Friday, December 14, 2012

Blog Posts to Make Up For Quiz


It Now Only Costs $100 To Know Everything About Your DNA

            Thanks to an investment from a high-ranking employee at Google, Sergey Brin, 23andme.com is now offering its genome sequencing for $100. They offer information about how susceptible you are to certain diseases. They hope the lower price would take price out of the decision and allow interest to be the driving factor in whether or not you want to get your genome sequence. However, the results just boil down to percentages, so you don’t receive any concrete answers.

Tracing Humanity's African Ancestry May Mean Rewriting 'out of Africa' Dates

            A University of Alberta archeologist’s research is leading anthropologists to rethink the ‘out of Africa’ theory. Evidence included artifacts that point to human occupation of Africa at least 200kya, which encompasses a late Ice Age time where a “genetic bottleneck” likely occurred. Methods used to date these findings include radiocarbon dating as well as spin resonance. The importance is that they may be able prove that people lived through the bottleneck period.

Africa's Homo Sapiens Were the First Techies

            A search for finding the beginning of modern human behavior and technological advancement has led anthropologists to South Africa. Wits University professor, Christopher Henshilwood, has written a paper about the Still Bay techno-traditions from 70-75kya and the Howiesons Poort from 60-65kya. He has found evidence of the first abstract art, jewelry, and bone tools that were used to make spears. Henshilwood said, "All of these innovations, plus many others we are just discovering, clearly show that Homo sapiens in southern Africa at that time were cognitively modern and behaving in many ways like ourselves. It is a good reason to be proud of our earliest, common ancestors who lived and evolved in South Africa and who later spread out into the rest of the world after about 60,000 years.” He also mentioned that climate change as well as the rising sea levels could have led to these innovations. His goal is to prove the “Neanthropic Man” originated in Africa and led to the modern behavior in Europe. 

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