Exaggerated emphasis by media on Darwinius Masillae

Views of discover magazine on human origins and the latest Marwinius Masillae evolution

• Decoding the Ancient Secrets of White Shaman | DISCOVER

  Carolyn Boyd guides her pickup down a cliffside trail overlooking Dead Mans Pass, a limestone canyon cut deep into the backcountry of southwest Texas. A ring of black vultures circles overhead. Boyd slows the truck and scans the canyon for what has drawn their interest. On top of a boulder, splayed out like a ritual sacrifice, is a half-eaten goat carcass. “Mountain lion,” she says. The region known as the Lower Pecos is an arid 21,000-square-mile expanse of southwest Texas and northern Mexico surrounding the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande. The land is barbed with cacti, teeming with rattlesnakes, and riven with impassable canyons. But more than 4,000 years ago, these barrens were home to a flourishing culture of hunter-gatherers, creators of some of the world’s most complex and beautiful prehistoric rock art. The literal meaning of those paintings had been dismissed as an unsolvable mystery—until recently. Boyd parks at the bottom of the canyon. In her early fifties, with high cheekbones and dark hair pulled back under a hat, she is both elegant and hardy, like a pioneer woman from a classic Western. She sets a brisk pace up the side of the canyon. Her destination is Delicado Shelter, one of some 300 shallow caves in the region known for paintings of human figures, deer, canines, felines, birds, rabbits, snakes, and other desert animals. Boyd, an archaeologist and director of SHUMLA (Studying Human Use of Materials, Land, and Art), an education and research center in Comstock, Texas, will spend the afternoon scouring the shelter for insight into the ancient residents and their spiritual world. Through decades of dogged work, Boyd has also developed a system to understand this enigmatic art... Image: The figures at the White Shaman rock shelter seem to depict a journey through the spirit world. Courtesy of SHUMLA School INC 2012 - 32 hours ago

• World Science Festival: Resilience and Books This Weekend | The Loom

  It’s hard to believe that the World Science Festival is now in its fifth year. What started out feeling like an experiment is now a New York institution. I’m looking forward to participating yet again, and hope you’ll be able to join me. On Friday I’ll be moderating an event called “Illuminating Resilience.” Four experts will discuss how people withstand life’s hardest shocks, and manage to bounce back. When: Friday, June 1 10 to 11:30 AM Where: NYU Global Center, Grand Hall. 238 Thompson St, New York, NY 10012. Map More details and ticket ordering information here. On Saturday afternoon, The World Science Festival will be holding a free event called, “Meet the Authors: Conversations with Best-Selling Science Writers” I’ll be kicking things off at 1 pm with a talk about Science Ink. We’ll have temporary tattoos, special guests, and other surprises. And then stick around for other writers, including Lawrence Krauss and E. O. Wilson. Where: NYU Kimmel Center, Commuter Lounge, 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012 (2nd Floor, Room 203) Map Details here - 2 days ago

• Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting…. | Gene Expression

  One point which I’ve made on this weblog several times is that on a whole range of issues and behaviors people simply follow the consensus of their self-identified group. This group conformity probably has deep evolutionary origins. It is often much cognitively “cheaper” to simply utilize a heuristic “do what my peers do” than reason from first principles. The “wisdom of the crowds” and “irrational herds” both arise from this dynamic, positive and negative manifestations. The interesting point is that from a proximate (game-theoretic rational actor) and ultimate (evolutionary fitness) perspective ditching reason is often quite reasonable (in fact, it may be the only feasible option if you want to “understand,” for example, celestial mechanics). If you’re faced with a complex environment or set of issues “re-inventing the wheel” is often both laborious and impossible. Laborious because our individual general intelligence is simply not that sharp. Impossible because most of us are too stupid to do something like invent calculus. Many people can learn the rules for obtaining derivatives and integrals, but far fewer can come up with the fundamental theorem of calculus. Similarly, in the 18th century engineers who utilized Newtonian mechanics for practical purposes were not capable ... - 3 days ago

• Thanks to readers! | The Loom

  Just wanted to thank readers who recently sent me requests for signed bookplates. To make sure that I was dealing with human readers, instead of Ebay robots, I asked folks to send me a picture. Here are a few. The offer continues to stand: if you’ve gotten a book of mine and want to get it signed, I’ve printed up bookplates appropriate to each title.  Email a picture with your mailing address and any special signing request. - 4 days ago

• Genetics’ random truths | Gene Expression

  Update: Please do not take the labels below (e.g., “Baloch”) as literal ancestral elements. The most informative way to read them is that they indicate populations where this element is common, and, the relationship of proportions can tell us something. The literal proportion does not usually tell us much. End Update I was browsing the Harappa results, and two new things jumped out at me. Zack now has enough St. Thomas Christian samples from Kerala that I think we need to accept as the likely model that this community does not derive from the Brahmins of Kerala, as some of them claim. Their genetic profile is rather like many non-Brahmin South Indians, except the Nair, who have a peculiar attested  history with the Brahmins of their region. But that’s not the really interesting finding. Below is a table I constructed from Zack’s data. Ethnicity Language S.Indian Baloch Caucasian NE.Euro Karnataka Brahmin Dravidian 47% 38% 4% 6% Karnataka Hebbar Iyengar Brahmin Dravidian 49% 36% 5% 5% Karnataka Iyengar Dravidian 48% 39% 3% 5% Karnataka Iyengar Brahmin Dravidian 48% 37% 3% 7% Karnataka Kannada Brahmin Dravidian 51% 35% 3% 5% Karnataka Konkani Brahmin Dravidian 47% 37% 2% 6% Kerala Brahmin Dravidian 43% 39% 4% 6% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 46% 40% 3% 6% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 47% 40% 3% 5% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 48% 39% 9% 4% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 47% 38% 6% 4% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 48% 37% 6% 5% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 48% 37% 3% 5% Tamil Brahmin Dravidian 48% 35% 5% 6% Tamil Brahmin Iyengar Dravidian 47% 38% 6% 4% Tamil Brahmin Iyengar Dravidian 47% 35% 6% 6% Tamil Brahmin Iyengar Dravidian 50% 35% 2% 8% Tamil Brahmin iyer/iyengar Dravidian 48% 38% 2% 5% Tamil Brahmin iyer/iyengar Dravidian 48% 38% 4% 5% Tamil Brahmin iyer/iyengar Dravidian 47% 37% 2% 5% Tamil Brahmin iyer/iyengar Dravidian 47% 37% 6% 8% Bengali Brahmin IE 43% 35% 4% 10% Bengali Brahmin IE 45% 35% 2% 11% Bengali Brahmin IE 44% 35% 5% 11% Bihari Brahmin IE 39% 38% 5% 11% Maharashtra/Madhya Pradesh Saraswat Brahmin IE 47% 39% 1% 6% Mahrashtrian Desastha Brahmin IE 46% 38% 8% 5% Oriya Brahmin IE 47% 36% 0% 9% Punjabi Brahmin IE 33% 41% 13% 10% Punjabi Brahmin IE 35% 40% 8% 11% Rajasthani Brahmin IE 32% 38% 9% 15% Sindhi Pushtikar/Pushkarna Brahmin IE 31% 36% 12% 10% UP Brahmin IE 37% 38% 2% 14% UP Brahmin IE 41% 37% 7% 11% I was curious about the distribution of the ... - 5 days ago

• Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry | Gene Expression

  A correspondent emailed me to tell me that Linda Chavez, whose father was a New Mexican Hispano, was found to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Henry Louise Gates Jr’s Finding your Roots series. This brings me to point to a recent paper, The impact of Converso Jews on the genomes of modern Latin Americans: Modern day Latin America resulted from the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of the Americas in 1492, followed by waves of migration from Europe and Africa. As a result, the genomic structure of present day Latin Americans was determined both by the genetic structure of the founding populations and the numbers of migrants from these different populations. Here, we analyzed DNA collected from two well-established communities in Colorado (33 unrelated individuals) and Ecuador (20 unrelated individuals) with a measurable prevalence of the BRCA1 c.185delAG and the GHR c.E180 mutations, respectively, using Affymetrix Genome-wide Human SNP 6.0 arrays to identify their ancestry. These mutations are thought to have been brought to these communities by Sephardic Jewish progenitors. Principal component analysis and clustering methods were employed to determine the genome-wide patterns of continental ancestry within both populations using single nucleotide polymorphisms, complemented by determination of ... - 8 days ago

• Ancient Golden Earring Discovered Hidden in a Jar in Israel | 80beats

  This beautiful golden earring, decorated with figures of goats, was one of a trove of jewelry pieces that were wrapped in cloth and stuffed into a jar discovered by archaeologists at the Tel Meggido dig in Israel. When the team flushed the jar’s interior with water, earrings, a ring, and carnelian beads came tumbling out. They aren’t sure why the jewelry was in the jar, but they posit that it could have been hidden there by the inhabitants of the home where the jar was found for safekeeping. The layer of soil where the find occurred dates from the 11th century BCE, a period when Meggido was under Egyptian rule, and the team believes the jewelry is either of Egyptian origin or inspired by Egyptian designs. Image courtesy of American Friends of Tel Aviv University - 9 days ago

• In The Beginning Was the Mudskipper? | The Loom

  In 1893, the Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set off to find the North Pole. He would not use pack dogs to cross the Arctic Ice. Instead, he locked his fate into the ice itself. He sailed his ship The Fram directly into the congealing autumn Arctic, until it became locked in the frozen sea. Nansen was convinced that the ice itself would drift up to the pole, taking him and his crew along for the ride. For two and a half years they drifted with the pack. It gradually became clear to Nansen that The Fram had stopped moving north and was now traveling east instead, back towards Europe. He leaped out of the ship and tried to sled up to the pole, only to discover that the ice he was now traveling on was moving south. Only four degrees away from true north, he decided to retreat. He bolted back for Franz Josef Land. The Fram meanwhile continued to drift east. After several months, it broke free of the ice, and the crew sailed the ship south to the island of Spitzbergen. There on the bare flats they saw a giant ... - 9 days ago