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Neanderthals bid for human status 13 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Rowan Hooper NEANDERTHALS as innovators? That the concept seems amusing goes to show how our sister species has become the butt of our jokes. Yet in the Middle Palaeolithic, some 300,000 years ago, innovation is what the Neanderthals were up to. This period is usually regarded as undramatic in cultural and evolutionary terms, with little in the way of technological or cognitive development. Palaeoanthropologists get more excited about the changes in tools found later, as the Middle Palaeolithic gave way to the Upper, and as modern humans replaced Neanderthals,...

Extinct Ancient Societies Gaunches of the Canary IslandsAbout the Gaunches of the Canary Islands, history of the extinct society, how they were destroyed and the last of them. Their Society: Inhabiting the Canary Islands, which lie off the coast of northwest Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, the Guanches were a tall, fair or red-haired race of people. It is believed that they were the descendants of Cro-Magnon men who migrated to the islands from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula in oceangoing canoes some 3,000 years ago. The Guanches' own oral history and mythology spoke of 60 men and their...

Beijing, China, Dec 15: An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team`s leader saying one of the world`s oldest species was effectively extinct. The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction. A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to...

Animals seem to have found a way to make a living just about everywhere," said Jesse Ausubel of the Sloan Foundation, discussing the findings of year six of the census of marine life. Added Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist with the census: "We can't find anyplace where we can't find anything new." This year's update, released Sunday, is part of a study of life in the oceans that is scheduled for final publication in 2010. The census is an international effort supported by governments, divisions of the United Nations and private conservation organizations. About 2,000 researchers from 80 countries are...

SYDNEY, Australia — Before there were cuddly koalas, hoards of flesh-eating kangaroos, "demon ducks," and marsupial lions roamed Australia's Outback, according to recent fossil discoveries by paleontologists. A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales working in the eastern state of Queensland made the discoveries in three new fossil deposits during a recent two-week dig. Many of the fossils are older than 24 million years; one of the deposits is thought to contain fossils up to 500 million years old, according to Prof. Mike Archer, the university's dean of science. A saber-toothed kangaroo and a giant 10-foot-tall,...

GENEVA (AP) -- Polar bears and hippos are among more than 16,000 species of animals and plants threatened with global extinction, the World Conservation Union said today. According to the Swiss-based conservation group, known by its acronym IUCN, the number of species classified as being in serious danger of extinction rose from about 15,500 in its previous "Red List" report, published in 2004. The list includes one in three amphibians, a quarter of the world's mammals and coniferous trees, and one in eight birds, according to a preview of the 2006 Red List. The full report is published later this...

The Thylacine Debate - Is the Tasmanian Tiger Really Extinct? By Chani Blue Epoch Times Australia Staff Mar 16, 2006 Despite hundreds of reported sightings of this elusive marsupial wild dog, the Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacinus Cynocephalus remains declared officially extinct, therefore has no protection for it's fragile and natural environment or in and of itself, until it's existence can be verified. The Tasmanian tiger lives in dry eucalypt forest, wetlands and grasslands in Tasmania. From indigenous fossil paintings, we can determine that it also lived in Papua New Guinea and main land Australia. Some remains discovered, date back to 2,200...

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be...

"The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam....

'Extinct' wild horse roams again By Charles Clover (Filed: 19/12/2005) The wild horse has been saved from extinction after a successful programme to reintroduce captive-bred horses to their natural habitat in Mongolia. A working group of scientists at London Zoo has now recommended that Przewalski's horse, previously characterised as "extinct" in the wild, should now be listed as "endangered". It is a rare case of a species climbing away from extinction. If the new status is accepted by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, scientists say it will be a milestone for large mammal conservation. In 1945, there were only 31...

The first humans to arrive in Australia destroyed the pristine landscape, probably by lighting huge fires, the latest research suggests.The evidence, published in Science magazine, comes from ancient eggshells. These show birds changed their diets drastically when humans came on the scene, switching from grass to the type of plants that thrive on scrubland. The study supports others that have blamed humans for mass extinctions across the world 10-50,000 years ago. Many scientists believe the causes are actually more complex and relate to climate changes during that period, but, according to Dr Marilyn Fogel, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington,...

BERKELEY – A petite pink flower that hasn't been seen in 70 years has been rediscovered on the flanks of Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County by a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student. The Mount Diablo buckwheat, Eriogonum truncatum, "has been a Holy Grail in the East Bay for several decades," according to UC Berkeley botanist Barbara Ertter, who confirmed the identification in the field on Friday. Last reported in 1936, the flower was presumed extinct, she said, because its habitat has been overrun by introduced grasses. It is one of only three plants, all of them rare,...

BRINKLEY, Ark., April 28 - The ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird long given up for extinct, has been sighted in the cypress and tupelo swamp of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge here in Arkansas, scientists announced Thursday. Bird experts, government agencies and conservation organizations involved kept the discovery secret for more than a year, while they worked to confirm the discovery and protect the bird's territory. Their announcement on Thursday brought rejoicing among birdwatchers, for whom the ivory bill has long been a holy grail - a creature that has been called the Lord God bird, apparently because that...

The year: 2050 The setting: A grandfather and his grandson visiting a Museum of Natural History on a beautiful Saturday afternoon somewhere in middle America. "Oh great, this is it. Follow me, Jeffrey. I want to show you something you will never forget.” “Who are all these people, Grandpa?” “These people are Democrats?” “Demo-what?” “Democrats. Liberal Democrats from the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries.” “What happened to them?” “They became extinct at their own hand, son.” “How?” “Well for one, after decades of empty promises, it became apparent to American voters that Democrats never solved any problems, they just...

WASHINGTON — As the nation's trial lawyers again funneled tens of millions of dollars to Democrats and their causes in the last election, Republicans were crafting a strategy to choke off that money for future campaigns. President Bush's agenda for the next four years, much of which he will highlight in his State of the Union address tonight, includes many proposals that would not only change public policy but, the GOP hopes, achieve an ambitious political goal: Stripping money and voters from the Democratic Party and cementing Republican dominance for years after he leaves office. One of the clearest examples...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

Jan. 27, 2004 — In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed. The number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct....

I have not seen this posted before. This Islamofascist got what he deserved.

Every species seems to come and go. Some last longer than others, but nothing lasts forever. Humans are a relatively recent phenomenon, jumping out of trees and striding across the land around 200 000 years ago. Will we persist for many millions of years to come, or are we headed for an evolutionary makeover, or even extinction? According to Reinhard Stindl, of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna, the answer to this question could lie at the tips of our chromosomes. In a controversial new theory he suggests that all eukaryotic species (everything except bacteria and algae) have an...

SAN DIEGO - The wildfires that charred vast areas of Southern California last fall may also have put the survival of two rare species of butterflies at risk, researchers say. Some experts say it became apparent even while the fires were still smoldering that the flames that blackened more than 745,000 acres, destroyed more than 3,400 homes and killed nearly two dozen people also threatened the existence of the Hermes copper and Thorne's hairstreak butterflies. "When I saw the magnitude of devastation, I realized in my lifetime I might see one, possibly two species go extinct," said biological consultant Michael...