Even in Kansas! @colinmcroberts.bsky.social for KS-01!
05.01.2026 21:12
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Even in Kansas! @colinmcroberts.bsky.social for KS-01!
Had a lot of fun with our Human and Ape Biomechanics Group the past 2 days @primatesocietygb.bsky.social winter meeting, presenting and learning about others primate focused research 🐵
A special moment for Jane 🤍
I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio
Beautifully said. Her passing marks the loss of another giant in the field who broke down the barrier between "sapiens" "humans" and "primates" - that some of our more sapient-obsessed palaeoanthropologists had constructed.
Jane Goodall's work insisting, with evidence from her brilliant and tenacious fieldwork, that we were not so separate from animals, and they were much more like us than the Eurocentric theorists asserted, was so important.
Am I missing something or is the date range of these skulls still between 1 million and 600,000 year ago? The pseudoscience fans are really latching onto this. Hurray, civilization must be even older than thought. I don't see that this changes much.
DNA?
My husband is stepping up to do something about the mess we're in. (I'm so proud of him/we're in for a wild year as a family)
I would LOVE it if you took all the frustration/anger/despair you're feeling and channeled it into helping us take the fight right to the heart of the Republican stronghold!
Education is supposed to help us become smart enough to understand ideas without necessarily agreeing with them or believing them to be true. That’s required of living in a society among others! If your religion is against people living in society then maybe rethink your religion or fully realize it
Only a handful of fossils of human relatives from the period before 2 million years ago come from outside of two narrow parts of Africa that cover less than one percent of the continent. But these few outlier sites represent great diversity, suggesting more.
www.johnhawks.net/p/geographic...
I colorized this ancient water spout, likely from Cyprus and now at the Met Museum
/End
That's not an accurate description of hunter-gatherers. They weren't migrating every day, week, or even every month. They moved 3-6 times a year but weren't moving into unknown lands. They require intimate knowledge of the land. I.e. "remember that dead hollow tree that has a week's worth of water?"
People eat food in many ways that may offend the palates of those who didn't grow up with their customs. Eating fermented or putrifying meat is common among traditional hunting societies but overlooked by many who study past hunters like Neanderthals.
www.johnhawks.net/p/bizarre-fo...
The leap of butchered elephants = large groups, i.e. a fiesta of hundreds or 1,000 Neanderthals, was always questionable to me. Especially when you consider genetic evidence of low diversity. They don't seem to have gathered in large groups unless they were very serious about abstinence. Not likely.
It's all more evidence #Neanderthals were highly adaptable inc warm climate, also using plant foods.
Broader Qs beyond this paper: food storage & elephants hunts = larger groups? While focused task locales & evidence from lithics of reduced mobility might indicate a particular way of forest life.
What exactly do you mean by "finalized"...several million years would encompass the whole of the genus homo
The developing rift between what the genetics tell us and what's inferred through morphology is fascinating. Either sapiens split ~1 mya or ~700 kya, it can't be both. Perhaps the molecular clock isn't fine tuned enough or morphological models are generating associations that don't exist.
I’ve only just discovered these searchable Nature databases… www.nature.com/search?q=Fos...
Tickets to the Austin show purchased! Thanks for remembering us behind enemy lines 😂
So many connections between star knowledge and ancient societies. Some have been embodied in monuments like Stonehenge, but the knowledge of they sky and its relation to natural and social cycles is vastly older.
www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-o...
I see that diversity across time (Sima de los Huesos root Neanderthal and Denisova 5) but isn't it true that after ~105 kya most Neanderthals were closely related? Besides the Thorin pop. what other deep lineage has been found? If DNA can be obtained I could see the Krapina pop. being divergent.
If you ever wanted to explore history of the Denisovans but didn't know where to start, this is for you.
view.genially.com/68097ef2bb6b...
Two pieces of hominin skull sucked up and spit out of a giant undersea vacuum cleaner, with thousands of fragments of animal bones that were once buried in the course of the Solo River. Remarkable discovery from hard work and years of survey.
www.johnhawks.net/p/more-homin...
The classic rendering of the obstetric dilemma hypothesis is that the size & shape of the human pelvis has been constrained by its restructuring for bipedal locomotion, making birth difficult. Nice discussion on the topic with CU Denver's Dr. Anna Warrener. #paleoanthropology #humanevolution
In Fongoli news, there have been a couple of big rains - enough to clean out & fill Sakoto pool, one of the chimps’ favorite soaking spots!
The Wood Age,it seems, is a lost world. It should be considered more often when reconstructing human origins.
Fascinating - how encounters with feminist conscious raising groups & reading feminist texts changed primatology, showing how male bias worked in developing now outmoded evolutionary ideas like ‘man the hunter’ and ‘the military model of primate behaviour’! www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...
I discuss the Harbin cranium (probably the most complete Denisovan fossil found so far) youtu.be/VxRPbwc-Izc?...
I read the article. The thing is, we don't need Colossal's permission to call them what they are or are not.
