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Fossil remains show the merging of Neandertals, modern humans By Neil Schoenherr The early modern human remains from the Pestera Muierii (Cave of the Old Woman), Romania, which were discovered in 1952, have been poorly dated and largely ignored. But recently, a team of researchers from the Anthropological and Archaeological Institutes in Bucharest, Romania, and from WUSTL has been able to directly date the fossils to 30,000 years ago. The fossils prove that a strict population replacement of the Neandertals did not happen. "What these fossils show is that these earliest modern humans had a mosaic of distinctly modern human...

Early humans followed the coast By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News Coastlines were rich in resources for early humans Learning how to live off the sea may have played a key role in the expansion of early humans around the globe. After leaving Africa, human groups probably followed coastal routes to the Americas and South-East Asia. Professor Jon Erlandson says the maritime capabilities of ancient humans have been greatly underestimated. He has found evidence that early peoples in California pursued a sophisticated seafaring lifestyle 10,000 years ago. Anthropologists have long regarded the exploitation of marine resources as a recent...

Study acquits sun of climate change, blames humans By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - The sun's energy output has barely varied over the past 1,000 years, raising chances that global warming has human rather than celestial causes, a study showed on Wednesday. Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. "Our results imply that over the past century climate change due to human influences must far outweigh the effects of...

Neanderthals and humans lived side by side 18:00 13 September 2006 NewScientist.com news service Rowan Hooper Neanderthals were thought to have died out as modern humans arrived in Europe. Now, artifacts found in a cave in Gibraltar reveal that the two groups coexisted for millenia before Neanderthals finally dwindled out of existence. Homo sapiens moved into Europe about 32,000 years ago. But the newly unearthered artefacts shows that a remnant population of Homo neanderthalensis clung on until at least 28,000 years ago, a significant overlap. Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum, and colleagues, recovered 240 stone tools and artefacts from...

Contact: Neil Schoenherr nschoenherr@wustl.edu 314-935-5235 Washington University in St. Louis Modern humans, not Neandertals, may be evolution's 'odd man out'Looking incorrectly at Neandertals Could it be that in the great evolutionary "family tree," it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out? New research published in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it's...

‘The Baboons Suffered From Stress’ 20:00 Aug 15, '06 / 21 Av 5766 (IsraelNN.com) Zoo keepers in Haifa said their charges were relieved to be allowed outside after spending more than four weeks indoors. The animals at the Haifa Zoo were brought in to protect them from missile fire, and to protect the public from the animals in case a rocket slammed into a cage and destroyed it, thus releasing the animal. Zoo manager Etty Ararat said Tuesday that carnivores, bears and monkeys were all moved indoors when the rockets began falling after war broke out between Israel and Hizbullah...

LONDON, July 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A UK fertility clinic has been given the green light by the country’s fertility authority to allow women undergoing in-vitro fertilization to trade costs of the treatment in exchange for any surplus eggs. The eggs are to be fertilized, and the resulting embryonic babies mined for cells to be used in research. The decision marks the first instance where human eggs are being legally sold as items of commerce. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority licensed the North East England Stem Cell Institute to exchange embryos in lieu of payment for IVF services. The...

Creating 'human-animals' for research Ethics report endorses mingling human cells with lesser beings Sunday, May 1, 2005 Posted: 0316 GMT (1116 HKT) RENO, Nevada (AP) -- On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs. The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two...

Contact: jwenger@mail.nih.gov When contemplating the coos and screams of a fellow member of its species, the rhesus monkey, or macaque, makes use of brain regions that correspond to the two principal language centers in the human brain, according to research conducted by scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), two of the National Institutes of Health. The finding, published July 23 in the advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, bolsters the hypothesis that a shared ancestor to humans and present-day non-human primates may have possessed the key...

Yann Arthus-Bertrand/CorbisWith human interference, two types of sticklebacks, top, appear to be morphing into one. By contrast, large- and small-beak finches, middle, remain distinct in a remote, unsettled area of Santa Cruz, bottom, in the Galápagos. Humans can threaten species with extinction in many ways, including overfishing, pollution and deforestation. Now a pair of studies points to a new danger to the world's biodiversity: humans may be blocking new species from evolving. New species evolve when old species split apart. Animals living on a peninsula might become cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels, for example. They...

Did humans and chimps once interbreed? 17 May 2006 From New ScientistBob Holmes IT GOES to the heart of who we are and where we came from. Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors. We can observe the traces of this complex history in the human...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bottlenose dolphins can call each other by name when they whistle, making them the only animals besides humans known to recognize such identity information, scientists reported on Monday. Scientists have long known that dolphins' whistling calls include repeated information thought to be their names, but a new study indicates dolphins recognize these names even when voice cues are removed from the sound. For example, a dolphin might be expected to recognize its name if called by its mother, but the new study found most dolphins recognized names -- their signature whistles -- even when emitted without inflection...

Neanderthals and Humans: Perhaps They Never Met By Robin Lloyd Special to LiveScience posted: 08 May 2006 The number of years that modern humans are thought to have overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe is shrinking fast, and some scientists now say that figure could drop to zero. Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia from 230,000 to 29,000 years ago, petering out soon after the arrival of modern humans from Africa. There is much debate on exactly how Neanderthals went extinct. Theories include climate change and inferior tools compared to those made by modern humans. Anthropologists also disagree on whether...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado – Exploration of space now and in the future depends on both human and robotic skills. However, according to a leading scientist, there is need to fortify and rebalance the funding between the two. The long-standing argument regarding the merits of machinery over flesh and blood exploration was aired here at the 22nd National Space Symposium (NSS), staged by The Space Foundation in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The group conducts the annual symposium, being held April 3-6 at The Broadmoor Hotel. Moderating a special session on autonomous and crewed space exploits, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, Rose Center for...

Anthropologists: Early Humans Probably Pretty Peaceful Friday, March 17, 2006 By Heather Whipps Depending on which journals you've picked up in recent months, early humans were either peace-loving softies or war-mongering buffoons. Which theory is to be believed? A little bit of both, says one archaeologist, who warns against making generalizations when it comes to our long and varied prehistory. The newest claim concerns Australopithecus afarensis, who lived approximately five million years ago and is one of the first hominids that can be linked directly to our lineage with some certainty. Scientists say the small and furry creature was hardly...

Did humans decimate Easter Island on arrival? 19:00 09 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Bob Holmes Early settlers to the remote Easter Island stripped the island’s natural resources to erect towering stone statues (Image: Terry L Hunt)The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island's forests almost immediately after their arrival. Easter Island has often been cited as the classic example of a human-induced ecological catastrophe. The island – one of the most remote places on Earth – was...

How can humans and chimpanzees, who share about 99 percent of the same genes be so different? Scientists in the United States and Australia say changes in the gene expression, not just genes, is a big part of what separates humans from their nearest relatives. Gene expression is the process by which genes are turned on or off. Not all of the estimated 30,000 genes in humans are activated at the same time in every cell. "We think gene expression is a major part of what separates chimps and humans," said Kevin White, an associate professor of genetics, ecology and...

First Chimpanzee Fossils Cause Problems for Evolution by Fazale (Fuz) R. Rana, Ph.D.Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome.1This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.2Unfortunately, the fanfare surrounding the chimpanzee genome overshadowed a more significant discovery. In the same issue, Nature published a report describing the first-ever chimpanzee fossils. This long-awaited scientific advance barely received notice because of the fascination with the chimpanzee genome....

How Humans Differ from Animals by Kenneth Richard Samples For many people the distinction between human beings and animals has become increasingly blurred. Exposure to the secular, naturalistic worldview--especially in academia--can leave one wondering whether the differences are simply a matter of degree. In this view, mankind leaped to the top of the evolutionary heap by chance events. However, philosophers have identified many ways in which human beings differ dramatically from animals. Unique human qualities and traits set man apart from the animals by kind, not just degree. From a Christian worldview perspective, and specifically in light of the imago...

Last Monday was D-Day—or, perhaps more accurately, B-Day—for NASA: the day the administration released its proposed fiscal year 2007 (FY07) budget for the space agency. As is always the case, the budget had its share of winners of losers. While NASA overall got a 3.2% increase to $16.8 billion (closer to 1% when supplemental funds for hurricane relief are included), that increase was not spread evenly over the agency’s programs. While Exploration Systems got an increase of nearly 30%, science programs got an increase of only about 1%, while aeronautics research was cut by over 20%. Those changes, administration and...