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Britain’s last Neanderthals were more sophisticated than we thought An archaeological excavation at a site near Pulborough, West Sussex, has thrown remarkable new light on the life of northern Europe’s last Neanderthals. It provides a snapshot of a thriving, developing population – rather than communities on the verge of extinction. “The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species, Homo sapiens,” says Dr Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were...

Lizards Show Proof Of Adaptive Change By STAN FREEMAN   Italian wall lizards placed on a tiny island in the Adriatic Sea evolved over three decades to adapt to their surroundings.     AMHERST, Mass. — In 1971, five pairs of Italian wall lizards were transplanted by biologists from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring but subtly different island of Pod Mrcaru, where none lived, as an experiment in evolution.How, if at all, would these creatures change?Largely insect eaters, the half-foot long reptiles would find themselves on an island where insects were...

Thursday, November 15, 2007 What Fred Said [Larry Kudlow] I just sat down with presidential candidate Fred Thompson, for an interview that will air tonight on Kudlow & Company. The former Tennessee senator was in good form. He attacked Warren Buffet’s tax-hike proposal on the rich as totally wrong, and Buffett himself as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic party. He agreed with Dick Armey that the GOP will lose if it departs from the first principles of limited government and lower tax rates. He called the farm bill “disgraceful” and would veto it if he were president....

Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report this week in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads. The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig -- extracted, amplified, and sequenced a...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - There are so many negative vibes around "Cavemen" that at least one TV critic is taking bets that it won't even get on the air. The ABC series based on Geico insurance commercials has gone beyond being just another stupid sitcom. Questions are being raised about whether the Cro-Magnon characters will reinforce racial stereotypes.

The producers of ABC's new sitcom Cavemen, based on a series of popular advertisements for the insurance company Geico, were ready to defend themselves against charges of rampant commercialism. But the charge that their show about put-upon Cro-Magnons in the modern world has racist undertones took them by surprise. ''I actually didn't know we would catch so much hell,'' Cavemen writer Joe Lawson ruefully told a room full of highly critical critics at a gathering of North American television writers here Wednesday. ``That's a pleasant surprise.'' Cavemen, which features shaggy Cro-Magnons trying to make their way through a hostile Homo...

Is finding a way for marketers to beat commercial-zapping DVRs and helping networks to cure the distressed state of TV comedy so simple that a caveman could do it? ABC's decision last week to greenlight a half-hour pilot program based on Geico's popular cavemen characters highlights the blurring line between advertising and entertainment, as well as the trouble the network has had in launching successful sitcoms. Although the project is at a nascent stage -- there's no script and no cast -- plans call for the comedy to be titled "Cavemen" and focus on a trio of prehistoric characters who...

Video: The O’Reilly Factor, so easy a caveman could host it! In viewer mail last night Bill received a message saying that hosting his show is so easy a caveman could do it. Bill's reaction was classic. Video here -http://hotair.com/archives/2007/03/09/video-the-oreilly-factor-so-easy-a-caveman-could-host-it/

Attention Fred Flintstone and the Geico cave guys: "Stone Age" is no longer acceptable, joining the list of other words and terms deemed offensive in polite society.

The ABC network said it had ordered a pilot for a comedy, tentatively titled "Cavemen," that features the characters used in a series of television ads by an insurance company. In the ads, cavemen appear insulted by a Geico insurance pitchman's claim that the company's Web site is so easy to use that "even a caveman can do it." The potential series, one of 14 pilots that will be produced by Touchstone Television this spring, features the cavemen as they "struggle with prejudice on a daily basis as they strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta."...

Freeze 'condemned Neanderthals' Small pockets of Neanderthals clung on in the south (Image: Gibraltar Museum) A sharp freeze could have dealt the killer blow that finished off our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals, according to a new study. The ancient humans are thought to have died out in most parts of Europe by about 35,000 years ago. And now new data from their last known refuge in southern Iberia indicates the final population was probably beaten by a cold spell some 24,000 years ago. The research is reported by experts from the Gibraltar Museum and Spain. They say a climate downturn...

Mr.Buffett. As an avowed supporter of the estate tax, Mr. Buffett could have let the government take its share of his estate after he dies. But just as Mr. Buffett has accumulated his vast wealth without paying much personal income tax, he has found a way to avoid the tax man in this maneuver as well, even writing in his letter to Bill and Melinda Gates that a condition of the gift is that the foundation “must continue to satisfy legal requirements qualifying my gifts as charitable and not subject to gift or other taxes.” On the estate tax, watch...

A leading U.S. consumer group Monday accused Geico Corp. of using consumers' education backgrounds and occupations as criteria in setting auto insurance rates, resulting in discrimination against minorities and lower-income people. The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) charged that the No. 4 U.S. auto insurer, has adopted rating methods and underwriting guidelines in 44 states that directly tie rates to education and occupation. Geico, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK), the insurance and investment company controlled by billionaire Warren Buffett, rejected the charges. It called them "an offensive attempt to link fundamentally fair and actuarially sound industry practices with...

Legislation was introduced in New Jersey Tuesday that would bar insurers from using drivers' education or profession in setting automobile-insurance-policy rates. Assembly Deputy Speaker Neil M. Cohen, D-Union, introduced the bill in response to published reports that Geico of Washington, D.C., used such information in setting prices. "I found out about this practice the same way everyone in New Jersey did -- by reading the newspaper," Cohen, chairman of the financial institutions and insurance committee, said. "And just like everyone else, I was outraged." Cohen's bill, A-2819, would prohibit insurers from assigning less-favorable rates to drivers based on their education...

For Seattle's Mike Webb, calling for President Bush's "execution" had no effect on his position. In fact, his show was subsequently expanded by an hour. Nor did his on-air hope that Ronald Reagan had "really suffered" before his death make any difference. While it's hard to imagine conservatives getting away with similar rhetoric, somehow one of America's most extreme, hate-filled radio programs managed to remain on a major radio station in Seattle for years, despite marginal ratings performance. To find something similar on the extreme right, one would have to look to shortwave radio broadcasts. Mike Webb was to the...

In papers filed Dec. 5 in King Co. Superior Court, and obtained by BlatherWatch, KIRO talk host Mike Webb (9p-1a) was charged with the crime of Fraudulent Insurance Claim in an alleged $5982 scam against a car insurance company. According to the Court's Superform, Michael Kenneth Webb, 50, KIRO Radio Talk Show Host and a Virgo, is also the subject in an investigation of forgery. The papers were gleaned from public court records. Charges were generated after an accident June 28 involving Webb in his black 2000 Lexus GS-3 and his alleged subsequent dealings with GEICO. A Certification For Determination...

According to USA Today, "Our greatest businessmen (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) think we are doomed to fail." Gates demonstrated his pessimism in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he told reporters, "I'm short the dollar. ... The ol' dollar, it's gonna go down." It's not surprising that the world's richest man came down from the Alps pessimistic. The misconceptions, myths and superstitions that pass for sound economics in Europe these days remind us that while socialism may be dead as a political force in the world, its zeitgeist of radical egalitarian leveling, gigantic government...

update Google scored a big legal win Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that its use of trademarks in keyword advertising is legal. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Google's motion to dismiss a trademark-infringement complaint brought by Geico. The insurance company had charged Google with violating its trademarks by using the word "Geico" to trigger rival ads in sponsored search results. Geico claimed the practice diluted its trademarks and caused consumer confusion. The judge said that "as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as...

NEW YORK - Geico doesn't mind you Googling Geico, but when you do, it wants Google to tell you about Geico, not Allstate or AIG. This is the crux of a lawsuit going to trial today in Virginia pitting the car insurer, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway (nyse: BRKa - news - people ), against the search engine that says it wants to organize the world's information, information on car insurance included. Geico sued Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people) in May claiming trademark infringement. The insurer says Google links ads from Geico's rivals to searches for "Geico" itself....

When state officials held a press conference Monday to announced that GEICO was returning to New Jersey's auto insurance market, McGreevey was noticeably absent. Which was odd, since it was an opportunity to crow about reforms he signed last year. Where was he? Administration sources say billionaire investor Warren Buffett , who owns GEICO, refused to attend if McGreevey was present. Micah Rasmussen, the governor's spokesman, said only that his boss was with his family at the time.