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Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience January 27, 2015An ancient human fossil discovered from the seafloor near Taiwan reveals that a primitive group of humans, potentially an unknown species, once lived in Asia, researchers say. These findings suggest that multiple lineages of extinct humans may have coexisted in Asia before the arrival of modern humans in the region about 40,000 years ago, the scientists added. Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, others once walked the globe. Extinct human lineages once found in Asia include Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans; Denisovans, whose genetic legacy may...

ALBANY, N.Y. -- A New York appeals court says a chimpanzee isn't entitled to the rights of a human and doesn't have to be freed by its owner. The three-judge Appellate Division panel was unanimous Thursday in denying "legal personhood" to Tommy, who lives alone in a cage in upstate Fulton County. A trial level court had previously denied the Nonhuman Rights Project's effort to have Tommy released. The group's lawyer, Steven Wise, told the appeals court in October that the chimp's living conditions are akin to a person in unlawful solitary confinement.

The genetic ancestry of the earliest Europeans survived the ferocious Ice Age that took hold after the continent was initially settled by modern people. That is the suggestion of a study of DNA from a male hunter who lived in western Russia 36,000 years ago. His genome is not exactly like those of people who lived in Europe just after the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago. But the study suggests the earliest Europeans did contribute their genes to later populations.

A genetic analysis of a 45,000-year-old thigh bone narrows down the time when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred.A 45,000-year-old leg bone is raising questions about just how close modern-day humans are to our thick-browed Stone Age ancestors. DNA from the femur of a Siberian man is helping to pinpoint when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred, researchers say. But what does this mean for the human connection to a species that disappeared nearly 30,000 years ago? The thigh bone, spotted six years ago on the banks of the Irtysh River in Siberia by a Russian artist who carves jewelry...

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...

A New York University professor has a revolutionary idea for combating global warming: making ourselves greener.Matthew Liao, director of NYU’s bioethics program, thinks that human engineering is a possible solution to global warming, and he lays out his ideas in a new paper. While previous environmental efforts have been focused on reducing the carbon emissions that are said to be causing global warming, Liao says we should look to changing ourselves.“We tried to think outside the box,” Liao told BBC News. “What hasn’t been suggested with respect to addressing climate change?” One of his ideas is to artificially induce...

"A new study led by Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University has strongly suggested that humans are squarely responsible for the disappearance of megafauna during the last 100,000 years. The results have been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B."

HUMANS ARE AWESOME http://www.humansareawesome.net/ People Are Awesome, they are brilliant in comparison to all other living beings. Our abilities are amazing and somewhat out of this world. The official non-fail extreme video compilation channel! This time a tribute to GoPro cameras. Be sure to watch it in 1080P. Music: "Time" by Luckner featuring Sophie Louise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_pkYr9I9nU

An international team of scientists conducting an analysis of the genetic diversity and cranial measurements of 10 African and Asian human populations conclude that anatomically modern humans may have dispersed out of Africa earlier than previously thought, and in more than one stage: initially into Asia by taking a southern route through Arabia as much as 130,000 years ago; and later into Northern Eurasia on a more northerly route 50,000 years ago. The timing and nature of early modern human dispersal out of Africa has long been disputed among scholars, with competing theories or models about how and when it...

Humans Grew More Than 4 Inches In The Last 100 Years The Conversation Tim Hatton, University of Essex, The Conversation May 2, 2014, 5:02 PM It is a commonplace for children to be taller than their parents, but four generations ago this wasn’t the case. A recent study of soldiers around the age of 20 who enlisted in the army during World War I revealed an average height of five feet six inches (168cm). Today the average for young men is five feet ten inches (178cm). A gain of four inches seems a lot. But it is not unique to...

Are humans the enemy? Should pigs and plants be given constitutional rights? The War on Humans e-book and companion documentary explore how a new generation of activists are pushing a radical agenda whose ultimate victims may be the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

What makes for a beautiful visage, and why, may have been discovered accidentally on a Russian fur farm BEAUTY, the saying has it, is only skin deep. Not true. Skin is important (the cosmetics industry proves that). But so is what lies under it. In particular, the shape of people’s faces, determined by their bone structure, contributes enormously to how beautiful they are. And, since the ultimate point of beauty is to signal who is a good prospect as a mate, what makes a face beautiful is not only an aesthetic matter but also a biological one. How those bone...

Humans are the enemy! A new study published in Ecology and Society claims that longer life expectancy for us is bad news for the planet. From the study by Aaron Lotz and Craig R. Allen: We found a positive relationship between life expectancy and the percentage of endangered and invasive species in a country…The overall trend in high-income countries with improvements to the Human Development Index, which includes human life expectancy as one of its variables, is toward a disproportionately larger negative impact on a country’s ecological footprint. However, some lower-income countries have a high level of development without a...

Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warns that humans will need to go beyond the planet Earth if they are to survive as a species. “We must continue to go into space for humanity,” Hawking told a gathering this week in Los Angeles, California. “We won’t survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.” Hawking, 71, has long been a proponent of space exploration. Speaking at a 2008 ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the U.S. space agency, NASA, Hawking called for a new era in human space exploration, comparable, he said, to the European voyages to the New World more...

Scientists claim to have identified the missing link between human speech and monkey chatter. Researchers analysed the distinctive "lip-smacking" sounds made by wild gelada baboons of the Ethopian highlands and found striking similarities to human speech. Their noises are so human-like that Thore Bergman, an assistant professor with the University of Michigan, thought he heard people talking while he was hanging out with the creatures. "I would find myself frequently looking over my shoulder to see who was talking to me, but it was just the geladas," he said. "It was unnerving to have primate vocalizations sound so much...

The last Neanderthals had passed by southern Iberia quite earlier than previously thought. Neanderthals may have died out earlier than before thought, researchers say. These findings hint that Neanderthals did not coexist with modern humans as long as previously suggested, investigators added.Modern humans once shared the planet with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. However, there has been heated debate over just how much time and interaction, or interbreeding, Neanderthals had with modern humans. To help solve the mystery, an international team of researchers investigated 215 bones previously excavated from 11 sites in southern Iberia,...

DNA Unveils Enigmatic Denisovans Extinct Neandertal relatives serve up a complete genetic playbook By Bruce BowerScience News September 22nd, 2012; Vol.182 #6 (p. 5) A replica of a partial Denisovan finger bone, placed on its corresponding position on a person’s hand, emphasizes the small size of this ancient find. Scientists have retrieved a comprehensive set of genetic instructions from the actual Denisovan finger fossil. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Genetic data of unprecedented completeness have been pulled from the fossil remains of a young Stone Age woman. The DNA helps illuminate the relationships among her group — ancient Siberians...

It really happened: Six generations of inbreeding spanning the years 1800 to 1960 caused an isolated population of humans living in the hills of Kentucky to become blue-skinned. The startlingly blue people, all descendants of a French immigrant named Martin Fugate and still living near his original settlement on the banks of Troublesome Creek when hematologists studied them in the 1960s, turned out to have a rare blood condition called methemoglobinemia. A recessive gene was pairing with itself to change the molecular composition of their blood, making it brown as opposed to red, which tinted their skin blue. The hematologists'...

<p>March 7 (Bloomberg) -- Gorillas have been portrayed as militaristic bullies in the Planet of the Apes movies and as "highly social gentle giants" by researcher Dian Fossey.</p> <p>Now scientists say they're closer genetically to humans than they once thought.</p>

DNA Study Contradicts Human/Chimp Common Ancestry by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Nov. 15, 2011 Evolutionary biologists argue that since human and chimp DNA are nearly identical, both species must have evolved from a common ancestor. However, creation scientists have pointed out that their DNA is, in fact, very dissimilar. The vast majority of each species' DNA sequence is not genes, but instead regulated gene expression. A new report unmistakably confirmed that the regulatory DNA of humans is totally different from that of chimps, revealing no hint of common ancestry. Biologist John F. McDonald, of the Georgia Institute of Technology's School...