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Category: Evolution

Did parasite manipulation influence human neurological evolution?

Did parasite manipulation influence human neurological evolution?

Christopher Packham writes: It seems so obvious that someone should have thought of it decades ago: Since parasites have plagued eukaryotic life for millions of years, their prevalence likely affected evolution. Psychologist Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico is not the first researcher to suggest that the evolution of the human brain could have been influenced by parasites that manipulate host behavior. But tired of waiting for neurologists to pick up the ball and run with it,…

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Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

Eye-opening discovery: 54 million year old fossil flies yield new insight into the evolution of sight

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Eyes surprise: fossil eyes from a 54 million year old cranefly. Lindgren et al./Nature By Mike Lee, Flinders University Fossilised flies that lived 54 million years ago have revealed a surprising twist to the tale of how insects’ eyes evolved. These craneflies, unveiled in Nature today, show that insect eyes trap light the same way as human eyes, using the pigment melanin – yet another example of evolution finding similar solutions to similar problems. Read more: Eye to the past:…

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We are not at the center of the microbial world

We are not at the center of the microbial world

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Ed Yong writes: Aside from those of us with access to microscopes, most people will never see microbes with their own eyes. And so we tend to identify microbes with the disease-causing minority among them, the little buggers that trigger the tickling mist of a sneeze or the pustule on otherwise smooth skin. We become aware of their existence when they threaten our lives, and for much of our history, that threat was substantial. Epidemics of smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, and…

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Why people and parrots know how to dance

Why people and parrots know how to dance

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Ed Yong writes: Before he became an internet sensation, before he made scientists reconsider the nature of dancing, before the children’s book and the Taco Bell commercial, Snowball was just a young parrot, looking for a home. His owner had realized that he couldn’t care for the sulfur-crested cockatoo any longer. So in August 2007, he dropped Snowball off at the Bird Lovers Only rescue center in Dyer, Indiana—along with a Backstreet Boys CD, and a tip that the bird…

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Why did octopuses become so smart?

Why did octopuses become so smart?

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Ed Yong writes: A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome. Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for…

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The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

The dancing species: How moving together in time helped make us human

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By Kimerer LaMothe Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an ‘I’. Dancing remains a vital, generative…

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Like humans, ravens mirror the distress they witness in others, study suggests

Like humans, ravens mirror the distress they witness in others, study suggests

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Katherine J. Wu reports: Seeing someone else suffer a big disappointment can have a pretty damaging effect on your own morale. That’s definitely the case with people—and it might be true for ravens, too. New research suggests that, like humans and many other mammals, common ravens (Corvus corax) can read and internalize the emotional states of others. In the study, published today in the journal PNAS, ravens watch their friends grapple with a frustrating task in which they’re denied a…

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I’m an evolutionary biologist – here’s why this ancient fungal fossil discovery is so revealing

I’m an evolutionary biologist – here’s why this ancient fungal fossil discovery is so revealing

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Do fungi like this Penicillium mold, which produces the the antibiotic penicillin, trace their origins to an ancestor that lived a billion years ago? Rattiya Thongdumhyu/Shutterstock.com By Antonis Rokas, Vanderbilt University Biologists don’t call them “the hidden kingdom” for nothing. With an estimated 5 million species, only a mere 100,000 fungi are known to scientists. This kingdom, which includes molds, yeasts, rusts and mushrooms, receives far less attention than plants or animals. This is particularly true for fossils of fungi,…

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A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans

A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans

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Science News reports: Denisovans reached what’s now called “the roof of the world” at least 160,000 years ago. Found in a Tibetan Plateau cave, a partial lower jawbone represents a Denisovan who is the oldest known hominid to reach the region’s cloud-scraping heights, researchers report online May 1 in Nature. The fossil suggests that these perplexing, extinct members of the human lineage weathered the plateau’s frigid, thin air long before humans did. Many researchers have assumed that, as far as…

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How culture works with evolution to produce human cognition

How culture works with evolution to produce human cognition

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Cecilia Heyes writes: The conventional view, inside and outside academia, is that children are ‘wired’ to imitate. We are ‘Homo imitans’, animals born with a burning desire to copy the actions of others. Imitation is ‘in our genes’. Birds build nests, cats miaow, pigs are greedy, while humans possess an instinct to imitate. The idea that humans have cognitive instincts is a cornerstone of evolutionary psychology, pioneered by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker in the 1990s. ‘[O]ur modern…

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New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines

New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines

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  Science magazine reports: A strange new species may have joined the human family. Human fossils found in a cave on Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, include tiny molars suggesting their owners were small; curved finger and toe bones hint that they climbed trees. Homo luzonensis, as the species has been christened, lived some 50,000 to 80,000 years ago, when the world hosted multiple archaic humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, and when H. sapiens may have been making…

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Dueling dates for Deccan Traps volcanic eruption reignite debate over dinosaurs’ death

Dueling dates for Deccan Traps volcanic eruption reignite debate over dinosaurs’ death

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Science News reports: Which came first: the impact or the eruptions? That question is at the heart of two new studies in the Feb. 22 Science seeking to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in Earth’s geologic history: Whether an asteroid impact or massive volcanism that altered the global climate was mostly to blame for the demise of all nonbird dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The dinosaur die-off is the only known mass extinction that coincides with two…

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Plankton that are both plant-like and animal-like are redefining marine ecology

Plankton that are both plant-like and animal-like are redefining marine ecology

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Knowable magazine reports: Their color gave them away. Ecologist Diane Stoecker was looking at plankton in samples of ocean water from the dock in Woods Hole Harbor in Massachusetts some 40 years ago when she spotted something strange. Under the microscope, she recognized Laboea strobila, shaped like an ice-cream cone — “yellowish green and very beautiful,” she recalls — and the smaller, more spherical Strombidium species — also oddly greenish. Stoecker knew that these single-celled critters, named ciliates for the…

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How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

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Ferris Jabr writes: A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers,…

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Humans: The least aggressive primate

Humans: The least aggressive primate

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Richard Wrangham writes: A few years ago, I stayed in Kenya with the conservationists Karl and Kathy Ammann, who kept a rescued chimpanzee named Mzee in their home. Even as a young adult, Mzee was generally well-behaved and trustworthy. Yet he could be impulsive. At one point, over breakfast, Mzee and I reached for the jug of orange juice at the same time. He grabbed my hand as I held the jug, and he squeezed. Ouch. “You first!” I squeaked….

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Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neanderthal legacy

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Ann Gibbons writes: Neanderthals are still among us, Janet Kelso realized 8 years ago. She had helped make the momentous discovery that Neanderthals repeatedly mated with the ancestors of modern humans—a finding that implies people outside of Africa still carry Neanderthal DNA today. Ever since then, Kelso has wondered exactly what modern humans got from those prehistoric liaisons—beyond babies. How do traces of the Neanderthal within shape the appearance, health, or personalities of living people? For years, evolutionary biologists couldn’t…

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