Been rigerously reading all the latest research on human evolution? No? Don't worry, here's the human evolution weekly update to bring you up to speed.
- Humans may be innate assholes. In games surrounding the division of resources amongst a group, adults generally divide things up fairly. However, children are a lot more selfish. Do we have to be taught equality? (source).
- A new experiment has revealed the evolution of language may have been motivated by the benefits of teaching. The researchers found that verbal teaching offered huge advantages when trying to teach people how to make the stone tools our ancestors made (read more).
- Counting monkeys is key to helping conservation efforts, but can be very difficult given they like to live high in the trees. Researchers propose a way around this, trying to figure out if you can use the noise made by monkeys to infer population size (sawce).
- Did humans evolve in Asia? That's a fascinating possibility new data from China raises. Redating of a Chinese site suggests hominins were occupying that location before they supposadly migrated out of Africa. However, the research does have some fairly major issues (read more).
- And finally would Jesus save the Neanderthals? A theologian ponders this in a recent paper and (since he belongs to an unscientific discipline) fails to come up with a concrete answer. Instead, he simply notes we should either answer yes or figure out something new that makes humans special. Useful research here (sauce).
