecological Niche Modelling - Friend or Foe?
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
Problems associated with low spatial and temporal resolution in datasets are a daily hazard of my particular field of research, palaeoanthropology. The fossil record, as everyone knows, is hugely incomplete and, in addition, biased. Those records we do have about the biogeography of extinct species, in particular, are usually patchy and likely to be biased in favour of those parts of the distribution where fossilisation was probable and disturbance since sufficient to uncover the remains but not........ Read more »
NEWBOLD, T. (2010) Applications and limitations of museum data for conservation and ecology, with particular attention to species distribution models. Progress in Physical Geography, 34(1), 3-22. DOI: 10.1177/0309133309355630
LOZIER, J., ANIELLO, P., & HICKERSON, M. (2009) Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling. Journal of Biogeography, 36(9), 1623-1627. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x
- February 27, 2010
- 02:18 PM
- 308 views
The Biological Species Concept and Hybridisation in Primates
by Isabelle Winder in Going Ape
The most popular species concept in use today, the Biological Species Concept (BSC) defines a species through reference to the limits of reproductive compatibility: essentially, through the idea that any pair (male and female) within a single species will be capable of producing viable and fertile offspring, while a couple which belong to different species will not. The boundaries of successful reproduction, then, can be used to delineate species, at least in sexually reproducing animals.Of cour........ Read more »
DUNBAR, R., & DUNBAR, P. (1974) On hybridization between Theropithecus gelada and Papio anubis in the wild☆. Journal of Human Evolution, 3(3), 187-192. DOI: 10.1016/0047-2484(74)90176-6
JOLLY, C.J., WOOLLEY-BARKER, T., BEYENE, S., DISOTELL, T.R., & PHILLIPS-CONROY, J.E. (1997) Intergeneric hybrid baboons. International Journal of Primatology, 18(4), 597-627. info:/
JOLLY, C. (2001) A proper study for mankind: Analogies from the Papionin monkeys and their implications for human evolution. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 116(S33), 177-204. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.10021
MARKARJAN, D., ISAKOV, E., & KONDAKOV, G. (1974) Intergeneric hybrids of the lower (42-chromosome) monkey species of the Sukhumi monkey colony. Journal of Human Evolution, 3(3), 247-255. DOI: 10.1016/0047-2484(74)90183-3
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