Tag Archives: modern human origins

Reason #3 to enroll in 207x

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Adam Van Arsdale

Continuing my series on the top 10 reasons to enroll in Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), which officially begins on May 6th…. Previous entries: #10 Origin stories are captivating. Scientific origin stories can be unifying. #9 It’s open and … Continue reading →

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Reason #6 to enroll in 207x

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Adam Van Arsdale

Continuing my series on the top 10 reasons to enroll in Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), which officially begins on May 6th…. Previous entries: #10 Origin stories are captivating. Scientific origin stories can be unifying. #9 It’s open and … Continue reading →

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“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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My talk at the AAAs

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

If you are in the San Francisco area and interested in human evolution, you should stop by our session at the AAAs this afternoon. There is a great group of panelists who have agreed to contribute and I am excited … Continue reading →

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Upcoming AAA meetings

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I apologize for my blog silence of late. It has been a busy few weeks of writing. Later this week I am headed to the AAA meetings in San Francisco, however, and I will try to provide some updates on … Continue reading →

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Thought of the day: “Modern” human origins

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

The first class I took that really hooked me on paleoanthropology was an undergraduate seminar on Modern Human Origins. The class was wonderful. We read a huge amount of primary literature and for whatever reason, the class, although we were … Continue reading →

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Neandertal-human admixture and early Homo

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Last week’s pre-publication of a paper addressing the alternative hypotheses of Neandertal-human admixture vs. ancient African population structure, with respect explaining the signal of Neandertal DNA in living humans, has generated a lot of great posts. First, John Hawks has … Continue reading →

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Neandertal and modern human admixture

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Heng Li, Svante Pääbo and David Reich have a new paper (open access, via ArXiv here) that tests whether or not genetic similarities between recent humans and Neandertals is the result of recent admixture or ancient … 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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Lineages, species and Michigan

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

One of the posts that I have had in draft form for several months, waiting for the proper motivation and approach to finalize, is titled, “lineages and species in the fossil record.” This week, perhaps, the time and motivation has … Continue reading →

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