Here: It’s an intriguing area of research, not least because in addition to illuminating the Neandertal mind, such investigations can help reveal what factors allowed anatomically modern humans—our kind—to succeed where other members of the human family failed. Failed? Failed to do what, exactly? AKA: Why Darwinism is headed off a rock cut.
Christians around the world would say: If only. The current exponent of that view is Steve Pinker: The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing Read More ›
Remember the recent claim that wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals, presumably because the Neanderthals were too stupid to tame and keep such animals, as others had done. The lowly Neanderthals, it seems, have outsmarted a lot of academics in recent years. Just when it was safe to pontificate that Neanderthals couldn’t do art, there was the “bombshell” discovery of Neanderthal art. So here at the elite and highly sophisticated offices of UD News, we just said, wait till some Neanderthal excavation turns up an apparent ritual hunting dog burial. Okay, not so lucky yet, but it turns out that Neanderthals wore eagle talons as jewellery: A few raptor talons and feathers — also bearing hints of use as Read More ›
From Nature: Geneticists meet to work out why the rate of change in the genome is so hard to pin down. Wouldn’t that have some effect on the believability of time scales for human evolution?: A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates Read More ›
That’s the claim in this ScienceDaily piece: Recently released research on human evolution has revealed that species of early human ancestors had significant differences in facial features. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found that these early human species also differed throughout other parts of their skeletons and had distinct body forms. The research team found 1.9 million-year-old pelvis and femur fossils of an early human ancestor in Kenya, revealing greater diversity in the human family tree than scientists previously thought. “What these new fossils are telling us is that the early species of our genus, Homo, were more distinctive than we thought. They differed not only in their faces and jaws, but Read More ›
Further to Oldest human fossil found, 400k years “earlier than previously thought,” neuroscientist David A. DeWitt writes to say, That is a real problem since it means that humans overlapped with australopithcines including especially sediba which is a mere 2 million years old. Humans dated 2.8 million years ago? Sophisticated tools used by H. erectus? Neanderthal genes in modern humans? Range of variation in Dmanisi overlapping H. erectus to modern humans? A. sediba is a mixture of Homo and Australopithecine remains in South Africa? What we essentially have is a Cambrian explosion type phenomenon for human origins. Readers? See also: The ridiculous level of uncertainty in the field of human evolution DeWitt: “Look at how messed up this field is. Read More ›
2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than previous ones. From LiveScience: An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say. And Michael Cremo is still wrong, right? NatGeo’s take here. See also: The search for our earliest ancestors: signals in the noise Follow UD News at Twitter!
From The Guardian: How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals Forty thousand years ago in Europe our ancestors formed a crucial and lasting alliance that enabled us to finish off our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat. … “Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Read More ›