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Apes Able to Think Ahead

Humans show remarkable foresight. From storing food to carrying tools, we can imagine, prepare for and, ultimately, steer the course of the future. Although many animals hoard food or build shelters, there is scant evidence that they ponder the long-term ramifications of their actions or the future more generally. But new research hints that our ape brethren may share our ability to think ahead ... Science & Technology at Scientific American.com

 

 

Did humans and chimps once interbreed?

It goes to the heart of who we are and where we came from. Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors ... New Scientist News

Neanderthal Nuclear DNA Sequenced

Rex Dalton at Nature is reporting that ancient DNA guru Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his team have managed to obtain nuclear DNA sequences from a Neanderthal. The new sequences--which comprise about a million base pairs, or about 0.03 percent of genome--come from a 45,000-year-old male Neanderthal from Vindija Cave, located in northwestern Croatia ... BLOG: SciAm Observations

Climate Change Blamed for Pleistocene Megafauna Bust and Boom

Around 13,000 years ago, the world's climate began to change. Seas rose, glaciers retreated and ecosystems began to transform. At roughly the same time, humans arrived in North America, perhaps attracted by migrating game or newly hospitable land. Over the course of the next few millennia a host of indigenous large-bodied mammals, such as the mammoth, died out. Scientists have long debated whether climate warming or human hunting brought about this megafauna extinction. New radiocarbon dating results support the environmental explanation ... Scientific American