Human Evolution and Paleoanthropology

21 Jan 2010 09:07

Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder, for yet another subject I find interesting but don't really understand.

William Calvin, The Ascent of Mind
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
- The Woman Who Never Evolved
- Mother Nature
Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan and Mark G. Thomas, "Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior", Science 324 (2009): 1298--1301
Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture [Or, why does Lucretius sound so startlingly modern? My comments. Blurb]

Susan Cachel, Primate and Human Evolution [blurb]
Patrick D. Evans, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Eric J. Vallender, Richard R. Hudson, and Bruce T. Lahn, "Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2007): 18178--18183
Dean Falk and Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.), Evolutionary Anatomy of the Primate Cerebral Cortex
Clive Finlayson, Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective [Blurb]
Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal, "Context modulates signal meaning in primate communication", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104 (2007): 1581--1586 [Open access]
Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, Maria Victoria Hernandez-Lloreda, Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello, "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis", Science 317 (2007): 1360--1366
Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well [Blurb. I am curious to see how she explains the fact that other primates do not point to focus shared attention, or have language.]
Barbara J. King, The Information Continuum: Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, Apes, and Hominids
Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture
Haim Ofek, Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution [blurb]
Michael C. Oldham, Steve Horvath and Daniel H. Geschwind, "Conservation and evolution of gene coexpression networks in human and chimpanzee brains", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 17973--17978
Duane Quiatt and Vernon Reynolds, Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge, and the Evolution of Culture [Blurb]
Gerhard Roth and Ursula Dicke, "Evolution of the brain and intelligence", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 250--257
Georg F. Striedter, "Precis of Principles of Brain Evolution", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 1--12 [With extensive peer commentary following]
Karen B. Strier, Primate Behavioral Ecology
S. G. Webb, The First Boat People [Somewhat eccentric-sounding theory about the peopling of Australia; blurb]
Ken Wessen, Simulating Human Origins and Evolution [Blurb]
João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d'Errico, Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Woodg, and Josefina Zapata, "Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 107 (2010): 1023--1028 ["Two sites of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Iberia, dated to as early as approximately 50,000 years ago, yielded perforated and pigment-stained marine shells. At Cueva de los Aviones, three umbo-perforated valves of Acanthocardia and Glycymeris were found alongside lumps of yellow and red colorants, and residues preserved inside a Spondylus shell consist of a red lepidocrocite base mixed with ground, dark red-to-black fragments of hematite and pyrite. A perforated Pecten shell, painted on its external, white side with an orange mix of goethite and hematite, was abandoned after breakage at Cueva Antón, 60 km inland. Comparable early modern human-associated material from Africa and the Near East is widely accepted as evidence for body ornamentation, implying behavioral modernity. The Iberian finds show that European Neandertals were no different from coeval Africans in this regard, countering genetic/cognitive explanations for the emergence of symbolism and strengthening demographic/social ones."]