How Culture Drove Human Evolution
posted by the man of twists and turns on Jan 4, 2013 - 44 comments

The fear of spiders is hardwired into most of humanity, despite the creatures often being beneficial to people. For some reason, it's the odd and scary stories about spiders that stick in our heads.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Aug 10, 2012 - 99 comments

View, rotate, and interact with fascinating 3D scans of some of humanity's oldest artifacts. [more inside]
posted by SpringAquifer on Mar 15, 2010 - 8 comments

Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in [Y-chromosome] gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation.

It is commonly said that the Human and Chimpanzee genomes share 99% or more identical DNA. In a surprising development about to be published in Nature, the Y-chromosomes of these two species were found to share only 70% of their DNA, raising important questions about the mode and tempo by which speciation from a common ancestor occurred. This finding may point the finger at the evolution of different patterns of sperm-competition and mating practices within these two species.
posted by Rumple on Jan 16, 2010 - 21 comments

Extropy
How did life arise? What is information? In his recent dispatches from The Technium, Kevin Kelly would say extropy (cf. negentropy & Prigogine). [previously 1|2]
posted by kliuless on Sep 20, 2009 - 70 comments

Understanding Human Prehistory. Mike Munford (who???) summarises the results of his "limited study of human prehistory for the benefit of others who may have found most of the available books on it as baffling as [he] did."
posted by Effigy2000 on Mar 2, 2007 - 21 comments

Early humans lost hair to beat parasites? (New Scientist) - Human nakedness, a species anomaly among mammals, draws comparisons to the blind, naked mole rat. Meanwhile, seven thousand humans (Italians) recently gathered naked, for unclear purposes.
posted by troutfishing on Jun 9, 2003 - 17 comments

'If you want to know what Utopia is like, just look around - this is it,' the article asks is human evolution over? Two interesting "facts?" "points?" 1) the blending of our genes which will soon produce a uniformly brown-skinned population. Apart from that, there will be little change in the species. 2) Just consider Aids, and then look at chimpanzees,' says Jones. 'You find they all carry a version of HIV but are unaffected by it. Something very similar could soon happen to humans. In a thousand years... Link via www.cursor.org.
posted by bittennails on Feb 4, 2002 - 39 comments

Human Evolution Will the next significant steps be biological, technical or both?
posted by PaperCut on Jun 6, 2000 - 12 comments