Do Chimpanzees Mourn For Their Dead?

Note: The next addition of the Four Stone hearth will at This is Serious Monkey Business on February 2nd. Pleas get your submissions in! That seems to be the way the press is portraying the video below. The video was released in conjunction with an article published in the American Journal of Primatology (the article [...]

Cause of Death Affects Racial Classification on Death Certificates

The title of this post is the name of a fascinating paper in PLoS One. I haven’t had time to read the entire article but here is the first couple of paragraphs:

Was Australopithecus anamensis Arboreal?

That is the question asked by a recemt paper in Folia Primatologica. I don’t have access but Discovery News has the story. Apparently, the researchers analyzed the capitates of a number of hominoids and hominins. According to Discovery News:

Interesting Science Picture: Part XV

The picture below comes from an interesting article on a case of mutalism between pitcher plants and bats. Service benefit provided by N. r. elongata to K. h. hardwickii. (a) Aerial pitcher of N. rafflesiana var. elongata. (b) The same pitcher with the front tissue removed to reveal a roosting Hardwick’s woolly bat. (c) The [...]

Orangutan Genetics: Begging for an Article

There are a couple of interesting articles on Orangutan genteics out. The first, published in Nature (and is open acess), announces the sequencing of the Orangutan genome. Results are kind of interesting. From Science Daily (I haven’t had a chance to read the Nature article yet): However, in a surprising discovery, the researchers found that [...]

New Zoo Baby

Below is a picture of the newest resident at the St. Louis Zoo: It is a male black rhino born on January 14th.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: A Film By Werner Herzog

Apparently Werner Herzog has made a 3-D movie about Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc. A trailer for the film is below the fold.

King Tutankhamun’s Family and Genetics

Back in February of 2010 I blogged about a research paper on Tutankhamun. In that post I focused on the paleopathological findings of the Hawass et al article and didn’t really mention the genetic research and resulting identification of Tutankhamun’s family. Recently this second aspect of the Hawass et al study have bubbled to the [...]

Lions, and Tigers, and Bears! Oh My!

Okay it’s none of the above, it’s a mountain lion spotted in St. Louis County. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch The question is: What’s it doing in Chesterfield? The Missouri Department of Conservation isn’t quite sure, but most likely the mountain lion was just passing through in search of territory or a mate. The [...]

Four Stone Hearth Volume 111 Is Up

The 111th volume of the Four Stone Hearth is up at The Prancing Papio. Check it out!

Four Stone Hearth in Two Days

The Four Stone Hearth will be in two days at The Prancing Papio. Please get your submissions in!

Sweet! Baboons And A New Variety of Orange!

This is really cool! South African farmer Alwyn van der Merwe said workers noticed several years ago that one of his tangerine trees was already stripped of fruit when the other trees were ready for picking. The same thing happened the next year, and the next. A farmworker finally solved the mystery when he saw [...]

Ancient DNA From Homo floresiensis: Redux

Extracting DNA from Homo floresiensis has been tried in the past with no luck. Nature News reports on a new attempt to obtain DNA from a Homo floresiensis molar. What struck me is interesting from the story is this bit:

Four Stone Hearth: Volume 110

Welcome to the first Four Stone Hearth of 2011! I have compiled some of the best anthropology writing on the web and I hope you like them.

Sex Differences in Chimpanzee Use of Play Objects

I will be hosting the Four Stone Hearth on 1/05/11. Please send my your submissions! In the meantime, I am looking for hosts for dates in February and March. If you are interested in hosting drop me a line (my email address is on the “About” tab). Current Biology has and interesting paper called Sex [...]