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In 2010, the Hong Kong organization Noah’s Ark Ministries International or NAMI announced they had discovered the legendary vessel on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey and were subsequently accused of perpetrating a hoax. Now, a professional archaeologist states there is significant merit to their discovery. Harvard University educated archaeologist and director of the Paleontological Research Corporation, Dr. Joel Klenck, surveyed the site, analyzed the archaeological remains and completed a comparative study. “The site is remarkable”, states Klenck, “and comprises a large all-wood structure with an archaeological assemblage that appears to be mostly from the Late Epipaleolithic Period.” These assemblages at...

Jena (Germany) Modern scientists would have loved the sight of early reptiles running across the Bromacker near Tambach-Dietharz (Germany) 300 million years ago. Unfortunately this journey through time is impossible. But due to Dr. Thomas Martens and his team from the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha numerous skeletons and footprints of early dinosaurs have been found and conserved there during the last forty years. "It is the most important find spot of primitive quadruped vertebrates from the Perm in Europe," says Professor Dr. Martin S. Fischer from the University Jena (Germany). The evolutionary biologist and his team together with the Gotha...

A unique and mysterious guinea-pig-sized rodent, not seen since 1898 despite several organized searches, bizarrely showed up at the front door of an ecolodge at a nature reserve in Colombia, South America. The magnificent red-crested tree rat (Santamartamys rufodorsalis), stayed for almost two hours while two research volunteers took the first photos ever of a creature the world thought would never be seen again. The charming nocturnal rodent made his re-debut to the world at 9:30PM on May 4, 2011 at the El Dorado Nature Reserve in the far north of the country. The Reserve was established in 2005 by...

First Homosexual Caveman FoundArchaeologists have unearthed the 5,000-year-old remains of what they believe may have been the world's oldest known gay caveman. Archeologists believe they have discovered a 'transsexual' or 'third gender grave' in the Czech Republic.The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves."From history and ethnology, we...

"Too simple" and "not so fast" suggest biological anthropologists from the George Washington University and New York University about the origins of human ancestry. In the upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the anthropologists question the claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors. Instead, the authors offer a more nuanced explanation of the fossils' place in the Tree of Life. They conclude that instead of being our ancestors the fossils more likely belong to extinct distant cousins. "Don't get me wrong, these are all important finds," said co-author Bernard Wood, University Professor...

Answering e-mail while toggling between telephone conversations. Monitoring social networking sites while working. Supervising the kids' homework while listening to the news and cooking dinner. The abundance of contemporary distractions offers many reasons to curse multitasking. But a UCLA anthropologist refuses to join the chorus. In a new book that explores the long history of multitasking, Monica L. Smith maintains that human beings should appreciate their ability to sequence many activities and to remember to return to a task once it has been interrupted, possibly even with new ideas on how to improve the activity... Smith, an associate professor of...

Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests. At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said. The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history....

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights. [snip] Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the...

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights. During the last 10 years the two factions have been through a phase of bitter tribal warfare...

A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study. The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders. The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492...

Man 567. If Adam was the first human being, how long ago was he created? I do not know. There is no indication whatever in the Bible as to when the first man was created. Nor is it a religious question. It is for science to seek for such evidence as it can discover from geological research. On such indications as science has so far been able to offer, it is probable enough that the first man was created perhaps 35,000 years ago. It would certainly be rash to go beyond 50,000. 568. You have granted that the world may...

Daniel Yergin, in the prologue to his award winning book, uses the language of anthropology to describe what the human species became in the past century: Hydrocarbon Man. While the search continues for alternative fuels and millions are spent on research and development, modern man will continue for some time to come to be dependent on Persian Gulf oil: the strategic prize. This essay focuses on the terrorist threat to oil pipelines in the region. The question is, given the strategic importance of Middle East oil to the West and its economic and technological dependence on oil: Why have pipelines...

Discussing with Andrea Mitchell today the kerfuffle over Pres. Obama's Christianity, Chuck Todd hearkened back to PBO's infamous bitter-clinger line. Obama offered his pronouncement at a private, hoity-toity fundraiser in San Francisco—and Todd claimed Obama didn't mean to demean by it. According to Todd [quoting Paul Begala], Obama is his mother's son, and like the anthropologist she was, he was simply offering an anthropological analysis of the plight of those poor rural Pennsylvanians. View video here.

An older guy has sauntered into Lucy's life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species. Excavations in Ethiopia's Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago. A nearly complete skeleton of an A. afarensis child has been retrieved...

Many people will admit to having the odd rogue ancestor. But now scientists believe we may all be related to cannibals. The claim comes after the discovery of what is thought to be the oldest human species: a toothy tree swinger named Homo gautengensis. The new species emerged more than two million years ago and died out approximately 600,000 years ago, according to Dr Darren Curnoe, the anthropologist who identified him.

In 2008, archeologists working at the Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains discovered a tiny piece of a finger bone, believed to be a pinky, buried with ornaments in the cave. Scientists extracted the mitochondrial DNA (genetic material from the mother’s side) from the ancient bone and checked to see if its genetic code matched with the other two known forms of early hominids–Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans. What they found was a real surprise. The team, led by geneticist Svaante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute, discovered that the mtDNA from the finger bone matched neither–suggesting there...

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar says human beings can have no more than 150 friends – that’s the upper limit the brain can absorb. His conclusion comes from studying the social group size of monkeys and apes and how that size might relate to the brain. Initially Dunbar was examining why primates groom each other. If the reason involved sexual bonding, it should correspond to “the social brain hypothesis” that the reason primates have a large brain is because of their social complexity. In other words, you need a large brain to keep track of your relationships. Humans, he says, are...

The use of weapons may date back well before the rise of humanity, given evidence that even our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, can use spears to hunt other primates. To see how fighting evolved from hand-to-hand combat to world war, here are 10 major innovations that revolutionized combat.

Museums and textbooks often use artistic renderings to estimate what a fossilized animal or plant may have looked like when it was alive. These images by “paleoartists” put flesh and faces on skeletal structures, and they can influence public perception of early human history more than the actual science—particularly in regards to human evolution.

In May 2009, a remarkably well-preserved extinct primate, nicknamed “Ida,” was hailed as one of the most important fossil finds ever. It had features that some interpreted as a link between two primate body forms. At the time, ICR News suggested that its evolutionary significance was far overblown, predicting that the scientific consensus would offer retractions. Those retractions came three months later, confirming that the fossil―called Darwinius―was really just an extinct lemur variety...

A new concept making its way through the scientific community holds that just a few key changes in the right genes will result in a whole new life form as different from its progenitor as a bird is from a lizard![1] This idea is being applied to a number of key problems in the evolutionary model, one of which is the lack of transitional forms in both the fossil record and the living (extant) record. The new concept supposedly adds support to the "punctuated equilibrium" model proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Dr. Gould derived his ideas...

SANTA ANA, Calif., Nov. 3 /Christian Newswire/ -- While many people continue to believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, a group of scientists will present overwhelming scientific evidence against Darwin's speculations. "If Charles Darwin knew 150 years ago what we know today, he likely would not have published Origin of the Species," said John Baumgardner, Ph.D., whose organization, Logos Research Associates, will lead the two-day "Darwin Was Wrong" conference Nov. 13-14 at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. "We can perhaps excuse Darwin, given his ignorance about the true complexity of living organisms and about genetics," said Dr. Baumgardner, a geophysicist...

Ardipithecus ramidus is an extinct primate whose fossilized remains were first found along the Awash River in Ethiopia about fifteen years ago. Many fragments were collected, including shattered bones from a four-foot-tall female nicknamed "Ardi." She was chosen to represent her kind, apparently because of the comparative completeness of her remains. Now Ardi's discoverers believe they have collected enough data to reconstruct her history--but what does their data actually reveal? ...

Alongside all the public interest in sporting prowess, recent research has added significantly to our knowledge of how the human body actually works. Many characteristics we take for granted now appear to be critical success factors. Take, for example, our toes. We do not need long toes, like monkeys and apes, because our toes are not used for grasping branches. But are they vestigial - withered remnants of once-grand appendages? The answer is: most definitely not! Whilst it is possible to walk comfortably with longer toes, running is different. Increase toe length by just 20% and there is a doubling...

Modern Men Are Wimps Oct 23, 2009 — Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?  Our ancestors were much stronger, says the author of a new book on anthropology.  PhysOrg reported on a book by Peter McAllister that says today’s males don’t measure up physically to their counterparts even a century ago, let alone those in the Roman empire and earlier. According to McAllister humans have lost 40 percent of the shafts of the long bones because they are no longer subjected to the kind of muscular loads that were normal before the industrial revolution,” the article said.  “Even our...

The field of biology has provided much support for a recent creation, and physical evidence of very young-looking biological materials from supposedly ancient fossils continues to accrue from around the world, and from various depths under the earth. In August of this year, paleontologists in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, made a discovery that astounded the evolutionary community...

A few months ago, “Ida” was sitting on top of the world. She’d been lauded as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth.” Falling, indeed. On October 21, Nature published an article announcing that “[a] 37-million-year-old fossil primate from Egypt, described today in Nature, moves a controversial German fossil known as Ida out of the human lineage.” Wired also published a story, noting that, “[f]ar from spawning the ancestors of humans, the 47 million-year-old Darwinius seems merely to have gone extinct, leaving no descendants,” further..."...

Oct 17, 2009 — Macaques (small monkeys) shake branches and sometimes thump on logs. Ode to Joy could not be far behind. Maybe concert music began as a threatening display or show of strength (think gorilla chest-beating). This is not a joke (at least, intentionally). Charles Q. Choi wrote for Live Science in all seriousness, “When monkeys drum...

As a scientist claims modern athletes are weaklings, evidence has been forward that our male ancestors were not only faster, stronger and fitter, even their womenfolk would have wiped the floor with today's emasculated men. That's the central claim of Manthropology, a new book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister. In the book, subtitled The Science Of The Inadequate Modern Male, McAllister presents evidence that pre-historic Australian Aborigines could easily have outsprinted even Usain Bolt, today's fastest man on Earth. The basis of his findings? A set of 20,000-year-old preserved human footprints discovered in the Outback. They belonged to a party...

LONDON -- Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100- and 200-meter record-holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions. Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood. Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle. These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male". "If you're reading...

Reconstructions of animals based on fossilized remains are interesting and can be of value. However, they are notoriously subjective. Recent research suggested, for example, that many longstanding dinosaur reconstructions were almost double the size of the actual dinosaurs.[1] And similar distortions are evident in presentations of the fossil world’s latest superstar. Artist sketches and other renderings of “Ardi,” the newly proposed replacement for Lucy as man’s distant evolutionary ancestor, convey more than the raw data. Of the many Ardipithecus ramidus fossil bones and fragments that were collected from 35 individuals along the Awash River in Ethiopia, a female was chosen...

Discovery of 4.4 Million-Year-Old Fossil Does Not Shake Creationists' Faith By RUSSELL GOLDMAN Oct. 7, 2009 Sometimes an ape is a 4.4 million-year-old fossil that sheds light on the evolutionary origins of human beings, and sometimes… an ape is just an ape. In the case of "Ardi," the ape-like fossil recently discovered in Ethiopia and already being celebrated as the oldest found relative of modern human beings, the final determination depends on who is doing the talking. In one camp are evolutionary scientists who last week published and hailed the discovery of an upright walking ape named Ardipithecus ramidus, or...

News to Note, October 10, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint...

Oct 2, 2009 — A new fossil human ancestor has taken center stage. Those who love Lucy, the australopithecine made famous by Donald Johanson (and numerous TV specials), are in for a surprise. Lucy is a has been. Her replacement is not Desi Arnaz, but is designated Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus – the new leading lady in the family tree. Actually, she has been around for years since her discovery in Ethiopia in 1992. It has taken Tim White and crew 15 years to piece together the bones that were in extremely bad condition. But now, Ardi has made...

The papers and news sites are full of claims about what some still think is a “new” candidate for an evolutionary ancestor of humans. Called Ardipithecus ramidus (often just “Ardi”), most of the articles actually explain that it’s really a detailed reanalysis of a fossil category that’s been around for years, but still the phones run hot with concerned creationists or gloating skeptics. Perhaps this is not surprising, given the journalistic temptation to run with headlines such as “Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found”—even though the article itself states that the bones were first discovered in 1994!1 In...

1. Meet “Ardi”Evolutionists aren’t yet sure if they should call it a human ancestor, but one thing they do know is that “Ardi” does away with the idea of a “missing link.”Although first discovered in the early 1990s, the bones of Ardipithecus ramidus are only now being nominated for evolutionists’ fossil hall of fame—via a slew of papers in a special issue of the journal Science. In it, Ardi’s researchers describe the bones and make the case that Ardi is even more important in the history of human evolution than Lucy. Despite claims of its evolutionary significance, one of the...

Bones of “Ardi,” New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens” Another new alleged missing link has been found, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago. Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly...

Did apes descend from us? Skeleton of Ardi, 1.2-metre, 50-kilogram female may hold the clue Joseph Hall Science writer It may well be the closest we will ever come to the missing link between chimps and humans and the most important anthropological find ever. In a series of studies released today by the journal Science, researchers have revealed a creature that took the first upright steps toward human beings and fundamentally changes the way we look at our earliest evolutionary ancestors. The research brings into question the belief that our most distant ancestors descended from apes. What's closer to the...

The world's oldest and most complete skeleton of a potential human ancestor -- named "Ardi," short for Ardipithecus ramidus -- has been unveiled by an international team of 47 researchers. Their unprecedented, 17-year investigation of Ardi is detailed in a special issue of the journal Science.

In an earlier post, we wrote a bit about the differences between modern politics and the approach taken by our pre-agricultural ancestors. When thinking about these issues (modern vs. pre-ag), it's important to understand that while our experience of the modern is (obviously) more immediate, the experience of those who lived in that long dawn before agriculture was far more lasting, and thus is more likely to find reflection in our deepest patterns of thought and feeling. If we agree that our species, modern Homo sapiens came into being around 200,000 years ago, and the earliest evidence of agriculture is...

New reseach challenges previous theories of continent population New questions of human origin could shed light on what makes groups of people more or less prone to certain diseases, an OU researcher has found. Cecil Lewis, assistant professor of anthropology and director of the OU Molecular Anthropology laboratory, studied genetic diversity among American populations. His research is not only groundbreaking for anthropology but it could also affect future health research. “I made a number of surprising discoveries, some of which actually applied to the Americas as a whole,” Lewis said. Lewis’ research, which was recently published in the American Journal...

Living Architecture: Growing your house, one chair at a time Plants are amazing: they provide food, air, medicine, and material with which we can create buildings, furniture, and art. But through an ancient yet obscure craft, still-living plants can themselves be turned into bridges, tables, ladders, chairs, works of art, and even buildings. Known variously as botanical architecture, tree sculpture, tree-shaping, tree-grafting, pooktre, arborsculpture, and arbortecture, the craft is, at its essence, construction with living plants. The concept seems to date back to prehistoric times. Perhaps the oldest examples are the living bridges of Cherrapunjee, India. 1. Root Bridges of...

The response to my article “Reba McEntire says “Don’t Judge Homosexuals” was encouraging. Not all agreed. That’s OK. American Vision is about exposing errors in reasoning in addition to putting forth a coherent biblical worldview. One poster wrote the following: I’m so sick of the anti-homosexual rants among professed religious people. There is overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is not a choice. If it isn’t a choice, it cannot properly be thought of as sin. Many studies have shown the homosexual brain is physically different from heterosexual brains. Additionally, studies have shown that the occurrence of homosexuality is statistically unchanged among...

Want to know what it really means for a society to recognize “gay marriage”? Or for a society to permit polygamy? Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears? Care to know what happens to a human community that tolerates sexual experimentation among pre-adolescents and teenagers? Are fathers and mothers really interchangeable? ... Among the Etoro, a tribe of about 400 living by hunting and small-scale gardening in the Stickland-Bosavi district of Papua New Guinea, from around age 12, every boy is “inseminated” orally more or less daily by a young man who is assigned to him as a partner....

DNA evidence linking Indian tribes to Australian Aboriginal people supports the theory humans arrived in Australia from Africa via a southern coastal route through India, say researchers.The research, lead by Dr Raghavendra Rao from the Anthropological Survey of India, is published in the current edition of BMC Evolutionary Biology.One theory is that modern humans arrived in Australia via an inland route through central Asia but Rao says most scientists believe modern humans arrived via the coast of South Asia.But he says there has never been any evidence to confirm a stop-off in India until now.Rao and colleagues sequenced the mitochondrial...

The glittering "grills" of some hip-hop stars aren't exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says. Ancient peoples of southern North America went to "dentists"—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico). Scientists don't know the origin of most of the teeth in the collections, which belonged to people living...

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) - A dissertation written by President Barack Obama's late mother is being published. Duke University Press said Monday that an edited version of Ann Dunham's anthropological study about rural craftsmen in Indonesia is scheduled to reach stores this fall. Dunham completed the study three years before she died in 1995. Duke marketing manager Emily Young said the foreword was written by the president's half-sister and Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng (so-TOR'-oh ING). The book is based on Ann Dunham's 14 years of research among village workers on the Indonesian island of Java.

Read these stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. Wall Street Journal: “Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions” 2. ScienceNOW: “Our Ancestors Were No Swingers” 3. National Geographic News: “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” 4. LiveScience: “Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified” 5. BBC News: “Stem Cells ‘Can Treat Diabetes’” (adult stem cells, that is...) 6. New Scientist: “Praying to God Is Like Talking to a Friend” And much much more at...

In this week's installment: 1. PhysOrg: “In Search of the Original Flapper[—]New Theory on Evolution of Flight” Can evolutionists rescue their own model of bird origins? 2. ScienceNOW: “Oldest Stone Blades Uncovered” Stone blades from more than 500,000 years ago: the work of an alleged human ancestor or someone playing Survivorman? 3. BBC News: “Jews Celebrate ‘Dawn of Creation’” People around the world celebrated a recent, literal creation this week. 4. The Local: “Creationists Taking on Evolution in Germany” In February we noted a Der Spiegel article on European creationists (which followed a Guardian article that covered British creationists). Now...

Cameras have revealed how "armed" chimpanzees raid beehives to gorge on sweet honey. Scientists in the Republic of Congo found that the wild primates crafted large clubs from branches to pound the nests until they broke open. The team said some chimps would also use a "toolkit" of different wooden implements in a bid to access the honey and satisfy their sweet tooth. The study is published in the International Journal of Primatology. Crickette Sanz, from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "The nutritional returns don't seem to be that great.