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For about 60 million years during the Eocene epoch, the Indian subcontinent was a huge island. Having broken off from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Indian Tectonic Plate drifted toward Eurasia. During that gradual voyage, the subcontinent saw a blossoming of exceptional wildlife, and when the trove of unique biodiversity finally made contact with bigger Eurasia, the exchange of animals and plants between these areas laid the foundations for countless modern species. "Today, mainland Asia and India have all this unique biodiversity -- but did the mainland Asian biodiversity come from India, or did the Indian biodiversity come from...

...following some remarkable technical developments in that time, including next generation sequencing, ancient DNA research is beginning to come of age... Here are three big issues which I think geneticists are making headway on, following decades of stalled progress by fossil specialists. 1. There's been a shift from merely documenting the occurrence of interbreeding between modern humans and archaic groups, like the Neanderthals and Denisovans, to a focus on the circumstances surrounding it and its consequences for living people... Around 2 per cent of the genome of non-African people was inherited from Neanderthals, with slightly more DNA in Indigenous Oceanic...

The late Early Pleistocene site near Untermassfeld, in Germany, is now well known for a rich array of fauna dating back to about 1.07 million years ago, including simple 'Mode 1' (or Oldowan-type) stone tools evidencing early human occupation. Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple 'Mode 1' stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of...

March 25th is Good Friday *and* the Feast of the Annunciation. Talk about a powerful moment for reflection... We couldn't help but notice that the Feast of the Annunciation fell on Good Friday (of all days!) and wanted to share Mike's thoughts on the coincidence... if you believe in such things as coincidence. This week is the holiest week of the year. Through the Passion, suffering, death and resurrection of Our Blessed Lord, the curse of Adam is undone. Our Lord provides the path to salvation through the cross so that we are no longer permanent exiles from Paradise. This...

More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment. Now analysis of commercial oil drilling data—denied to the academic community until recently—offers the first detailed look at how the Chicxulub impact reshaped the Gulf of Mexico. Figuring out what happened after these types of impacts gives researchers a better idea of how they redistribute geological material around the world. It also gives scientists an idea of what to expect if another such impact were to occur...

Evolutionary Tyranny Still Casts Cloud Over Science by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent scientific paper, published in the high-profile journal PLOS ONE, made three separate references to the amazing design of the human hand…and rightly attributed them to the Creator.1 Evolutionists cried foul and raised such an uproar that the journal retracted the paper. Evolutionary scientists often claim they are objective in their work as researchers and educators. They also claim that creationist research isn't valid because creationists don't publish in secular journals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that evolutionists are seldom objective...

Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no picnic 1.8 million years ago. Our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, had access to food, water and shady shelter at a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. They even had lots of stone tools with sharp edges, said Gail M. Ashley, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. But "it was tough living," she said. "It was a very stressful life because they were in continual competition...

[I posted this under science and food. Why? Because it's a story about genetically engineering a chicken so it's legs will grow like a dinosaurs, from which it evolved. But think about it. Instead of drumsticks you can eat dino-legs! And what will they taste like? Chicken, of course! Yummy!Dinosaur-like lower leg created on bird through molecular experimentAny one that has eaten roasted chicken can account for the presence in the drumstick (lower leg) of a long, spine-like bone. This is actually the fibula, one of the two long bones of the lower leg (the outer one). In dinosaurs, which...

A multi-disciplinary team of scientists have discovered the skull of a weird, unique extinct human and who was found in an underground cave Homo naledi fragments of skull and jaw ======================================================================================================= Scientists have discovered a skull belonging to a previously unknown species of human from three million years ago. The research team made up of paleoanthropologists stumbled across the remains in an underground cave and have now put together a skeleton which stands at 4ft 9 tall and is described as "a really, really strange creature." Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his co-horts stumbled...

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes...

Many recent studies have tried to understand when and where archaic hominins and our modern ancestors co-existed and interbred. Most of this research has been intent on cataloging Neanderthal gene sequences remaining in the genomes people of European or Asian descent. According to Vernot, "Different populations of people have slightly different levels of Neanderthal ancestry, which likely means that humans repeatedly ran into Neanderthals as they spread across Europe." Where the ancestors of modern humans might have had physical contact with Denisovans is debatable. The best guess, Akey said, is that Denisovans may have had a broad geographic range that...

David the Young Earth Creationist by Lita Cosner Published: 17 March 2016 (GMT+10) Biblical creationists interpret Genesis as a historical record of creation because that is what the Bible does, over and over. We have shown both the Old Testament and New Testament teachings rely on Genesis as a historical record of creation in six normal-length days only thousands, not billions, of years ago. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the Bible is that while narrative teaches history, poetry is not conveying historical truth. While the poetry in the Bible does not communicate in the same way...

China Spends Millions Searching for (Space) Aliens by Brian Thomas, M.S. * How much money should a nation spend on space-alien ventures? China is shelling out almost 200 million dollars on an enormous radio antenna built to listen for signs of far out intelligence.1 In the western hemisphere, the US invested millions of dollars in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) project but turned up no evidence whatsoever.2 The ever-growing number of barren and gaseous exoplanets discovered continues to elevate Earth's uniqueness.3 Apparently, China would love to be the first nation to make "first contact." China recently made news...

Major Evolutionary Blunders: Are Whales and Evolution Joined at the Hip? by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. * Evidence for Creation National Geographic has a Little Kids First Big Book of… series on different topics. In its Little Kids First Big Book of Animals, pictures show giraffes, camels, bears, and whales.1 Young readers can see they all look different. Animals that live on land, like bears, have legs. But no one has seen a whale with legs. However, upon closer look, bears and whales do have some of the same traits. They both give birth to live young and nurse...

Chinese Femur Refutes Human Evolution by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Evidence for Creation Textbooks around the world contain the well-known illustration of walking apes transitioning into a modern human. I recently heard a college student, raised in a Christian home, say these pictures convinced her of evolution. She probably represents countless others swayed by this simplistic icon. But those willing to question the concept that man descended from apes can welcome the recent study of a discovery from China. It adds to the list of important finds that refute human evolution and its illustrations.

A momentary chirp rocked the scientific world last week when a team of researchers announced they had detected signals from gravitational waves produced when two black holes, with masses 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, collided over a billion light years away. Since then, scientists have been giddy over the news. “This detection is the beginning of a new era: The field of gravitational wave astronomy is now a reality,” Gabriela González, a Louisiana State University physics and astronomy professor, said in a statement. But why is this discovery such a big deal?

Campaign to silence BBC presenter Dan Walker for his creationist views by Andrew Sibley Published: 18 February 2016 (GMT+10) A row has erupted over the appointment of a ‘creationist sports presenter’ to a lead position in BBC News. Committed Christian Dan Walker—who has previously refused to work on Sunday because of his faith—has been selected to head-up the BBC Breakfast News. Unfortunately a section of the news media has raised rather hysterical objections with an anonymous tip-off to the press from someone at the BBC (perhaps deliberately raising a storm around the so-called ‘Darwin day’ celebrated annually on 12th February)....

What impact does the detection of gravitational waves have on biblical creation? By John G. Hartnett Summary Gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein were observed by the LIGO observatories for the first time on September 14, 2015. The detection strongly supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity published in 1916 where Einstein predicted such a phenomenon. No evidence for violation of general relativity was observed. A binary pair of black holes were observed to coalesce—the first time their existence confirmed. Their distance, determined from luminosity, is about 1.3 billion light-years. The black holes had masses of 36 M⊙ (mass of Sun)...

Your Brain Has More Memory Than the Internet by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Whoever said the human brain is the most highly organized collection of matter in the universe was more correct than they could have known. New research modeled tiny structures within nerve cells and discovered a clever tactic brains use to increase computing power while maximizing energy efficiency. Its design could form the basis of a whole new and improved class of computer.

Order, Order! A Meditation on the Glory of Order in God's Creation Msgr. Charles Pope • January 25, 2016 • In a series of two posts I would like to ponder the glory of something we call order. I do this more in the form of a meditation than a treatise. Some may argue that I am oversimplifying complex philosophical concepts. That may be true, but I am a pastor not an academic. And though I summarize here, I do not think I have been inauthentic in setting forth the concepts and problems that have birthed the modern age....