john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Mailbag: Food nostalgia

Sat, 2010-03-13 15:52 -- John Hawks

Re: "The simple foods":

Thanks for the pointer to this irritating James McWilliams piece. I hate it when huge amounts of rhetoric blow up around a piece that is so logically flawed, so this is short.

Mr. McWilliams fails to distinguish between romanticizing the past and choosing not to poison oneself. He is actually suggesting that people in 1870 would have been stupid to object to sawdust in their food.

Yeah, like that fool Upton Sinclair, just pining away for a more innocent age.

Tags: 
social
diet

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.