Human Evolution

[Jo Bowyer]

Cremated remains reveal hints of who is buried at Stonehenge

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...=Editors_Picks

[Jo Bowyer]

The debate over people’s pathway into the Americas heats up

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

Despite recently getting a cold shoulder from some researchers, a long-standing idea that North America’s first settlers entered the continent via an ice-free inland corridor boasts more scientific support than any other proposal, an international team says.

New World colonizers from Asia may also have traveled by canoe down the Northwest Pacific Coast and perhaps much farther, as critics of the ice-free corridor hypothesis have argued. But less evidence supports that possibility, archaeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues argue in a research review published online August 8 in Science Advances.

[Jo Bowyer]

A brief history of mathematics: From Plato's philosophy of mathematics to modern mysteries

http://www.thestargarden.co.uk/Histo...thematics.html

In the 19th century, people begun to challenge Plato's argument, that mathematics contains true knowledge. In particular, it was not understood how Plato's abstract forms could interact with physical objects, since both obey different laws. Philosophers of science wanted to find another way to justify the certainty we have in mathematics, and many other schools of thought emerged, including intuitionism, formalism, and logicism^[43a].

Intuitionism argues that mathematical statements are mental constructions. Formalism states that numbers do not exist, except as symbols that are not about anything, and that mathematics is built from the manipulation of these symbols by following rules. Logicism states that the whole of mathematics can be derived from the philosophical laws of logic.

While there is still no consensus on what numbers represent, most philosophers of mathematics agree that mathematics can be described as beautiful^[47].

Timeline of mathematics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_mathematics

[Jo Bowyer]

Ancestor of all life on Earth evolved earlier than we thought, according to our new timescale

https://theconversation.com/ancestor...ew%20timescale

[Jo Bowyer]

Meet the first known child of a Neandertal and a Denisovan

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

[Jo Bowyer]

The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0455-x

[Jo Bowyer]

German skeletons hint that medieval warrior groups recruited from afar

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

[Jo Bowyer]

Human evolution: secrets of early ancestors could be unlocked by African rainforests

https://theconversation.com/human-ev...%20rainforests

[Jo Bowyer]

What Anglo Saxon teeth can tell us about modern health

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0906123403.htm

The skeletons analysed at the University of Bradford come from a settlement at Raunds Furnells and are from a group known to have been under nourished. The effect of this under nourishment, or stress, is to limit the growth of bones. This can limit the evidence available from analysis of bones alone, such as age.

Researchers were also able to look at children of different ages to see whether those who survived the first 1,000 days from conception, during which factors such as height are set, had different biomarkers for stress than those who died during this high-risk period.

Teeth, unlike bone, continue to grow under such stress and, unlike bone, record high nitrogen values. This evidence gives a clearer picture of what is happening to the child from before birth. The teeth are, in effect, acting as an archive of diet and health of both the child and mother.

[Jo Bowyer]

The Universality of Shame

https://neurosciencenews.com/shame-universality-9841/

Shame on you. These three simple words can have devastating effect on an individual’s psyche.

But why is that? How is the feeling of shame generated, and what is its purpose? Some theorists argue that feeling shame is a pathology, a condition to be cured. Others dismiss it as a useless, ugly emotion.

A research team at the University of Montreal and UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology (CEP), however, suggest something altogether different. Shame, they argue, was built into human nature by evolution because it served an important function for our foraging ancestors.

Living in small, highly interdependent bands, the researchers explain, our ancestors faced frequent life-threatening reversals, and they counted on their fellow band members to value them enough during bad times to pull them through. So being devalued by others — deemed unworthy of help — was literally a threat to their survival. Therefore, when considering how to act, it was critical to weigh the direct payoff of a potential action (e.g., how much will I benefit by stealing this food?) and against its social costs (e.g., how much will others devalue me if I steal the food — and how likely is it that they will find out?) became critical.

[Jo Bowyer]

Butchered bird bones put humans in Madagascar 10,500 years ago

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

Humans made their mark on Madagascar around 6,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists say. Those early migrants hunted massive, flightless birds once native to the island off southeast Africa, leaving butchery marks on the bird bones that enabled the new timeline.

[Jo Bowyer]

The way hunter-gatherers share food shows how cooperation evolved

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...-newsletter-v2

[Jo Bowyer]

Neanderthals were no brutes – research reveals they may have been precision workers

https://theconversation.com/neandert...sion%20workers

[Jo Bowyer]

Viruses influenced gene sharing between Neanderthals and humans

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1004112547.htm

[Jo Bowyer]

Neanderthal healthcare practices crucial to survival

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1004110042.htm

Neanderthals lived in small groups, so any one loss of life was particularly significant to the survival of the whole community. Injury, over disease, was the most common threat, as Neanderthals didn't live in the type of environment, or in large enough communities, to be at high risk from pathogens.

Neanderthal women, however, were at risk from difficulties in childbirth. The shape of their pelvis and the size and shape of a child's head was similar to that of modern-day humans, so it is assumed that they would also have encountered some common issues in childbirth.

Dr Spikins said: "It is likely that they would have had assisted childbirth; the role that we now attribute to midwives. Without support, they probably could not have survived the toll that the death rate of mothers and babies could have taken on their communities.

"When we look at the daily risks and dangers involved in hunting and finding food, as well as in childbirth in respect to their small hunting communities, it is not surprising that they would develop practices to improve health and reduce mortality risk.

"We can start to see healthcare as a pattern of evolutionary significant collaborative behaviour, alongside hunting together, food sharing and parenting. In this we can see why providing healthcare to those in need today is such an important part of human life."

Researchers now aim to expand this work to look at potential methods of healthcare and how far back healthcare practices can be traced.

[Jo Bowyer]

A 90,000-year-old bone knife hints special tools appeared early in Africa

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...d-early-africa