The BBC carried an interesting story highlighting conflicting interests of groups using different parts of watersheds. This certainly does not bode well for the many species occurring in these highland forest habitats, about which we still know too little. For the story, go here.
September 29, 2009
September 24, 2009
Lower Pleistocene hominins involved in more than just passive scavenging
New paper out in Journal of Human Evolution provides potential evidence from a Lower Pleistocene Olduvai Gorge site that hominins were engaged in more than just passive scavenging of small to medium-size mammal carcasses. Combined with information for early usage of fire by hominins in the Lower Pleistocene, there seems to be a gradually building case that hominins have been active modifiers of the African landscape for a very long time.
The aborigine colonization of the Canary Islands
For those interested in the biogeography of our own species, especially in relation to Africa, there’s an interesting new paper out in the European Journal of Human Genetics that deals with the geographic origin of the aboriginal populations of the Canary Islands. Unsurprisingly, many of the haplotypes are similar to those from populations in Northern Africa. However, they do posit a model of frequent migration between islands which goes somewhat against previous notions of colonization via “sequential island-hopping.”