This Friday Professor Chris Stringer spoke at the University of Otago about the origins of man.
Another working in this area is Svante Pääbo a geneticist who now specialises in evolutionary genetics, particularly the origins of modern humans.
The title of his TED lecture, DNA clues to our inner Neanderthal (shown below), echoes the title of Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish that explores our teleost (i.e. fishy!) origins. His talk relates how a little part of us is Neanderthal.
The first half of Prof. Pääbo’s talk covers what makes us humans different or the same around the world. The presentation is drier than other TED lectures, but the ideas conveyed worth thinking about if they are new to you. Those who have been to Chris Stringer’s talk will see where these two overlap.*
A general point he makes is that human evolution is complex and that the different human species have mixed as they have developed. (For the larger picture that goes further back in time, check out David Winter’s last article, The Tree of Diversification (or why the March of Progress is wrong). This and Prof. Stringer‘s talk deal with that tiny part of the human evolution tree right down by the bottom left in David’s second illustration – just above the silhouette guy carrying a spear!)
* I’m hoping David Winter will present more of the details in a post later – meantime I have to get back to my reading!
i09 has a (short) related article, The extinction of Neanderthals had nothing to do with us:
http://io9.com/5888359/the-extinction-of-neanderthals-had-nothing-to-do-with-us
The original article is in Molecular Biology and Evolution (‘Partial genetic turnover in neandertals: continuity in the east and population replacement in the west’):
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/02/23/molbev.mss074