Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written a new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding to be released this spring, and the New York Times' Natalie Angier has a little story about Hrdy's thesis, that alloparenting was the key to human evolution: Our capacity to cooperate in g...

In the course of my research for the ape strength article, I ran across an old piece from The Atlantic Monthly, in which Alexander Young gives a long satire describing "a visit" to P. T. Barnum's "gorilla" exhibition. This article was written after the fire that destroyed the second museum. I can't ...

I don't have a lot to say about the new footprints from Ileret, described by Matthew Bennett and colleagues. Seems like a nicely done study, particularly given the length constraints in Science. With respect to the comparison with Laetoli, I think that the perspective article by Robin Crompton and T...

Earlier, I pointed to my new article in Slate , about chimpanzee strength compared to humans. For anthropologists, I thought I might point to a passage in one of John Bauman's articles (1926:7-9), which raises a point I remember well from graduate school: The last question raised by the strength of ...

You're not coming here for economic analysis, but I found this Wired article on quants, risk, and the financial crisis useful: Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number. They also should have noticed...

I'm doing a little literature review this week on Middle Pleisocene postcrania. On a somewhat tangential topic, the description of the Sima de los Huesos cervical vertebrae, by Gómez-Olivencia and colleagues (2007), includes a nice summary of the current knowledge of the thoracic vertebral ca...

I want to point people interested in recent human evolution to a new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution . The authors, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, are good friends of mine, and I have worked with them on some of the material covered in their book....

I've just finished cleaning up more than 1000 messages left in my 2008 e-mail inbox. I am always careful to say in my FAQ that I don't respond to every e-mail -- with some 400 students and 4 children, I have to let some things slide or I would never have time to post. Still, I try to reply to those ...

Friday morning, I got back to teaching after my trip this week. So I filled my students in a bit about the Neandertal genome. One of them had been reading the news, and noticed several stories seemed to obsess over the chance that Neandertals would someday be cloned. So she asked, "Is that something...

Following after yesterday's profile of Don Johanson, Alan Boyle interviews evolutionary geneticist Sean Carroll about his new book, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species . The interview focuses mainly on figures of anthropological interest -- Eugene Dubois and...