Here. Why, that is, it would make more sense if it wasn’t designed. A friend has asked UD readers, on a pleasant summer evening, to count the fallacies in the video. Rube shouts in: Name one healthy body part you’re sure you’d be better off without.
In “Early human fossils unearthed in Ukraine” (BBC News , 20 June 2011), Jennifer Carpenter tells us,
Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe, experts have claimed.Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at the Buran-Kaya cave site.
The 32,000-year-old fossils bear cut marks suggesting they were defleshed as part of a post-mortem ritual.
Done, probably, so that the skeleton could remain as a memorial. Neanderthal peoples used red ochre in burials (signifying continued life?). Read More ›
At Eurekalert (June 29, 2011), we learn: “Finding showing human ancestor older than previously thought offers new insights into evolution.” In the current episode, new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show that modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus. The find counters previous hypotheses – which it must, in order to qualify as an episode:
The new story supports the “multiregional” model of human evolution. Read More ›
At Adam’s Lost Dream, Jay Hall, who teaches math at Howard College in Texas, comments on the Christianity Today’s simian Adam and Eve, courtesy BioLogos: Collins claims that humanity came from a group of 10,000 ancestors around 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. That is, mankind came from a group and not Adam and Eve. Elizabeth Mitchell comments, “Search the Christianity Today article much as you will, it never explains how the conclusion that there had to be 10,000 original people was reached. Oddly enough, neither does the BioLogos website.”According to A. Gibbons, writing in Science, “… researchers have calculated that ‘mitochondrial Eve’ – the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people—lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago Read More ›
In “Family ties doubted in Stone Age farmers” (New Scientist, 01 July 2011), Michael Marshall reports that
Blood may not always be thicker than water, if a controversial finding from one of the world’s best-preserved Stone Age settlements is to be believed. At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.
How do we know? TheÇatalhöyük people (7500-5500 BCE) “buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses, suggesting that people were buried where they lived.”
The researchers measured the teeth from 266 individuals, assuming that teeth are are more similar among relatives and that people buried together would be more closely related.
But she found no pattern at all. “It does not appear that individuals that were buried together were closely related to each other,” she says. “Çatalhöyük was likely not centred around nuclear families.”
In the best tradition of the assured results of modern science, further speculations follow. In the rush to confirm a trendy idea (families are optional), no one seems to consider that Read More ›
Bernard Wood asks “Did early homo migrate into or out of Africa?” (Science June 17, 2011):
The origin of our own genus remains frustratingly unclear. Although many of my colleagues are agreed regarding the “what”with respect to Homo, there is no consensus as to the “how” and “when” questions. Until relatively recently, most paleoanthropologists (including the writer) assumed Africa was the answer to the “where” question, but in a little more than a decade discoveries at two sites beyond Africa, one at Dmanisi in Georgia and the other at Liang Bua on the island of Flores, have called this assumption into question.
Meanwhile, Anne Gibbons asks, Who was homo habilis? And was it really homo? (Science June 17, 2011): Read More ›
In “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Hugo Merciera and Dan Sperbera argue (loaded word, that!) for a theory about how argument evolved:
Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought.
Read More ›
In “Breeding with Neanderthals helped humans go global,” ( New Scientist, 16 June 2011), Michael Marshall tells us, When the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet. The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil. The authors say that half of European HLA-A alleles come from other hominins, as do 72 per cent for Read More ›
We are told by Australia’s TV science broadcaster that hard times make for meek men.
Start with this (the article doesn’t): “Lee says the cross-cultural studies were limited in their findings as they failed to show the mechanisms underpinning the effect.”
In today’s edition of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, University of Queensland researchers Anthony Lee and Dr Brendan Zietsch show environmental factors can influence a woman’s choice of a mate.They find that when faced with the threat of increased prevalence of disease, women choose more masculine males. But during times of resource scarcity, “feminine” males, who are more committed to long-term relationships and caring for resulting offspring, come to the fore.
– Dani Cooper, “Meek men the perfect mate in austere times” (ABC 22 June 2011)
The researchers claim that more masculine males show low commitment. Who knew?
Most of the story is just that increasingly irritating tepid Darwinsludge: Read More ›
Ice man’s last meal: Deer, apparently: Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. – Heather Pringle, “The Iceman’s Last Meal”( ScienceNOW, 20 June 2011) What if it had been wild goat instead? That’s the frustrating problem with studies of human evolution. Before the literate period, it’s hard to find out what you really want to know. Dying words that give us some sense of the people who spoke them. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista
In “Cutting Edge Training Developed the Human Brain 80,000 Years Ago” (ScienceDaily, June 22, 2011), we are told,
Advanced crafting of stone spearheads contributed to the development of new ways of human thinking and behaving, according to new findings by archaeologists from Lund University. The technology took a long time to acquire, required step by step planning and increased social interaction across the generations. This led to the human brain developing new abilities.Some 200,000 years ago, small groups of people wandered across Africa, looking anatomically much like present-day humans, but not thinking the way we do today. Read More ›
Why would anyone need “a growing body of evidence that humans are remarkably altruistic primates”? In a peaceful and prosperous society, one sees instances of altruism as well as its opposite every day. And, given most humans’ preference for peace and prosperity, we should just assume that we are acting most naturally when we can live that way. Anyway,
A growing body of evidence shows that humans are remarkably altruistic primates. Food sharing and division of labor play an important role in all human societies, and cooperation extends beyond the bounds of close kinship and networks of reciprocating partners. In humans, altruism is motivated at least in part by empathy and concern for the welfare of others. Although altruistic behavior is well-documented in other primates, the range Read More ›
The “grandmother” thesis is that the reason our ancestors didn’t kill granny was that she helped out. (And then somehow religion got involved, and …) An actual study showed that “The hazard of death for Dogon children was twofold higher if the resident paternal grandmother was alive rather than dead. This finding may reflect the frailty of elderly grandmothers who become net consumers rather than net producers in this resource-poor society.”
Oh, and so did the comparison between a human group and co-operatively breeding animals: Read More ›
At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, we learn that “growing crops made us smaller” (June 20, 2011), John Roach tells us that the beginnings of agriculture were not obviously successful for our ancestors, as is often assumed:
People got shorter and sicker everywhere in the world when they started to farm about 10,000 years ago, according to a recent study that suggests the transition to an agricultural lifestyle came at a biological cost.
[ … ]
As people gave up the diverse diet of foraged foods and settled on eating a few staple food crops they “experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress,” Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student at Emory University, said in a news release.
Compounding the problem, growth in population density spurred by agricultural settlements led to an increase in unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading infectious diseases and the transmission of novel viruses from livestock to humans, she added.
Some would add that the earliest crop plants were probably just pampered weeds, from the modern farmer’s perspective. The precious seed stock for food grains that are well suited to human stomachs must have been a work of centuries, done with only the knowledge of plant genetics that one might gain from observation and experience. It’s doubtful our ancestors would have persisted without Read More ›
By now, so many things made us human. Better to say we don’t know?
Here we are told about “How fatherhood made us human.”
According to Alan Boyle at MSNBC‘s Cosmic Log (06/2011/17):
Other research suggests that early humans diverged from chimps in the organization of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups of chimpanzees are generally organized along kinship lines, and there’s a high level of aggression between those kin groups. But Arizona State University anthropologist Kim Hill and his colleagues reported in the journal Science that today’s human hunter-gatherer groups are more mixed up, genetically speaking. Read More ›