I’ve added comments from biologist Laurent Excoffier to my X-woman post. His verdict: probably another species of hominid.
Originally published March 25, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
I’ve updated my X-woman post with an interpretation from John Hawks: there was no X-woman species.
Originally published March 24, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Line up all the viruses on Earth end to end (go ahead, I’ll wait), and they’ll stretch over 10 million light years. In my new podcast, I talk to Curtis Suttle of the University of British Columbia about what it means to live on a virus-dominated planet.
Originally published March 24, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Another great review of the Tangled Bank, this time from Bioscience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:
“In the best of all worlds, every educated American could and should read this book, and as a result, would have a much richer understanding of evolution as a force directly affecting our lives.”
(NB–Even if you don’t live in the U.S., you may want to check it out!)
Originally published March 24, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins–even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.