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Full headline: Treasure trove of skulls reveal missing link in human evolution: Facial bones suggest early Neanderthals used their teeth as a 'third hand' The 17 skulls belong to a single population of a fossil hominin species This is the biggest collection of human fossils ever found on one site They shed light on pre-human evolution from around 400,000 years ago Skulls showed Neanderthal features in face and teeth but not elsewhere These features evolved due to eating and perhaps for use as a 'third hand' Study adds to theories that the Neanderthals developed their characteristic looks slowly, and intermittently,...

Full headline: Is this the first man with blue eyes? Experts astonished that 7,000-year-old DNA reveals caveman with African and European genes Remains discovered 5000ft up mountains of north-west Spain Findings suggest racial transformation happened later than thought Man, dubbed La Brana 1, also shows similarity to Scandinavian DNA His piercing blue eyes are in striking contrast to his dark complexion and hair. It means this 7,000-year-old caveman holds the clue to man’s genetic evolution. His remains were discovered 5,000ft up in the mountains of north-west Spain in 2006. Experts were astonished to find the ancient hunter-gatherer, given the name...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Humans lived for thousands of years in small, isolated populations and resulting inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution, a U.S. researcher says. Research suggests the severe inbreeding may have created many health problems and the small populations were likely a barrier to the development of complex culture and technologies, NewScientist.com reported Thursday. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston -- who has sequenced the genome of Neanderthals and that of another extinct human, the Denisovans -- said both species were severely inbred due to small populations. "Archaic populations had low genetic diversity,...

[Note: headline edited slightly in order to fit] Origins of modern language are ten times older than thought and could date back half a million years, according to Dutch researchers It contradicts the popular idea that our modern language began with a sudden emergence of modernity presumably due to one or a few genetic mutations that gave rise to language The scientists claim that far from being slow brutes, Neanderthals' cognitive capacities and culture were comparable to ours Dutch researchers have claimed that our modern language can be traced back to stone age man - ten times older than previously...

VideoHubei, China - Chinese scientists have discovered a fossil that they claim is the earliest known ancestor of humans. The find has challenged the long-held belief that apes began their evolution in Africa. The Archicebus Achilles was discovered in 2002 on a lake bed in China's Hubei province, but took more than 10 years of analysis for scientists to declare it as the world's oldest known primate fossil. The scientists contend that the 55-million-year-old fossil, which looks a bit like a mouse with monkey-like feet, is the world's oldest known ape-like creature. "Now after we discovered this fossil, we can...

The discovery of the structure of DNA and the subsequent developments in genetics and genomics have had a great impact on all of the biological sciences, including human evolution. Our ideas about human evolution 60 years ago came primarily from the fossil and archaeological records. These fields revealed that the last two million years were a dynamic period of our evolutionary history. The human lineage two million years ago was a population with ape-sized brains limited to sub-Saharan Africa. The human lineage expanded into Eurasia around 1.85 million years ago, and our brain size increased throughout the Pleistocene. Anatomically modern...

Bad backs, dangerous childbirths, sore feet and wisdom teeth pains are among the many ailments humans face from evolution, researchers say. In an evolutionary sense, humans are by far the most successful primates on the planet, with a world population close to 7 billion. Humanity owes this success to a number of well-known adaptations, such as large, complex brains and walking upright on two feet. However, there are downsides to these advances as well.

Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races. Researchers have identified a mutation in a gene that confers several distinct traits to East Asians, including thicker hair. The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded. snip The first of those sites to be studied contains the gene known as EDAR. Africans...

Scientists are beginning to analyze the DNA differences between modern humans and our extinct archaic relatives, the Denisovans. (National Human Genome Research Institute) Genome of ancient Denisovans may help clarify human evolution Scientists recently reported they had pieced together a high-quality sequence of an archaic human relative, the Denisovans. Among other things, the researchers took a close look at the ways in which we differ from these people, who were named after the place where their traces were discovered: Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia....snip It's "fascinating" to see the DNA changes that spread to most or all...

Recent research strikes a blow to the theory that humans and Neanderthals interbred. THE GIST Studies over the last two years suggest that Neanderthals vanished more than 30,000 years ago. This would mean that early humans and Neanderthals could not have interbred. enlarge Over the last two years, several studies have suggested that Homo sapiens got it on with Neanderthals, an hominid who lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for up to 300,000 years but vanished more than 30,000 years ago. The evidence for this comes from fossil DNA, which shows that on average Eurasians...

When the DNA sequences of Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes were sequenced, the difference between the sequences of coding genes was smaller than expected based on the phenotypic differences between both species. If not the coding genes, then what is responsible for these dissimilarities? In the words of the authors of a new study that took a look at this question: Although humans and chimpanzees have accumulated significant differences in a number of phenotypic traits since diverging from a common ancestor about six to eight million years ago, their genomes are more than 98.5% identical at protein-coding loci. Since this...

Genetic data points to ancient liaisons between species. Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they're not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today. The discovery, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 17 April, adds important new details to the evolutionary history of the human species. And it may help explain the...

From the composition of just two human genomes, geneticists have computed the size of the human population 1.2 million years ago from which everyone in the world is descended. They put the number at 18,500 people, but this refers only to breeding individuals, the “effective” population. The actual population would have been about three times as large, or 55,500. Comparable estimates for other primates then are 21,000 for chimpanzees and 25,000 for gorillas. In biological terms, it seems, humans were not a very successful species, and the strategy of investing in larger brains than those of their fellow apes had...

Probable life appearance in anterior view of Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi"), ARA-VP 6/500.Photograph by: Handout, Illustrations 2009, J.H. Matternes An international team of scientists unveiled Thursday the results of 15 years of study of one of the oldest known human ancestors, Ardipithecus ramidus, which they say overturns much of what we know about human evolution. And surprisingly, it's also rewriting the story of our relation to gorillas and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, and their development as well. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, one of the authors involved in the research and the man who discovered the first pieces of the most complete...

When we daydream about the future, we tend to focus on the fabulous belongings we're going to have. Jet packs, flying cars, weapons to kill aliens, cell phones that make today's sleek models look clunky -- you name it, we're going to have it. We don't tend to focus, however, on who we'll be in the future. Most of us probably picture ourselves exactly the same, though maybe thinner, as surely we'll all have robot personal trainers by then. While we see the world's technology evolving to meet our needs, we may not think about how we ourselves might be...

News to Note, May 23, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (READ THE FOLLOWING STORIES AND MUCH MORE BY CLICKING THE EXCERPT LINK AT BOTTOM) 1. ICR: “‘Missing Link’ Ida Is Just Media Hype”The news media has been awash this week in hype over an alleged missing link fossil nicknamed Ida. As it turns out, the fossil wasn’t fraudulent, but the hype definitely was. 2. The Telegraph: “New ‘Super Rats’ Evolve Resistance to Poison”Is this “super rat” an example of evolution in action, or the result of an information-reducing mutation? 3. Gallup: “More Americans ‘Pro-Life’ than...

Read these stories and much more by clicking the excerpt link below: 1. Wall Street Journal: “Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions” 2. ScienceNOW: “Our Ancestors Were No Swingers” 3. National Geographic News: “First Tool Users Were Sea Scorpions?” 4. LiveScience: “Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified” 5. BBC News: “Stem Cells ‘Can Treat Diabetes’” (adult stem cells, that is...) 6. New Scientist: “Praying to God Is Like Talking to a Friend” And much much more at...

In this week's installment: 1. PhysOrg: “In Search of the Original Flapper[—]New Theory on Evolution of Flight” Can evolutionists rescue their own model of bird origins? 2. ScienceNOW: “Oldest Stone Blades Uncovered” Stone blades from more than 500,000 years ago: the work of an alleged human ancestor or someone playing Survivorman? 3. BBC News: “Jews Celebrate ‘Dawn of Creation’” People around the world celebrated a recent, literal creation this week. 4. The Local: “Creationists Taking on Evolution in Germany” In February we noted a Der Spiegel article on European creationists (which followed a Guardian article that covered British creationists). Now...

Natural Selection Studies Based on Bad Statistics March 30, 2009 — Hundreds of studies claiming to show natural selection may be wrong, say scientists from Penn State and Japan.  PhysOrg reported today that “several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.”  Many studies of human evolution have relied on these flawed methods.  If the methods were wrong, the conclusions are unreliable.  “Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences,”...

A male chimpanzee feeds in Kibale National Park tropical rain forest, 354km southeast of Uganda's capital Kampala, December 2, 2006. A new study, certain to be controversial, maintains that chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago -- a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago. (James Akena/Reuters) Chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago -- a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago, according to a study published on Friday. The researchers compared...