The 10,000 Year Explosion
How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

I like challenging views of people who go against the grain and dare to knock down sacred houses. Cochran and Harpending are clearly of this caliber. To begin with, their book is a frontal attack on the existing consensus in the (social) sciences regarding the biological and cultural evolution of ma......more

I remember, back when I was in college, participating in one of those classic college-style drunken debates with some friends about whether evolution was speeding up or slowing down. I argued, no doubt with some slurring of words, that that the increase in the complexity of life meant that there wer......more

“This is a new picture of recent human evolution. It implies that humans have changed not just culturally, but genetically, over the course of recorded history, and that we must allow for such changes when we try to understand historical events.” I guess, when you read the above quotation, your auto......more

This was recommended by a friend of mine, an archaeologist. It came out of our mutual dislike of the notion, promoted by some advocates of the paleo diet, that humans of the late stone age were perfectly adapted to their environment, and thus stopped evolving. By that logic, agriculture (and everyth......more

The evolutionary biologist, Steven Jay Gould, once famously said that “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” Nonsense say University of Utah anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Hen......more