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Inexplicable Species and the Theory of Evolution Editor’s note: We were delighted recently to introduce a new series, “Modernizing Darwin,” cross-posted at Shabbat.com, by Geoffrey Simmons, MD. The first post is here. Dr. Simmons is the author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links. He is a Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.Man has been searching for fossils, or stumbling upon them, for millennia. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw the fossilized bones of giant creatures as proof that horrible monsters once walked the land or swam in the seas. Darwin utilized fossils to...

A construction crew in Cape Coral, Fla., in June discovered what is believed to be a bone fragment from a mastodon or mammoth, a report released Friday said.  The fragment was discovered underground by  crews working on the city’s utilities expansion project, The Fort Myers News-Press reported. It is believed to be a part of the animal’s humerus bone, according to The Cape Coral Daily Breeze.  It is not entirely clear how old the find is; The News-Press reported it could be more than two million years old, while NBC2 put it at somewhere between 12,000 and 250,000 years. What’s more, archaeologists think there could...

The next time you feel like taking the path of least resistance, consider the fate of humankind's ancestral predecessor, Homo erectus: According to the authors of a new study published in PloS One, laziness may have precipitated the early humans' extinction, leaving them unable -- and unwilling -- to adapt to changing environments... The team found that H. erectus tended to pursue "least-effort strategies" when crafting tools and collecting resources, even sticking to one generic tool for most activities. In a statement, lead author Ceri Shipton, an archaeologist at ANU, notes that the primitive peoples "really don't seem to have...

Neanderthals are often depicted as having straight spines and poor posture. However, these prehistoric humans were more similar to us than many assume. University of Zurich researchers have shown that Neanderthals walked upright just like modern humans - thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the pelvis and spine of a very well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton found in France... Since the 1950s, scientists have known that the image of the Neanderthal as a hunched over caveman is not an accurate one. Their similarities to ourselves - both in evolutionary and behavioral terms - have also long been known, but in recent years...

Stephen Pates, a researcher from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, has uncovered secrets from the ancient oceans. With Dr Rudy Lerosey-Aubril from New England University (Australia), he meticulously re-examined fossil material collected over 25 years ago from the mountains of Utah, USA. The research, published in a new study in Nature Communications, reveals further evidence of the great complexity of the oldest animal ecosystems. Twenty hours of work with a needle on the specimen while submerged underwater exposed numerous, delicate microscopic hair-like structures known as setae. This revelation of a frontal appendage with fine filtering setae has allowed researchers to...