Yesterday I went to Rutgers University to give a talk about medical ecology. Afterwards, I got a delightful surprise: Amy Chen Vollmer, the president of the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology, got on stage to announce I had won the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in Public Communication of Life Sciences.
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
I’ve got some blog news.
Starting next week, I will be publishing the Loom with National Geographic Magazine. I’ll be part of a new blogging team there, collectively called Phenomena. I’ll be joining three gifted writers, all of whom I’ve been fortunate to know for a number of years: Virginia Hughes, Brian Switek, and Ed Yong.
Originally published December 10, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old. Before then, they were fins, which your fishy ancestors used to swim through oceans and rivers. Once those fins sprouted digits, they could propel your salamander-like ancestors across dry land. Fast forward 300 million years, and your hands had become fine-tuned for manipulations: your lemur-like ancestors used them to grab leaves and open up fruits. Within the past few million years, your hominin ancestors had fairly human hands, which they used to fashion tools for digging up tubers, butchering carcasses, and laying the groundwork for our global dominance today.
We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. (I wrote about some of those discoveries in my first book, At the Water’s Edge.)
In the wake of my story in the Times on zombies and today in Slate on our inner viruses, I figured I had stirred up enough questions to try out Reddit’s feature, Ask Me (Almost) Anything. So I’ll be there tomorrow Monday 12/10 at 3 pm ET. See you then!
Originally published December 6, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.