Last week was a lull, but this week I have a few things to share…

The agricultural revolution that began 11,000 years ago changed humanity as well as the planet. But how did the transformation happen? Some intriguing clues have emerged in recent months from ancient DNA extracted for the first time from the oldest skeletons of farmers. I wrote a feature for the New York Times about the new findings, and how archaeologists are folding them into their understanding of how farming began. (Image: P. Dorrell and S. Laidlaw/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 20, 2016” →

Thanks to Dana Ehret for taking pictures of my talk Thursday at the University of Alabama. Before speaking about human-driven evolution, I had an excellent day talking with UA biologists about turtles and death cap mushrooms and other glories of Alabama’s biodiversity.

Aging is one of those science-journalism topics that never gets old. (Sorry.) Over the years, I’ve written a number of pieces on what happens when we get old, and why we get old in the first place. You can read some of them here here here and here. Also, you can watch this Science Happens video or this lecture I gave at Stony Brook on the evolution of aging (I wrote it up here.) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 9, 2016” →

It was a busy week for me: a talk in Boston, a shoot for an upcoming Science Happens video, and a lot of time spent burrowing deep into my next book. On Thursday I’ll resurface in Alabama to give a lecture at UA about evolution in our own time. So, Alabamians, I hope to see you there! Here are the details about this free lecture. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 30, 2016” →

Back in December, when I was working on a profile of the geneticist Eske Willerslev, he told me off the record that he and his colleagues had a huge new genome paper in the works that would offer a lot of clues about human history. But it would take a while to come out because similar papers were going to be published at the same time by other scientists.

Well, the wheels turn slowly, but they were worth the wait. On Thursday’s front page of the New York Times, I reported on four new studies that give an unprecedented look at our origins. There was a whole lot to write about–more than can fit in one article, so I focused on one of the most contentious questions in paleoanthropology: how did humans emerge out of Africa and settle the rest of the world? Some fascinating possibilities emerge from these new studies on hundreds of genomes. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 23, 2016” →

Greetings! As you may have observed, there was no newsletter last Friday. I didn’t have anything to point you to, and I was also swamped with stuff that wasn’t yet ready for prime time.

But now I’m out of that knot. And so, without further ado…

Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 16, 2016” →