I was in a conversation last night about a book I had really enjoyed this year, and I remarked that I had meant to review it on the blog and hadn't done it yet. The book is Dale Guthrie's The Nature of Paleolithic Art, which I enjoyed for the text and...

In a new paper, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues describe new hominin fossils from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. A good thing: It gives somebody like me a rationale for describing early hominins from the point of view of Hadar. You see, Hadar is the...

Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. Now it's all packed into a single Nature Genetics paper by Marc Monot and coworkers. I mean,...

Here's the top hit for "Neanderthal" on Google News today: Today's question: Are there cavemen in heaven? I mean, during the course of evolution, when did they become “human beings” with “souls”? I won't venture an answer, but you're...

Six hundred dollars was more money twenty years ago, but it was still pretty cheap for a beautiful rosewood specimen cabinet, I'd have thought. It was full of somebody's nineteenth-century insect collection. Wait a minute -- how many nineteenth-century...