The Evolution of Scientific Visualisations: A Case Study Approach to Big Data for Varied Audiences.

Visual representations of complex data are a cornerstone of how scientific information is shared. By taking large quantities of data and creating accessible visualisations that show relationships, patterns, outliers, and conclusions, important research can be communicated effectively to any audience. The nature of animal cognition is heavily debated with no consensus on what constitutes animal intelligence.

Hiding in Plain Sight-ancient Chinese anatomy.

For thousands of years, scientists have studied human anatomy by dissecting bodies. Our knowledge of their findings is limited, however, both by the subsequent loss of many of the oldest texts, and by a tendency toward a Eurocentric perspective in medicine. As a discipline, anatomy tends to be much more familiar with ancient Greek texts than with those from India, China, or Persia.

Evolution and dispersal of the genus Homo: A landscape approach.

The notion of the physical landscape as an arena of ecological interaction and human evolution is a powerful one, but its implementation at larger geographical and temporal scales is hampered by the challenges of reconstructing physical landscape settings in the geologically active regions where the earliest evidence is concentrated. We argue that the inherently dynamic nature of these unstable landscapes has made them important agents of biological change, creating complex topographies capable of selecting for, stimulating, obstructing or accelerating the latent and emerging properties of the human evolutionary trajectory. We use this approach, drawing on the concepts and methods of active tectonics, to develop a new perspective on the origins and dispersal of the Homo genus.

The biogeography of the Papio baboons: a GIS-based analysis of range characteristics and variability.

The Papio baboons are known for their ecological flexibility and wide geographic ranges, as well as their uncertain taxonomy. There have, however, been few systematic comparisons of the environments occupied by the 6 major Papio species, and how differences in range conditions and variability might affect their evolutionary ecology remains unknown. This paper uses geographical information system techniques to explore the environmental associations of all 6 major species.

Reticulate evolution and the human past: an anthropological perspective.

Context: The evidence is mounting that reticulate (web-like) evolution has shaped the biological histories of many macroscopic plants and animals, including non-human primates closely related to Homo sapiens, but the implications of this non-hierarchical evolution for anthropological enquiry are not yet fully understood. When they are understood, the result may be a paradigm shift in evolutionary anthropology.

Objective/methods: This paper reviews the evidence for reticulated evolution in the non-human primates and human lineage.