Free Republic

No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals. Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe. Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of...

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have found a loophole and dicided to exploit it for Christ. It would seems that Charles Darwin's book, "Origin of Species", is considered public domain by the law. So what Kirk and Comfort have done was open a hornets nest by distributing hundreds of thousands of free copies of Darwin's book with Christian material and messages as a forward. Then they distributed them for free at universities across America and Europe. The 50 page introduction picks apart aspects of Charles Darwin’s work and links it to everything from Nazi eugenics to the scientist’s alleged...

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have found a loophole and dicided to exploit it for Christ. It would seems that Charles Darwin's book, "Origin of Species", is considered public domain by the law. So what Kirk and Comfort have done was open a hornets nest by distributing hundreds of thousands of free copies of Darwin's book with Christian material and messages as a forward. Then they distributed them for free at universities across America and Europe. The 50 page introduction picks apart aspects of Charles Darwin’s work and links it to everything from Nazi eugenics to the scientist’s alleged...

It seems we have all been guilty of defaming Neanderthal man. Research by a team based at the University of Bristol suggests that, far from being a lumbering, witless no-hoper, he was capable, 50,000 years ago, of producing forms of cosmetic adornment and even of primitive jewellery. In 1985, finds in Murcia, Spain, had suggested that this might be so; and now an expedition led by Professor João Zilhão of Bristol has uncovered a shell which shows "a symbolic dimension in behaviour and thinking that cannot be denied". All of which suggests some decent equivalence with the hitherto far more...

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species -- perhaps Homo erectus -- had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser...

Women may think of men as primitive, but new research indicates that the Y chromosome - the thing that makes a man male - is evolving far faster than the rest of the human genetic code. A new study comparing the Y chromosomes from humans and chimpanzees, our nearest living relatives, show that they are about 30 per cent different. That is far greater than the 2 per cent difference between the rest of the human genetic code and that of the chimp's, according to a study appearing online Wednesday in the journal Nature. These changes occurred in the last...

JERUSALEM – Archaeologists have uncovered remains of an 8,000-year-old prehistoric building as well as ancient flint tools in the modern city of Tel Aviv, Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Monday. The building is the earliest structure ever found in Tel Aviv and changes what archaeologists previously believed about the area in ancient times. "This discovery is both important and surprising to researchers of the period," said Ayelet Dayan, the archaeologist who led the excavation. "For the first time we have encountered evidence of a permanent habitation that existed in the Tel Aviv region 8,000 years ago," she said.

Did Neanderthals wear make-up? Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago.The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers. Scientists unearthed the shells at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain. The team says its find buries "the view of Neanderthals as half-wits" and shows they were capable of symbolic thinking. Professor Joao Zilhao, the archaeologist from Bristol University in the UK, who led the study, said that he and his team had examined shells that...

BOULDER--In a vivid example of how a small geographic feature can have far-reaching impacts on climate, new research shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice age episodes dating back more than 100,000 years. The international study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that the repeated opening and closing of the narrow strait due to fluctuating sea levels affected currents that transported heat and salinity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As a result, summer temperatures in parts of North America and Greenland oscillated between warmer and...

Transposons are a class of “mobile genetic elements” that operate within the DNA of living organisms. For years, macroevolutionary proponents have claimed that their presence undoubtedly supports Darwinian evolution. But a recent investigation showed that transposons have been wrongly interpreted, changing macroevolution’s best argument into its worst nightmare—an almost complete lack of genetic material for it to “tweak” into newly selectable features.

Scientists have shown for the first time that "lifeless" prion proteins, devoid of all genetic material, can evolve just like higher forms of life. The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance. Prions are associated with 20 different brain diseases in humans and animals.

PARIS (AFP) – Humans carry in their genome the relics of an animal virus that infected their forerunners at least 40 million years ago, according to research published Wednesday by the British science journal Nature. The invader is called bornavirus, a brain-infecting pathogen that was first identified in 1970s. Scientists led by Keizo Tomonaga of Japan's Osaka University compared the DNA of a range of mammals, including humans, apes, elephants, marsupials and rodents, to look for tell-tale signatures of bornavirus code. In the human genome, the team found several bornavirus fragments but also in the form of two genes that...

Caption: This composite color image is of the new infrared Hubble Ultradeep Field taken at 1.0 micron (blue), 1.25 micron (green), and 1.6 micron (red) with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3/IR) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Highlighted are the record-breaking high redshift galaxies, where the redshift "z"indicates the amount of stretching the light underwent on its voyage through the expanding universe. Higher redshift means larger distance and hence looking further back in time. The newly found objects are at z~7 (700 million years after the Big Bang: light blue circles) and z~8 (600 million years: dark blue circles) Credit:...

Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the intuitively attractive, almost irresistible idea that the whole great process leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessors. The pre-Darwin theories of evolution were built around this idea; in fact, Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) great and radical contribution was to throw out the notion of “progress” and replace it with selection from among a set of random variations. But...

South America is the world's most species-rich area. There have been many theories as to why, ranging from animals and plants accompanying the continent when it broke loose from Africa to variations in the extent of the rainforests over millions of years creating new species... South America's unique richness of species has been explained by several hypotheses. One states that animals and plants "accompanied" the South American continent when it broke loose from Africa 100 million years ago. Another proposes that many species were formed when the rainforest shrank into smaller areas during the Ice Ages and then subsequently expanded......

The timing of molar emergence and its relation to growth and reproduction in apes is being reported by two scientists at Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins in the Dec. 28 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). From the smallest South American monkeys to the largest African apes, the timing of molar development and eruption is closely attuned to many fundamental aspects of a primate's biology, according to Gary Schwartz, a researcher at the Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in...

Mutations are the raw material of evolution. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tubingen, Germany, and Indiana University in Bloomington have now been able to measure for the first time directly the speed with which new mutations occur in plants. Their findings shed new light on a fundamental evolutionary process. They explain, for example, why resistance to herbicides can appear within just a few years. "While the long term effects of genome mutations are quite well understood, we did not know how often new mutations arise in the first place," said Detlef Weigel, director at the...

Scientists have shown for the first time that "lifeless" prion proteins, devoid of all genetic material, can evolve just like higher forms of life. The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance. Prions are associated with 20 different brain diseases in humans and animals.

In the thread on General/Chat forum, Evolution caught in the act: Scientists measure how quickly genomes change, Restore discussed a interesting and recent scientific discovery, genome within certain plants are occurring more rapidly than expected, a lot faster.   As I was reading this thread, somebody asked how evolution explained how the moon got there.  Okay, evolution doesn't, as pointed out by several people on the thread, but geology has does a pretty good job of that explaination. This article got me to thinking about those who say the Bible states that God only took 6,000 years before the creation of Adam...

Scientists have analysed DNA extracted from the remains of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer.> The researchers were able to assign the Kostenki individual to haplogroup "U2", which is relatively uncommon among modern populations. U2 appears to be scattered at low frequencies in populations from South and Western Asia, Europe and North Africa. Despite its rarity, the very presence of this haplogroup in today's Europeans suggests some continuity between Palaeolithic hunters and the continent's present-day inhabitants, argue the authors of the latest study. >