The Current State of Nostratic Theory, or a Psychoanalytic Reading of a Soviet Utopian Idea
In-between the sensible exchanges on the out-of-America hypothesis with genome blogger, Max Lushington, I read a fascinating piece of Russian web scholarship. George Starostin, the son of a famed Russian linguist, Sergei Starostin, and an accomplished long-range linguist in his own…
Kunstkamera: Western Sanctions Imposed on Prominent Russian Academics
Political and epistemological battles between a group of Russian official, or academic scientists and a group of Russian entrepreneurial, or folk scholars continue. Since the publication of a “resolution” denouncing Anatole Klyosov’s DNA Genealogy as pseudoscience (extensively covered on this…
Amerindians Are Even More Genetically Diverse and Older Than You Thought
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aab3884 Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans Raghavan, Maanasa, Matthias Steinrücken, Kelley Harris, Stephan Schiffels, Simon Rasmussen, Michael DeGiorgio, Anders Albrechtsen, …Eske Willerslev. How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious….
Human Hand Proportions Are More Primitive Than Chimp Hand Proportions
Nature Communications 6, no. 7717 (2015) doi:10.1038/ncomms8717 The Evolution of Human and Ape Hand Proportions Almecija, Sergio, Jeroen B. Smaers, and William L. Jungers. Human hands are distinguished from apes by possessing longer thumbs relative to fingers. However, this simple…
Brain Complexity vs. Brain Size in Primate Evolution
Nature Communications 6 (2015), no. 7580 doi:10.1038/ncomms8580 Cerebral complexity preceded enlarged brain size and reduced olfactory bulbs in Old World monkeys Gonzalez, Lauren A., Brenda R. Benefit, Monte L. McCrossin, and Fred Spoor. Analysis of the only complete early cercopithecoid…
In Defense of Science…В защиту науки (Contd.)
A street fight is raging on (here and here) in the Russian academe between scientists and pseudoscientists. It’s increasingly difficult to tease apart the former from the latter. It’s all one bloody mess. It appears the most recent comments of an independent observer such as…
In Defense of Science…В защиту науки
Apologies to my English-only readership. This post is in Russian and represents my responses to an ongoing web war between academic and entrepreneurial scientists in Russia. A large, multidisciplinary group of prominent Russian academics headed by geneticist Elena Balanovsky published a…
The Hypothesis of “Boreal” Metarace: A Critique of Alexander Kozintsev
Every now and then I introduce the English-only readers of this blog to notable developments in human origins research taking place among Russian academics. I previously aspects of Yuri Berezkin‘s comparative mythology project, Vladimir Napol’skikh‘s peculiar linguistic opinions and surprising…
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