Author: Matt Kristoffersen
I’ve been baffled by the spread of a non-story over the past couple days, about the supposed discovery of the oldest fossil of our species, doubling the age of our species from 200,000 years to 400,000 years and overturning the generally-accepted idea that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.
Continue reading “Oldest Homo sapiens fossil? Journalistic vaporware”
The next few months are shaping up to be pretty busy with talks. Here’s my list so far–more details to come as the dates approach, and more talks to be added soon. If you’re in the neighborhood (or at the meeting, as the case may be), come on by… Continue reading “Yammerings: the 2011 edition!”
When it rains it pours. A bunch of stories I’ve been working on for a while have all surfaced over the past week. Here’s the very last…for now: my new Discover brain column. The topic is music. What is it? What is it for, if anything?
Continue reading “My new Discover brain column: Music and the brain”
As I report in today’s New York Times, scientists have sequenced the full genome from a 50,000-year-old finger bone from a Siberian cave, and they’ve concluded it belonged to a new lineage of humans they call Denisovans. These Denisovans, they argue, share an ancient common ancestor with us that lived, perhaps, 600,000 years ago–long before our species Homo sapiens arose. A couple hundred thousand years later, their branch of hominin evolution split, with one lineage evolving into Neanderthals, and the other into Denisovans. Much later, the Denisovans mated with Homo sapiens expanding out of Africa into southeast Asia, and today their DNA can still be found in the people of New Guinea and neighboring islands.
Continue reading “Denisovans: Ordinary humans with extraordinary genes?”
Scientific American is featuring an excerpt from Brain Cuttings, my new e-book about the frontiers of neuroscience. It’s an account of my wanderings through the science fiction world of the Singularity, pondering whether we’ll be uploading our brains someday to computers. The piece started out as an assignment for Playboy, which they published earlier this year; I then reworked the piece for the e-book. Check it out.
And if you have a subscription to Scientific American, please check out my feature in the January 2011 issue, called “100 Trillion Connections.” There, I expand on one of the key topics I discuss in my e-book excerpt: how the brain is a network of networks (of networks), and only by understanding their organization will we finally come to terms with the complexity of the mind.
Originally published December 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.