If you have not already seen it, you should check out (bookmark, subscribe to the RSS) Haldane’s Sieve. Not only does it have a great title, but it is an amazing resource for discussions of contemporary evolutionary and population genetics papers.
Today, for example, both Joe Pickrell and Graham Coop have posts up discussing current work in the field. Joe’s post provides comments on his own paper (available via ArXiv here) regarding the genetic prehistory of Southern Africa. Graham’s piece, prompted by Sankararaman et al.’s paper (also available on ArXiv here), looks at the potential timing of Neandertal-modern human admixture. Sriram Sankararaman provided direct comments on their paper a couple of weeks ago on the site.
Perhaps it is my nostalgia for grad school, that time when it was not uncommon to sit around a room discussing, and disagreeing about in civil terms, major issues in human evolution. It would be wonderful if paleoanthropology had something equivalent. Though that would of course require more open access publications…
