Tag Archives: Late Pleistocene

“with a morphology similar to present-day humans”

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Adam Van Arsdale

Hominins with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 y ago. That is the opening line of an abstract from Fu, et al. (2013) detailing ancient DNA from ~40,000 year old … Continue reading →

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Scales of time and space in prehistory

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Steven Kuhn, talking about the importance of matching scales of explanation with scales of evidence (2012), and citing ecologist Simon Levin (1992): Levin makes a parallel observation about ecological processes: “…if there are predictable patterns that may be observed in … Continue reading →

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Population replacements and founder effects in humans

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

TREE has an article in press looking at the impact of founder events on subsequent patterns of genetic diversity. The main argument of the paper, co-authored by Waters, Fraser & Hewitt (Founder takes all: density-dependent processes structure biodiversity), is that … Continue reading →

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Population level extinction in human prehistory readings, part 1

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

One of my current research projects is investigating the potential impact of population level extinction in human evolutionary history. I am focusing my efforts on Late Pleistocene Europe because it is a time and a place that we have a … Continue reading →

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Neandertal anti-defamation files

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Kyle Jarrard has a piece at The Huffington Post on changing attitudes about Neandertal competence: No more can we say that old Neanderthal — prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts — didn’t know what he was doing. And … Continue reading →

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Lineages, species and Michigan, part 2

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I will have to follow up with my own comments later, but I wanted to direct you to Ken Weiss’s follow-up piece to his comments on the single-species hypothesis yesterday. I will make one brief observation, though. Ken writes: But … Continue reading →

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Neandertal demographic collapse

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Love Dalén, Anders Götherström and colleagues have an interesting short article available in advance view in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The article argues, on the basis of Neandertal mtDNA data, for a distinction between Western and Eastern Neandertals, with the … Continue reading →

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Longlin fossils

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I said in a post the other day that I am largely unsympathetic to arguments for excessive speciation throughout the Pleistocene. The news this week from “Red Deer Cave” or Longlin Cave in SW China does not change that. These … Continue reading →

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