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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, rejected the notion that the CCP virus, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, originated in a Chinese lab. Fauci made the remarks to The National Geographic in an in-depth interview that ranged from virus origin theories to lighter topics prompted by questions like “Wow, how do you unwind?” Asked whether he believed the virus was made in—or accidentally released from—a Chinese lab, Fauci said there was overwhelming evidence it came from the wild. “If you look at the evolution of the virus...

The president of the European Commission backed calls for an investigation into the origin of the new coronavirus and said China should be involved in the process. Lawmakers in countries like Germany, Sweden and Australia have called for a probe into how the virus started, which has so far infected over 3.2 million people and killed over 230,000. Speaking to CNBC, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU’s executive arm, said she would like to see China work together with her organization, and others, to get to the bottom of exactly how it emerged. “I think this is...

An Oxford University study has concluded that our ancient ancestors who lived in East Africa between 2.4 million-1.4 million years ago survived mainly on a diet of tiger nuts. Tiger nuts are edible grass bulbs still eaten in parts of the world today. The study published in the journal, PLOS ONE, also suggests that these early hominins may have sought additional nourishment from fruits and invertebrates, like worms and grasshoppers. Study author Dr Gabriele Macho examined the diet of Paranthropus boisei, nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” because of his big flat molar teeth and powerful jaws, through studying modern-day baboons in Kenya....

"Capitalism in space: In order to maintain its goal of launching its orbital New Glenn rocket by 2020, Blue Origin has changed the engine it will use in the rocket’s second stage from a version of its main BE-4 engine to new version of their already developed BE-3 engine, used in their reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft...This quiet change, which the company made with no fanfare, carries with it some significant information as well as important ramifications."

How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. The answers aren't easy to determine. The beginning of the cosmos is cloaked and hidden from the view of our most powerful telescopes. Yet observations we make today can give clues to the universe's origin. New research suggests a novel way of probing the beginning of space and time to determine which of the competing theories is correct.

What is no-fault divorce? When you ask most people, they will say it’s a mutual-consent process, or that it preserves privacy, or that it eliminates blame for the failure of the marriage. Not many people will answer that it’s a lawsuit in which one party is suing the other party. And even fewer will know that it came from the Soviet Union. Like previous divorce actions, no-fault divorce is still a lawsuit, which means that one party is invoking the state’s police powers against the other party. The main difference now is that the person filing for divorce no longer...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Oxford Journals, Genome Biology and EvolutionBurial site and skeletal remains of the St. Helena marine forager, who was at least 50 years old when he died DNA from a 2,300-year-old skeleton suggests that the earliest known group of modern humans to branch off from the wider genetic population survived until astonishingly recently. The finding supports the case that southern, rather than eastern, Africa is humanity's ancestral home.Mitochondrial DNA, passed on only from the mother, demonstrates that all humanity is descended from a single ancestor around 200,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence points to the Omo Valley, where fossil evidence suggests that Homo sapiens roamed Africa 195,000...

... Pigmentation genes carried by the hunters and farmers showed that, while the dark hair, brown eyes and pale skin of the early farmer would look familiar to us, the hunter-gatherers would stand out if we saw them on a street today. "It really does look like the indigenous West European hunter gatherers had this striking combination of dark skin and blue eyes that doesn't exist any more," Prof Reich told BBC News.

Scientific evidence refuting the theory of modern humanity’s African genesis is common knowledge among those familiar with the most recent scientific papers on the human Genome, Mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes. Regrettably, within mainstream press and academia circles, there seems to be a conspicuous – and dare we say it – deliberate vacuum when it comes to reporting news of these recent studies and their obvious implications.

Scientists have suggested the exodus from Africa started between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. However, stone artifacts dating to at least 100,000 years ago that were recently uncovered in the Arabian Desert suggested that modern humans might have begun their march across the globe earlier than once suspected. Out of Africa models To help solve this mystery, Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues tested four competing out-of-Africa models. one involved a route northward, up the Nile River valley and then eastward across the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula into Asiathe other...

Abstract The description of a new skull (D4500) from the Dmanisi site (Republic of Georgia) has reopened the debate about the morphological variability within the genus Homo. The new skull fits with a mandible (D2600) often referred as ‘big’ or ‘enigmatic’ because of its differences with the other Dmanisi mandibles (D211 and D2735). In this report we present a comparative study of the variability of the Dmanisi mandibles under a different perspective, as we focus in morphological aspects related to growth and development. We have followed the notion of modularity and phenotypic integration in order to understand the architectural differences...

Ancient Humans Had Sex With A Mystery Species Stephanie Pappas Live Science Dec. 4, 2013, 3:33 PM A new, improved sequencing of ancient human relative genomes reveals that Homo sapiens didn't only have sex with Neanderthals and a little-understood line of humans called Denisovans. A fourth, mystery lineage of humans was in the mix, too. As reported by the news arm of the journal Nature, new genetic evidence suggests that several hominids — human relatives closer than humans' current living cousin, the chimpanzee — interbred more than 30,000 years ago. This group of kissing cousins included an unknown human ancestor...

New 'Human' Fossil Borders on Fraud by Brian Thomas, M.S. * An international team of paleoanthropologists reported discovering the earliest human fossils found outside Africa at a dig in the country of Georgia.1 The team told Science that one specimen, "skull 5," is so different from other humans that it significantly widens the range of variation within ancient mankind. The Guardian wrote that among the human remains in Dmanisi researchers found a "spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor," but there is actually more proof against this claim.2 The team found clearly human skeleton parts, along with five skulls...

Human-like Fossil Menagerie Stuns Scientists by Brian Thomas, M.S., & Frank Sherwin, M.A. * An international team of scientists made a stunning and controversial discovery from an archaeological site in Dmanisi, a small town in the country of Georgia, that is forcing some scientists to unlearn everything they knew about the story of human evolution. The results from the find appeared in an October issue of the journal Science.1 Among other human skeleton bones, the researchers found five skulls or partial skulls. Some of them looked human, though they were smaller than today's average skull size. But the biggest surprise...

An Incredible New Skull Is Forcing Us To Rethink The Evolution Of Early Humans Dina Spector Oct. 17, 2013, 2:01 PM Photo courtesy of Georgian National Museum A 1.8-million-year-old skull combines a small braincase with a long face and large teeth, which is unlike any other Homo fossils on record. Researchers have traditionally used differences among fossilized remains of ancient humans to define separate species among the earliest members of our Homo genus — Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Homo rudolfensis, for example. But an amazing new skull found in a republic of Georgia suggests that the specimens previously representing...

A stunningly well-preserved skull from 1.8 million years ago offers new evidence that early man was a single species with a vast array of different looks, researchers said Thursday. With a tiny brain about a third the size of a modern human's, protruding brows and jutting jaws like an ape, the skull was found in the remains of a medieval hilltop city in Scranton, Georgia, said the study in the journal Science.

The find, a fossil tooth (molar) uncovered through excavations at the site of Barranco León in the Orce region of southeastern Spain, was dated to about 1.4 million years ago using several combined dating techniques, including Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) in combination with paleomagnetic and biochronological data... Researchers identified the lithic assemblage as characteristic of Oldowan technology, the earliest known stone tool industry, first discovered at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa by Louis Leakey in the 1930s. The same industry was found at Dmanisi in the country of Georgia, where early human fossils dated to about 1.8 million years ago...

Archaeologists in Spain are busy excavating the Gran Dolonia portion of the Atapuerca archaeological site for clues to the first humans that arrived in Europe. Many archaeological treasures have come from this northern Spain location known as the caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca. In 2007 human remains were found that date back one and a half million years, considered the oldest Europeans remains ever found. Human remains have also been found from the "Homo antecessor" dating back 850,000-to-950,000-years ago. The youngest remains found here date back a mere 5,000-years ago from the homo sapien species. The site is in...

The study of the world’s oldest early primate skeleton has brought light to a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: that of the branch split that led to monkeys, apes and humans (anthropoids) on one side, and living tarsiers on the other. The fossil, that was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, represents a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus Achilles. The results of the research were published on 6 June 2013 in Nature. Oldest primate fossil rewrites evolutionary break in human lineage The fossil, which is 55 million years old and dates...