Human evolution

From a study reported by political science prof Benjamin Knoll at HuffPost: – 37% reject God-guided evolution and believe in a literal Adam and Eve who were not the process of biological evolution. These Mormons have a more literalist/fundamentalist view. – 37% accept God-guided evolution as the origin of life on Earth but also believe in a literal Adam and Eve created by God and not the result of evolution. Perhaps many in this group believe Adam and Eve to be a special exception to the evolutionary process while accepting evolution as the most persuasive explanation for all other life. — 13% accept God-guided evolution and reject the idea that Adam and Eve were separately created by God outside of Read More ›

From Stephanie Hertzenberg at Beliefnet:  Are Islam and Evolution Compatible? The question is controversial and hotly debated. Helpful information but some well-meaning misdirection: Some Muslims hold that evolution is partially compatible with Islam. At “Have Muslims Misunderstood Evolution,” a London event organized by the Deen Institute in 2013, Shaykh Yasir Qadhi argued that Islam is compatible with all of Darwin’s theory of evolution except in the case of humans. He claimed that, from an Islamic theological perspective, a Muslim can say that Allah inserted a created Adam into the natural order. This would be, he explained, as if Adam were the last domino placed in a line by Allah. Non-believers would see Adam’s domino as a casual connection or continuation from all Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Here we are in 2018, and we still don’t know who, when, or why ancient people left their marks in the Arabian desert in the form of large stone structures, some of them hundreds of meters long. But as we observed back in November, “All we know is that they were designed.” It’s a good example of intelligent design in action — the design science of archaeology. It’s one of many active areas of design-based research that clearly are propelling science forward. … What’s interesting is that there are very stunning natural structures in the same area: perfectly round volcanic craters that stand out vividly from their surroundings. So what’s the difference? We all know Read More ›

Their method is data-driven rather than staff picks: Our methods are the same as always: We performed a Google search for “top science stories” lists, selecting only those from go-to RCS sources. Points were awarded to each story based on its ranking. For example, on a typical “top ten” list the #1 story earned ten points, #2 earned nine, #3 earned eight, and so on. Lists that had fewer than ten rankings were normalized to a 10-point scale. For the lists that did not rank the stories, each story earned 5.5 points, which is the average score if you add together all the digits from 1 to 10 and divide by ten. From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: 4. Modern Humans Read More ›

From Michael Lucy at Cosmos: Antimatter puzzle deepens: Extremely precise measurements of the magnetic properties of the antiproton failed to reveal any difference between it and the proton, leaving scientists baffled about why the universe contains so much matter and so little antimatter. More. Here’s the story: Universe’s underlying symmetry still baffling: Magnetic differences between matter and antimatter do not explain why the universe actually exists, writes Cathal O’Connell. The stories are not rank ordered. Lucy also lists: Evidence from the oldest-known site of human occupation in Australia is sure to stir debate over human origins. (Cheryl Jones) Ancestral updates: In a year packed with new insights into the deep history of humanity, two stood out: remains found in Morocco Read More ›

From Sapiens: PARALLEL SOCIAL COGNITION IN HUMANS AND DOGS This research raises new questions about what brought dogs and humans together in prehistory and how they might influence each other’s development. More than 550 domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, were put through a series of tests based on studies of humans and nonhuman apes. Comparison of the data from all three species revealed patterns of individual differences in cooperative communication between human infants and dogs that were similar—and were not observed in chimpanzees. The researchers conclude that social cognition is better developed in dogs and humans. This raises as many questions as it answers because it is unknown whether the mental processes of dogs and humans work in the same way. Read More ›

From APNews: [The researchers] based their conclusion on a computer simulation that represented small bands of Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe and Asia. These local populations were randomly chosen to go extinct, and then be replaced by another randomly chosen population, with no regard for whether it represented the same species. Neither species was assumed to have any inherent advantage, but there was one crucial difference: Unlike the Neanderthals, the modern humans were supplemented by reinforcements coming in from Africa. It wasn’t a huge wave, but rather “a tiny, tiny trickle of small bands,” Kolodny said. Still, that was enough to tip the balance against the Neanderthals. They generally went extinct when the simulation was run more than a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Most people are now familiar with the traditional “Out of Africa” model: modern humans evolved in Africa and then dispersed across Asia and reached Australia in a single wave about 60,000 years ago. However, technological advances in DNA analysis and other fossil identification techniques, as well as an emphasis on multidisciplinary research, are revising this story. Recent discoveries show that humans left Africa multiple times prior to 60,000 years ago, and that they interbred with other hominins in many locations across Eurasia. Paper. (paywall) – Christopher J. Bae, Katerina Douka, Michael D. Petraglia. On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives. Science, 2017; 358 (6368): eaai9067 DOI: 10.1126/science.aai9067 More. In short, Cool beliefs did not turn out to Read More ›

Pleistocene humans walked as well as modern ones do. From ScienceDaily: Traditionally, it was thought that the leaner skeletons of modern humans reflected biomechanical advantages which made locomotion a more efficient activity. The slimmer pelvis of our species entails greater difficulty for childbirth, but it reduces the force the abductor muscles of the hip have to exert to maintain the stability of the pelvis while walking. … Since two million years ago, with the appearance of the species Homo ergaster, the body mass and the brain size of the hominins have risen considerably. These changes have entailed an important readjustment at the metabolic level, with greater demand for energy to maintain these larger organs. “However, our results show that the Read More ›

It’s a tougher question than at first appears. Just because a fossil human is found with a bashed-in skull doesn’t strictly prove violence or lethality of weapons. So, following in the footsteps of the once-proud maxim of journalism, “If your mother says she loves you check it out,” some researchers wanted to know if Stone Age clubs (in this case, 5500 BC) can really kill. From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Archaeologists have found ample evidence of violence in Western and Central Europe during the Neolithic period, through burials of people who had skull fractures—some healed, some were fatal —from an intentional blow to the head. But it was often unclear where these injuries came from. … So, Dyer and her Read More ›

From Zach Zorich at Archaeology: The Jebel Irhoud hominins apparently lived 350,000 years after Neanderthals and Homo sapiens last shared a common ancestor, long enough for the two lineages to develop some obvious differences. The people of Jebel Irhoud had flat and short faces like modern humans, but their brains were more elongated and their teeth much larger. Their brow ridges were also more prominent than those of humans living today, but not as heavy as those of Neanderthals. More. From Ann Gibbon at Science, we learn, “This stuff is a time and a half older than anything else put forward as H. sapiens,” says paleoanthropologist John Fleagle of the State University of New York in Stony Brook. The discoveries, Read More ›

Here, their top house picks: 1) A new Homo naledi fossil nicknamed Neo 2) Ancient human DNA discovered in dirt 3) Homo sapiens fossils from Morocco that are over 300,000 years old! 4) Humans arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago 5) A new species of ancient ape, Nyanzapithecus alesi More. Reasons for rankings, of course, provided. See also: What we know and don’t know about human evolution

From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Two studies in Science today (December 7)—one that focuses on prenatal development in humans, the other on infancy to old age—provide insights into the extent of DNA sequence errors that the average human brain cell accumulates over a lifetime. Together, they reveal that mutations become more common as fetuses develop, and over a lifetime a person may rack up more than 2,000 mutations per cell. … Within the now burgeoning field of somatic mutation analyses, the brain is a particular area of interest. That’s because unlike organs such as the skin and gut where cells are replaced daily, the brain’s neurons, once established in the fetus, for the most part stick around for life. Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: We may owe some of our unique intelligence to a generous supply of a signalling chemical called dopamine in brain regions that help us think and plan. Our brains produce far more dopamine in these regions than the brains of other primates like apes.More. Naturalist ideology requires something like extra dopamine production to be seen as a cause, not an effect.  Of course, what we are really talking about is human consciousness, whose origin no one understands. And whatta feast of just-so science! See also: Human/primate evolution: Eating fruit led to bigger brains? Climate change made us smart Retroviruses play a role in development of human brain? Tooth size not linked to brain size in early humans Read More ›

So do they think that we humans will evolve into separate species as a result of migration and founder effects? If not, what does “evolution” mean? From David Warmflash at the Genetic Literacy Project: The goblin shark, duck-billed platypus, lungfish, tadpole shrimp, cockroach, coelacanths and the horseshoe crab — these creatures are famous in the world of biology, because they look as though they stopped evolving long ago. To use a term introduced by Charles Darwin in 1859, they are “living fossils”. And to their ranks, some have added humans, based on the idea that technology and modern medicine has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated natural selection by allowing most infants to live to reproductive age and pass on their Read More ›