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Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did By Faye Flam The Philadelphia Inquirer Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find continues to shake our collective sense of human identity. Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should include them as members of our own species. No longer does science consider them our direct ancestors but some suspect Neanderthals and modern homo Sapiens interbred during the 20,000 some-odd years we co-existed in Europe. The archaeological record...

The first humans who left Africa to populate the world headed south along the coast of the Indian Ocean, Science magazine reports. Scientists had always thought the exodus from Africa around 70,000 years ago took place along a northern route into Europe and Asia. But according to a genetic study, early modern humans followed the beach, possibly lured by a seafood diet. They quickly reached Australia but took much longer to settle in Europe. Dr Martin Richards of the University of Leeds, who took part in the study, says the first humans may have moved south in search of better...

Israel has been getting plastered for the last month by what amount to low-tech weapons, mainly katyusha rockets and mortar bombs. Those things are WWII vintage weaponry and it's not as if countermeasures did not exist. Granted we don't quite have the laser weapons we'd like to have to shoot those weapons down, we DO have radar which can triangulate the location of anything which obeys ballistic laws, including both mortar bombs and katyusha rockets, and put munitions down on top of the shooters before the incoming projectile even lands. Here's the question: Why is Israel not using this sort...

The question of sex with Neanderthals speaks to our understanding of ourselves, our origins and our uniqueness. If this other type of human being wasn't like us, what was he like? As I started researching this issue, I found myself staring at a picture of a nude Neanderthal man - a forensic sculpture created by Duke University paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill that was published last year in the journal Science. The model, based on a skeleton found at La Ferrassie in France, is mesmerizing in its combination of familiarity and alienness. To be honest, he's really not half bad looking. I...