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The propensity for humans to kill one another may be hot-wired into our DNA but culture also has the power to change our behaviour, a new study has found. The research, led by José María Gómez at the Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas in Spain and published in the journal Nature, explored the human tendency to act violently towards members of our own species. This topic has been hotly debated among experts, with scores of studies questioning whether this vicious trait is an evolutionary development or the result of our cultural or social dynamics.

Too many of us have sat back for way too long and refused to become involved in anything that "smacks of politics This is an article which was originally published in 2005 in, amongst others, the late great Men’s News Daily. I felt it appropriate to republish it, today, as little seems to have changed with regards to the lunacy and growing dangers surrounding the continued application of “political correctness.” I offer it, again, as a reminder of one of the areas where we began with this ideology and—sadly—how little progress we seem to have made in ending its false...

Archaeologists in Texas have found a set of 16,700-year-old tools which are among the oldest discovered in the West. Until now, it was believed that the culture that represented the continent’s first inhabitants was the Clovis culture. However, the discovery of the ancient tools now challenges that theory, providing evidence that human occupation precedes the arrival of the Clovis people by thousands of years.

“A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.Nuclear war. Climate change. Pandemics that kill tens of millions. These are the most viable threats to globally organized civilization. They’re the stuff of nightmares and blockbusters—but unlike sea monsters or zombie viruses, they’re real, part of the calculus that political leaders consider everyday. And according to a new report from the U.K.-based Global Challenges Foundation, they’re much more likely than we might think. In its annual report on “global catastrophic risk,” the nonprofit debuted a...

A new study published in Climate Dynamics has found that humans are responsible for virtually all of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century. It's not a novel result - in fact, most global warming attribution studies have arrived at the same general result - but this study uses a new approach. Studies attempting to figure out the global warming contributions of various human and natural sources usually use a statistical approach known as 'linear regression'. This approach assumes we know the pattern of warming that each source (forcing) will cause, but we don't know how big the resulting...

They are one of our closest human relatives and dominated Europe and much of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, but Neanderthals may be far older than previously thought. A new study by geneticists has revealed a collection of fossilised bones discovered in a cave in northern Spain belonged to an early member of the Neanderthal family. It is the oldest partial genome from early human fossils ever to be sequenced and pushes back the date for the origins of the Neanderthal branch of our evolutionary tree by up to 300,000 years....

September 10, 2015 JOHANNESBURG—The discovery of a new species of human relative was announced today (Sept. 10) by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), the National Geographic Society and the South African Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation (DST/NRF). Besides shedding light on the origins and diversity of our genus, the new species, Homo naledi, appears to have intentionally deposited bodies of its dead in a remote cave chamber, a behaviour previously thought limited to humans. The finds are described in two papers published in the scientific journal eLife and reported in the cover story of the October...

One Texas teen's hobby is stirring up controversy among animal rights activists by posing with big game she killed in Africa. Here's how KHOU introduced to her: "So 19-year-old Kendall Jones is a cheerleader at Texas Tech and an avid hunter. She's posted a lot of pictures on her Facebook page of the big game she has killed in Africa - everything from lions to elephants." But it doesn't look like Jones has earned herself many fans on Facebook. The first two comments featured when we went to take a look read, "You are contributing to the extinction of beautiful...

Though a New York judge ruled Thursday that the law still considers chimpanzees property, not people, a prominent thinker in the pro-life movement warned that attempts to raise animals to human status will continue.  Wesley J. Smith, co-director of the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, said Friday, "We are gratified that a court refused to declare two chimpanzees 'persons.' That is right and proper. Chimps are animals, and the 'species barrier' separating the value of humans and animals, as some animal rights advocates put it, must never be breached."   "But make no mistake," Smith said. "Attempts to...

Researchers found four teeth in the Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha'ayin (not far from Tel Aviv), and they were astonished at test results that conclude the fossils to be some 400,000-years-old. The significance of this is that it's possible that the origin of prehistoric man is in Israel, and not in East Africa. And an additional surprise is that prehistoric man was mainly vegetarian and not carnivorous. The cave is 10 meters deep and its surface area is approximately 300 square meters. Researchers have been sifting through it for some 15 years to discover remains from prehistoric times. The ancient...

A new species of ancient human has been unearthed in the Afar region of Ethiopia, scientists report. Researchers discovered jaw bones and teeth, which date to between 3.3m and 3.5m years old. It means this new hominin was alive at the same time as several other early human species, suggesting our family tree is more complicated than was thought. The study is published in the journal Nature. The new species has been called Australopithecus deyiremeda, which means "close relative" in the language spoken by the Afar people. The ancient remains are thought to belong to four individuals, who would have...

Stephen Hawking today warned that computers will overtake humans in terms of intelligence at some point within the next century. Speaking at the Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London, the internationally renowned cosmologist and Cambridge University professor, said: “Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.” Hawking, who signed an open letter alongside Elon Musk earlier this year warning AI development should not go on uncontrolled, added: “Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom...

China faces rising labor costs and a shortage of workers. But a government project called “replacing humans with robots” is trying to change the face of the work force in Guangdong Province.

Have you heard about the brand new H3N2 dog flu sweeping through Chicago and sickening and killing dogs? It may actually be worse than you think: round-the-clock testing has unveiled that this heretofore unknown canine influenza was originally an avian flu that made a “mammalian adaptation” and has been infecting dogs and cats in Asia since 2007. Now it is here in the epicenter of the U.S. Will it sweep across the country and endanger dogs everywhere? Will this deadly flu become like the bird flu in Asia and the swine flu in England, both of which did transform into...

Megan Gannon March 14, 2015The eight eagle talons from Krapina arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site. (Luka Mjeda, Zagreb) Long before they shared the landscape with modern humans, Neanderthals in Europe developed a sharp sense of style, wearing eagle claws as jewelry, new evidence suggests. Researchers identified eight talons from white-tailed eagles — including four that had distinct notches and cut marks — from a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal cave in Croatia. They suspect the claws were once strung together as part of a necklace or bracelet. "It really is absolutely stunning," study author David Frayer,...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK)Scientists studying the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA have found one stretch of human DNA that can make the brains of mice grow significantly bigger. "It's likely to be one of many DNA regions that's critical for controlling how the human brain develops," says Debra Silver, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical School. It could also help explain why human brains are so much bigger than chimp brains, says Silver, who notes that "there are estimates of anywhere from two to four times as big." In addition to having bigger brains, Silver says, humans also "have more neurons, and...

Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience January 27, 2015An ancient human fossil discovered from the seafloor near Taiwan reveals that a primitive group of humans, potentially an unknown species, once lived in Asia, researchers say. These findings suggest that multiple lineages of extinct humans may have coexisted in Asia before the arrival of modern humans in the region about 40,000 years ago, the scientists added. Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, others once walked the globe. Extinct human lineages once found in Asia include Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans; Denisovans, whose genetic legacy may...

ALBANY, N.Y. -- A New York appeals court says a chimpanzee isn't entitled to the rights of a human and doesn't have to be freed by its owner. The three-judge Appellate Division panel was unanimous Thursday in denying "legal personhood" to Tommy, who lives alone in a cage in upstate Fulton County. A trial level court had previously denied the Nonhuman Rights Project's effort to have Tommy released. The group's lawyer, Steven Wise, told the appeals court in October that the chimp's living conditions are akin to a person in unlawful solitary confinement.

The genetic ancestry of the earliest Europeans survived the ferocious Ice Age that took hold after the continent was initially settled by modern people. That is the suggestion of a study of DNA from a male hunter who lived in western Russia 36,000 years ago. His genome is not exactly like those of people who lived in Europe just after the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago. But the study suggests the earliest Europeans did contribute their genes to later populations.

A genetic analysis of a 45,000-year-old thigh bone narrows down the time when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred.A 45,000-year-old leg bone is raising questions about just how close modern-day humans are to our thick-browed Stone Age ancestors. DNA from the femur of a Siberian man is helping to pinpoint when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred, researchers say. But what does this mean for the human connection to a species that disappeared nearly 30,000 years ago? The thigh bone, spotted six years ago on the banks of the Irtysh River in Siberia by a Russian artist who carves jewelry...