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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.

Cache of tools found in Boulder yard used to butcher ice-age camels, horses. The “chink” of the impact sounded odd, so the crew poked around, and just 18 inches beneath the soil surface they made an extraordinary find: 83 stone tools left in a cache 13,000 years ago by people who used the sharpened rocks to butcher ice-age camels. “Sometimes they’re interesting things, and sometimes they’re just cool rocks,” said Bamforth, who studies the culture and tools of Paleoindians, who lived in the Boulder area at the end of the last ice age. But a good anthropologist leaves no rock...

Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people — ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists. The home's owner, Patrick Mahaffy, thought they were only a century or two old before contacting researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "My jaw just dropped," said CU anthropologist Douglas Bamforth, who is leading a study of...

An imperfect body might be just what the doctor ordered for women and key to their economic success, an anthropologist now says. While pop culture seems to worship the hourglass figure for females, with a tiny waist, big boobs and curvy hips à la Marilyn Monroe, this may not be optimal, says Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah. That's because the hormones that make women physically stronger, more competitive and better able to deal with stress also tend to redistribute fat from the hips to the waist. So in societies and situations where women are under pressure to procure...

In the latest twist in the tug-of-war between Native Americans and anthropologists, officials at the University of California have decided not to repatriate a pair of well-preserved skeletons that are nearly 10,000 years old. Archaeology students unearthed the bones in 1976 near the clifftop home of the chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). It may be possible to extract some of the oldest human DNA in North America from the exquisitely preserved remains, say researchers. But in the past two years the bones have become a political football over US$7-million plans to demolish and rebuild the house....

Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas. Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton—along with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—could provide new clues to how the Americas were first populated. The remains have been excavated over the past four years near the town of Tulum, about 80 miles southwest of Cancún, by a team of scientists led by Arturo González,...

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed that in the 1930s, when she was busy remaking the idea of culture, the notion of cultural diversity was to be found only in the 'vocabulary of a small and technical group of professional anthropologists'. Today, everyone and everything seems to have its own culture. From anorexia to zydeco, the American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed, there is little that we don't talk about as the product of some group's culture. In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not...

WASHINGTON: Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers in a study said on Thursday. "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction," said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York. The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with "mitochondrial Eve," a female hominid...

PARIS (AFP) - After a nearly 30,000-year silence, Neanderthals are speaking once more, thanks to researchers who have modelled the hominids' larynx to replicate the possible sounds they would have made, New Scientist says. The work, led by Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton, is based on Neanderthal fossils found in France, the British journal said on its website on Wednesday. The item includes an audio snippet in which a computer synthesiser replicates how a Neanderthal would say an "e" and compares this with the same sound as made by modern humans. A study published...

The Tassili n’Ajjer of Southern Algiers is described as the “largest storehouse of rock paintings in the world”. But could it also be the origins of the ancient Egypt culture ? In January 2003, I made enquiries to visit the Hoggar Mountains and the Tassili n’Ajjer, one of the most enchanting mountain ranges on this planet. The two geographically close but nevertheless quite separate landscapes are located in the Sahara desert in southeast Algeria. I was told that if I could pack my bags immediately (literally), I could join the three weeks’ trip. Unfortunately, I could not, but planned to...

Field work can be hell. But thanks to the dogged researchers who attended 66 college parties in Southern California, now at last it can revealed: Playing drinking games at a party leads to increased levels of alcohol in the bloodstream. Fortunately, that wasn’t the only result of the investigation reported in the January issue of January issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. I don’t know why women would drink more at themed parties, but I do have a hypothesis: Could it be a coping mechanism for dealing with the sight of guys like John Belushi dressed in togas?

HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the...

Knowing Ourselves The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? – Jeremiah 17:9 IntroductionWhen Plato expressed the ultimate purpose and great imperative of philosophy with this command, “know yourself,” he had struck upon a valuable insight. If we would know our purpose in life, how we should relate to the world and to others around us, what our goals and dreams and desires should consist of, how we should spend our time, then we must know who we are. We must know how we were made and for what purpose, and we must know...

Stone man. This partial skull of a 500,000-year-old human was found in a slab of travertine from a quarry like this one in Turkey.Credit: John Kappelman/University of Texas, Austin Workers at a travertine factory near Denizli, Turkey, were startled recently when they sawed a block of the limestone for tiles and discovered part of a human skull. Now, it appears they unwittingly exposed fossilized remains of a long-sought species of human that lived 500,000 years ago, researchers say. Although only four skull fragments were found, the fossil also reveals the earliest case of tuberculosis. The Middle East has long been...

The first public showing of the face of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, last week, exposed more than cracked, leathery skin and his buckteeth. (Gene Tierney’s overbite was much more fetching.) Archaeologists also detected a new feature, the hint of a Tut smile, transfiguring a regal mummy from antiquity into a human being with emotions perhaps like those of people today. The first reaction of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s head of antiquities, was unscientific. The face, he said, “has magic; it has mystery; it has beauty.” The search for identifiable affinities, if only a smile, with people long ago may account for...

IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place? A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about...

Politically Correct Anthropology by: Don Irvine, September 25, 2007 Political correctness which has been invading academia with a vengeance has a new target- Anthropology. An ad-hoc group calling themselves the Network of Concerned Anthropologists is now circulating a petition on the internet called the Pledge of Non-Participation in Counterinsurgency whose central theme says that "Anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counterinsurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the 'war on terror.'"In other words it's an anti-war declaration for anthropologists. The organizers, two of whom are at George Mason University, feel that anthropologists...

Contact: Payson Sheets Payson.Sheets@colorado.edu 303-492-7302 University of Colorado at Boulder CU-Boulder team discovers first ancient manioc fields in Americas Prehistoric manioc plantation buried by volcanic ash about 600 A.D. may help explain how Maya supported dense populations CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets maps ancient household at site of Ceren in El Salvador. A University of Colorado at Boulder team excavating an ancient Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has discovered an ancient field of manioc, the first evidence for cultivation of the calorie-rich tuber in the New World. The manioc field was discovered...

Source: University of California, Davis Date: August 16, 2007 Handsome By Chance: Why Humans Look Different From Neanderthals Science Daily — Chance, not natural selection, best explains why the modern human skull looks so different from that of its Neanderthal relative, according to a new study led by Tim Weaver, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis. Model of the Neanderthal man. Exhibited in the Dinosaur Park Münchehagen, Germany. (Credit: iStockphoto/Klaus Nilkens) "For 150 years, scientists have tried to decipher why Neanderthal skulls are different from those of modern humans," Weaver said. "Most accounts have emphasized natural selection and the...

BRASILIA, July 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Brazilian university professor claimed that the practice of infanticide by indigenous tribes should be respected as a cultural practice, the Telegraph reports. Dr. Erwin Frank, an anthropology professor at the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil, is quoted in the Telegraph as having defended the violent practice, saying, "This is their way of life and we should not judge them on the basis of our values. The difference between the cultures should be respected." Certain tribes believe that some babies are "cursed" and therefore do not have souls. Such children include those with...

Ancient Human Behavior Uncovered Article Date: 24 Jun 2007 - 4:00 PDT A major question in evolutionary studies today is how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern" One index of 'behavioural modernity' is in the appearance of objects used purely as decoration or ornaments. Such items are widely regarded as having symbolic rather than practical value. By displaying them on the body as necklaces, pendants or bracelets or attached to clothing this also greatly increased their visual impact. The appearance of ornaments may be linked to a growing sense of...

Contact: Erik Trinkaus trinkaus@wustl.edu 314-935-5207 Washington University in St. Louis The emerging fate of the Neandertals For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them. As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those...