A new study of woodpeckers adds nuance to the relationship between brain power and social interactions. … More From Woodpeckers to Apes: Competition Drives the Correlation between Brain Size and Group Size
Analysis of 1.8 million year old teeth reveal that this Homo habilis was right-handed. … More Even Homo habilis Was Right-handed
A new study shows how immune activity can affect social behavior in order to limit the spread of an infection. … More More evidence Connecting the Immune System with Social Behavior, with Implications for Neurodiversity
It used to happen to me all the time at work. Running late for a meeting and it’s only one flight up, so I dash up the stairs. I then arrive at the meeting huffing and puffing like I’d just run a mile. It was ONE LITTLE FLIGHT OF STAIRS! In my late 20s, I was … More I’m a runner. So why do I get winded by one flight of stairs???
Despite being one of the most influential of the early modern biologists and having crucially paved the way for Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has mostly gone down in history for being wrong. His theory of “use and disuse” as a mechanism for evolution was roundly rejected and is often presented in introductory biology textbooks as totally misguided and even … More In Defense of Lamarck: Historical, Philosophical, and Biological Vindication of Evolution’s First Big Idea
What’s in a voice? A lot, it seems. Certain vocal properties correlate with physical measures that serve as proxy indicators of health, fertility, and attractiveness of females … More Properties of our Voice Encode Information about Health, Fertility, and Body Shape
Off the coast of Honduras sits a small beautiful island called Utila. Less known, and thus less-overrun, than its famous big sister Roatan, Utila sits in the middle of the largest coral reef system outside the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Accordingly, the snorkeling and scuba diving in Utila is second-to-one and far, far cheaper … More That time I ate a barracuda and got ciguatera poisoning
In the study of human evolution, one conundrum has always vexed us: how did humans evolve such powerful brains? Few Differences in Chimp and Human DNA The genome of Homo sapiens is remarkably similar to those of our closest extant relatives, the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the pigmy chimpanzee, or bonobo (Pan paniscus). On the sequence level, we … More Genes Found that May Explain Expansion of Higher Brain Function in Homo sapiens
No matter their background in biology or medicine, sports fans everywhere are familiar with the anterior cruciate ligament, more commonly called the ACL. This is because injuries to the ACL are among the most common sports injuries. Probably most common in football, torn ACLs also occur in baseball, soccer, basketball, track and field, tennis… basically all … More Why Are ACL Injuries So Common? Poor Design.
Humans like to think of ourselves as the only animal that speaks to each other using language. It’s one of the things that “separates us from the animals,” so the saying goes. However, we already know that lots of other animals communicate with each other using vocal-auditory communication. Further, we’re beginning to learn that other … More Did Neanderthals Speak?
The Human Evolution Blog 