On Thursday, an excellent crowd turned out, despite the sharp cold weather, to hear me talk about Neanderthals. I managed to get a fairly good recording on my Iphone, and today I melded it with my slides on Imovie, to create a slideshow of the talk. I’ve embedded the Youtube and the Vimeo versions below. Take your pick.
Originally published December 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Over at Psychology Today, I’m in a celebratory mood. It’s been fifty years since Jane Goodall discovered that animals have been making tools. And it’s been downhill ever since. Check it out.
Originally published December 16, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Just a reminder–TODAY at 5 pm, I will be giving a lecture at the Yale Medical School, as part of a series hosted by the Yale Medical Humanities and the Arts Council.
I’ll be talking about some of the eye-popping studies that have come out over the past couple years on the Neanderthals, our enigmatic extinct cousins (and grandparents, in some cases). It might seem an odd fit to talk about Neanderthals at a medical school, but when you consider the medically important genes that Neanderthals carried, suddenly it starts to make sense.
Continue reading “Reminder: The Red-Headed Neanderthal today at 5 pm”
Psychology Today, December 16, 2010
Let us take a moment to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest take-down of human hubris. In November 1960, a 29-year-old British woman named Jane Goodall was wrapping up a long field season among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She had won their trust, or at least their indifference, and so Goodall could observe the chimpanzees up close, discovering things about their behavior that no one had seen before. One day, walking alone through a valley, she passed by a termite mound with a tree stump nearby. It occurred to Goodall that there was no stump there. She dropped to the ground, realizing that a chimpanzee was crouched over the mound, fifty yards from her. He was eating termites.
At the end of January, I’ll be running my fifth annual science writing workshop. It’s open to all science graduate students at Yale. Grad students from other universities are welcome to get in touch about participating.
You can find all the details on the updated workshop web page.
Originally published December 13, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.