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Month: February 2019

A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males

A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males

Melvin Konner writes: When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.” Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the…

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European colonization of Americas killed so many indigenous people it cooled Earth’s climate

European colonization of Americas killed so many indigenous people it cooled Earth’s climate

The Guardian reports: European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492. This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land…

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