Human evolution

Dr. Ajit Varki is Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is a confirmed evolutionist, but at the same time, interestingly, an ardent believer in human exceptionalism. Last April, Professor Varki and Professor S. Joshua Swamidass gave a presentation at the university, organized by the Veritas Forum, called, Common Ground in Science: A Conversation Between a Christian and an Evolutionist. Professor Swamidass has written a blog article about Dr. Varki’s presentation, in a recent post titled, More than just apes. Professor Varki highlighted two unique human traits during his talk: First (at 6:10), humans are the only known species that has out-competed all other sibling species (e.g. Neanderthals and Denisovans) Read More ›

Last time, it was climate change. From Smithsonian Mag: A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system. … Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to remove toxic Read More ›

From Human Genesis: So that leaves intentional burial, not necessarily because burial makes perfect sense but because everything else makes much less sense. After all, it is really hard to imagine why Homo naledi would crawl so far underground to bury their dead. If they did access the cave, they must have been able to use fire well. They must have advanced beyond just making a fire to making functional torches or lamps. The fact that these bodies were deposited over time even suggests that there was a cultural transmission going on: Older Homo naledi must have taught the younger ones where to take dead bodies and how to get into the Dinaledi chamber. As mentioned above, the intentional burial Read More ›

The purpose of today’s post is to ask Dr. Hunter thirteen questions regarding his views on human origins. I hope he will be gracious enough to respond. Without further ado, here they are. 1. Dr. Hunter, in your original article over at Darwin’s God, you put forward eleven arguments against the hypothesis that humans and chimps had a common ancestor, before going on to critique Professor S. Joshua Swamidass’s evidence for human evolution as “just another worthless argument,” which was “not about science,” but about metaphysics, and for that reason, “unfalsifiable.” Why did you subsequently revise your post, by deleting a key premise from your very first argument, and then deleting eight paragraphs which contained your sixth and seventh arguments? Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Neanderthals in Europe showed signs of nutritional stress during periods of extreme cold, suggesting climate change may have contributed to their demise around 40,000 years ago. A researcher at the University of Colorado Denver has found that Neanderthals in Europe showed signs of nutritional stress during periods of extreme cold, suggesting climate change may have contributed to their demise around 40,000 years ago. Jamie Hodgkins, a zooarchaeologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at CU Denver, analyzed the remains of prey animals and found that Neanderthals worked especially hard to extract every calorie from the meat and bones during colder time periods. Her results were published in the Journal of Human Evolution last week. Cold climates Read More ›

From ABC: The discovery pushes back the technological advance to between 45,000 to 49,000 years ago, and coincides with the arrival of people in Australia. The fragment is 10,000 years older than the previous oldest known fragments found in northern Australia in 2010.More. See also: Does the evidence point to mankind’s fully natural origin ? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have found humans have a higher metabolism rate than closely related primates, which enabled humans to evolve larger brains. The study found that, adjusted for body size, on a daily basis humans consume 400 more calories than chimpanzees and bonobos (closely related to chimps), 635 more calories than gorillas and 820 more calories than orangutans. … The study confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that humans evolved a faster metabolism and larger energy budget to accommodate larger brains, which consume more calories. The higher metabolism also supports having more offspring and a longer lifespan. More. Paper. (paywall) – Herman Pontzer, Mary H. Brown, David A. Raichlen, Holly Dunsworth, Brian Hare, Kara Walker, Amy Luke, Lara R. Dugas, Ramon Durazo-Arvizu, Read More ›

I once had a rare and valuable baseball card I wanted to sell. I placed an ad and was shortly contacted by a collector. But to my dismay he wasn’t interested. He had probably looked at hundreds of baseball cards and it only required one look for him to know that my treasured card held no value for him. He did not attempt any negotiating tricks, just a polite “thank you” and off he went. I would have felt better about the encounter if he had tried to haggle down the price. For I would have had the comfort of knowing my card held at least some value. Instead, there was no price discovery—apparently the card was worthless.  Read more

From the BBC, a slide show of observed or hypothesized changes, “The Simple Steps That Made Us Human,” none of which is in the least bit simple. The slide show ends with: “Because big questions need answering.” Yes, but one could be a bit more particular about the depth of the answers. These answers seem addressed to people who have no serious questions. Someone should study the cultural reasons that there is a market for this sort of stuff and why—like unsupported nutrition claims—it gets branded as “science.” Note: If a religious group did this, I would put them on cult watch. Yet it’s Brit government-funded. – O’Leary for News See also: Human origins: The war of trivial explanations and Human Read More ›

Another ntry inth “why the Neanderthals died out” science talk show, from ScienceDaily: Neandertals adapted their diet to the resources that were most readily available and easily accessible, while modern humans seemed to have invested more effort in accessing food resources. Modern humans’ changes in diet were possibly more strongly marked by the use of new technologies in obtaining food. The researchers concluded that Upper Paleolithic modern humans’ differing dietary strategies may have given them an advantage over the Neandertals. “Actually, one would expect that the Neandertals would be better adapted to the occasionally very harsh climatic conditions in Ice Age Europe,” says Sireen El Zaatari. “They developed there, while anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa and only migrated to Read More ›

Yeh, the End of All Thing IS at hand. File yer tax return first, okay? The government needs the money. Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic channels the best of science: 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 startling statistic: Across the span of their lives, the average American is more than five Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Early humans may have been food for carnivores 500,000 years ago Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone found in a Moroccan cave indicate that it was consumed by large carnivores, likely hyenas, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Camille Daujeard from the Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, France, and colleagues. … While the appearance of the marks indicated that they were most likely made by hyenas shortly after death, it was not possible to conclude whether the bone had been eaten as a result of predation on the hominin or had been scavenged soon after death. Nonetheless, this is the first evidence that humans were a resource for carnivores Read More ›

Here: Dozens of genes found in humans today have been traced to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They made their way into the human species when some of our direct ancestors mated with ancient lineages that are now extinct. Interbreeding like this happened in Africa and in Eurasia, producing many human hybrids – you can read more about them here. Recent genetic decoding has revealed that it partly accounts for differences in our physical appearance – things like skin and hair colour – and affects our health. More. One must pay to read anything significant, and one senses that we’re not going to hear why, exactly, those other groups are somehow classified as not “the human species.” Because if they are, the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Current prevailing hypotheses of how human ancestors became fire-dependent depict fire as an accident — a byproduct of another event rather than a standalone occurrence. One hypothesis, for example, explains fire as a result of rock pounding that created a spark and spread to a nearby bush. “The problem we’re trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t taken advantage of by our ancestors,” said Kristen Hawkes, distinguished professor of anthropology at the U and the paper’s senior author. “Everything is modified by fire; just take a look around at the books and furniture in this room. We’re surrounded by fire’s byproducts,” added Read More ›

From Todd Wood: Beyond that, it was incredibly refreshing to hear the talks in this symposium. Hybridization has been a passing interest of mine for a long time (thanks to Frank Marsh), and long ago, I came to the conclusion that hybridization was not remotely rare (like I had been taught) and that the biological species concept didn’t really explain what we were seeing in the real world of hybridizing species. Sure enough, Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town said that the Biological Species Concept is basically dead. That was in the first talk of the day. In the second, Mike Arnold of the University of Georgia said that introgressive hybridization is the rule in eukaryotes, plants and Read More ›