First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Bowles and Choi make a testable prediction for some parts of the upper Paleolithic. Interestingly four of the seven Neanderthal teeth with cooked starches in Henry 2011 (PNAS 108, 486–491, list of 2011-01-14) are from their window of 38–36 ka BP and at 46 ka, where the other three are from, a similar climate prevailed.
Other primates have a dip in hearing sensitivity right at the middle frequencies relevant for speech recognition (Coleman 2010). Humans uniquely haven’t and this is in fact their most sensitive range. As Quam et al. managed to show, this unique human trait is already present in A. africanus but not in P. robustus.