Human evolution

Yeah. They were short. So? From The Scientist: New research suggests that Homo floresiensis—ancient hominins often called “hobbits”—lived closer in time to modern humans than previously thought. Researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia have found evidence that modern humans were using fire on the Indonesian island of Flores as far back as 41,000 years ago, whereas the hobbits lived until roughly 50,000 years ago, the team reported today (June 30) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.More. Enough. Can we call off the Darwinian search for a lesser type (species) of human? Isn’t this getting, um, weird? See also: The Little Lady of Flores spoke from the grave. But said what, exactly? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Emily Singer at Quanta: According to the new findings, published in Genetics this month, Neanderthal genomes were rife with harmful DNA that significantly reduced the species’ fitness. The researchers conclude that Neanderthals were roughly 40 percent less fit than modern humans, meaning they were less likely to produce offspring. More. Okay, so it turns out we didn’t murder them, like everyone said we had. That’s the trouble when you’re supposed to be extinct. People can insist that Neanderthals are the Bad Seed and they can’t launch a grievance. Fortunately, even if it’s nonsense, no one gets hurt. Far cry from eugenics. See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there? and Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up Read More ›

Comments on a new study on the phylogeny of Homo naledi published today in the August issue of Journal of Human Evolution. For this analysis, Dembo et al. used Bayesian methods to infer the phylogeny. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of Bayesian methods, mostly because of the need for a model for which the probability is known. That’s technically not knowable, but Bayesian methods get around this by drawing model probabilities from a set of “random” models. So it ends up sort of like a bootstrap in traditional parsimony studies. What Bayesian methods get you is the ability to test many more models and model parameters than you could with other phylogenetic methods, and that’s really a big deal. In Read More ›

Here: Well, I must say I didn’t expect to be honored by a 7500 word broadside by philosopher Dr. Vincent Torley, assisted by Dr. Josh Swamidass, Assistant Professor at Washington University. I guess they must have a lot of spare time. The reason for the post at Uncommon Descent? Both hold common descent to be absolutely, incontrovertibly, obviously true, and they apparently wish I would fall into line and stop embarrassing them by doubting common descent. They wish I would give up my “peculiar kind of intellectual obstinacy.” The argument is in the end all about common descent. (There are a few accusations of poor reasoning, obscuring the issue, and even a little bad faith along the way.) Look, intelligent Read More ›

Further to inbred Neanderthals damaging us all, we learn from ScienceDaily that Flores man did not have Down syndrome: Analysis of a wealth of new data contradicts an earlier claim that LB1, an ~80,000 year old fossil skeleton from the Indonesian island of Flores, had Down syndrome, and further confirms its status as a fossil human species, Homo floresiensis. For the current study, the team compared physical traits preserved in the skeleton of LB1 to those found in Down syndrome. While people with Down syndrome are not identical to one another, it was nevertheless clear that LB1 was very distinct from all humans, including those with Down syndrome. The study found that LB1’s brain was much smaller than that seen Read More ›

Yes, they published this with a straight face. From ScienceDaily: The Neanderthal genome included harmful mutations that made the hominids around 40 percent less reproductively fit than modern humans, according to new estimates. Non-African humans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with Neanderthals, though much of it has been lost over time. The results suggest that these harmful gene variants continue to reduce the fitness of some populations today. The study also has implications for management of endangered species. Some time or other, these people should meet up with the Population Bomb crowd. Will they mutually self-destruct? Incidentally: Harris and Nielsen’s simulations also suggest that humans and Neanderthals mixed much more freely than originally thought. Today, Neanderthal Read More ›

From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. Fire-Maker is a 22-minute documentary featuring biologist Michael Denton as he investigates the amazing story of how humans and our planet were exquisitely designed to harness the miraculous powers of fire and transform our planet. See also: Sometimes Denton sounds like a Darwin who got way more right Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: If ‘Lucy’ wasn’t alone, who else was in her neighborhood? Key fossil discoveries over the last few decades in Africa indicate that multiple early human ancestor species lived at the same time more than 3 million years ago. A new review of fossil evidence from the last few decades examines four identified hominin species that co-existed between 3.8 and 3.3 million years ago during the middle Pliocene. More. Paper. – Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Stephanie M. Melillo, and Denise F. Su. The Pliocene hominin diversity conundrum: Do more fossils mean less clarity? PNAS, June 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521266113 … aleoanthropologists face the challenges and debates that arise from small sample sizes, poorly preserved prehistoric specimens and lack of evidence for Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Deep inside Bruniquel Cave, in the Tarn et Garonne region of southwestern France, a set of human-made structures 336 meters from the entrance was recently dated as being approximately 176,500 years old. This discovery indicates that humans began occupying caves much earlier than previously thought: until now the oldest formally proven cave use dated back only 38,000 years (Chauvet). It also ranks the Bruniquel structures among the very first in human history. In addition, traces of fire show that the early Neanderthals, well before Homo sapiens, knew how to use fire to circulate in enclosed spaces far from daylight. … But most importantly, the cave contains original structures made up of about 400 stalagmites or sections of stalagmites, Read More ›

There’s a certain haplessness to ScienceDaily. For example: Human intelligence might have evolved in response to the demands of caring for infants, new research suggests. Experts in in brain and cognitive sciences have developed a novel evolutionary model in which the development of high levels of intelligence may be driven by the demands of raising offspring. … Piantadosi and Kidd tested a novel prediction of the model that the immaturity of newborns should be strongly related to general intelligence. “What we found is that weaning time–which acts as a measure of the prematurity of the infants–was a much better predictor of primate’s intelligence than any of other measures we looked at, including brain size, which is commonly correlated with intelligence,” Read More ›

As at Biologos. He writes: Venema’s argument is that harmful mutations shared amongst different species, such as the human and chimpanzee, are powerful and compelling evidence for evolution. These harmful mutations disable a useful gene and, importantly, the mutations are identical. Are not such harmful, shared, mutations analogous to identical typos in the term papers handed in by different students, or in historical manuscripts? Such typos are tell-tale indicators of a common source, for it is unlikely that the same typo would have occurred independently, by chance, in the same place, in different documents. Instead, the documents share a common source. Now imagine not one, but several such typos, all identical, in the two manuscripts. Surely the evidence is now Read More ›

Response to Dennis Venema, Part II. From Cornelius Hunter: The Naked Ape: BioLogos on Human Chromosome Two There is one piece of contradictory evidence I did not discuss in my previous article. I omitted it because Venema gives it special emphasis and so it merits its own article. This evidence is that while we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46, the chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla each have 24 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 48. In my previous article I pointed out several differences in the primate genomes that contradict evolutionary theory. This difference in chromosome count is yet another fundamental problem for evolution. According to evolution, humans have 23 rather than 24 pairs Read More ›

Here: It does not seem that the evidence supports evolutionary theory as Venema concludes. In fact, there seem to be several significant problems with this claim, as I will explain. First, as we saw in my previous article, the genetic data from the different species do not fall into the expected evolutionary pattern. Here Venema focuses on the high genetic similarity between the primates, claiming it confirms evolution. But if this is what is required to confirm evolutionary relationships, then the substantial genetic differences that are so often found between otherwise similar species must falsify evolutionary relationships in those cases. But evolutionists have never entertained any such doubts. Those evolutionary relationships are intact, according to evolutionists, and this suggests that Read More ›

From National Geographic: The strange rings are crafted from stalagmites and are roughly 176,000 years old, scientists report today in Nature. And if the rings were built by a bipedal species, as archaeologists suspect, then they could only be the work of Neanderthals, ancient human relatives that are proving to be much more “human” than anticipated. “This discovery provides clear evidence that Neanderthals had fully human capabilities in the planning and the construction of ‘stone’ structures, and that some of them penetrated deep into caves, where artificial lighting would have been essential,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.More. And, from Nature, no one knows why they did it: “The big question is why they made Read More ›

In response to Vincent Torley’s Leading thinker on human evolution admits: we’re more than just an ape, Anaxagoraswrites at 2: I feel reassured that at least some scientists understand that humans are unique. Most laymen allready knew that. Yes, and that’s the critical mass of the stinking corruption that infests science media on this subject today: Everyone knows it’s true, yet science media continue to shovel garbage at us, such as that chimpanzees are entering the Stone Age or can handle high-level abstractions. No one is supposed to ask: If so, why are they still swinging in the trees? If the purveyors of this stuff are sane, they must realize that it cannot be true. But they must also know Read More ›