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Early Man

The Trouble with Neanderthals
September 18, 2006
If nothing else, the scientific investigation of Neanderthal Man is valuable for illustrating how fluid scientific opinion can be.  Since we found out Sept. 1 that Neanderthal genes may be lurking among us, two more unexpected claims have been made about these wrestler-build members of genus Homo. Hideouts and Holdouts:  Some Neanderthals may have lived […]
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Dumb Ideas

Express Your Inner Alley Oop
September 1, 2006
There’s a little Neanderthal in a lot of us, claims The Telegraph.  This is bad news and good news: People who have large noses, a stocky build and a beetle brow may indeed be a little Neanderthal, according to a genetic study.  But the good news is that other research concludes that Neanderthals were much […]
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Astronomy

Upset Update: Globular Clusters, Atmospheric Methane Tear Up Textbooks
August 28, 2006
Here are a couple of updates to stories we reported earlier in the category “Everything we thought was wrong.” Globular cluster ages:  Our 10/05/2003 entry reported that beliefs about globular cluster ages were undergoing a radical revision.  You can almost feel the rumblings in a related story on News@Nature; “In a complex Universe, astronomers thought […]
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Early Man

Chimp-Human Genes Evolved Much Faster Than Expected
August 22, 2006
It’s been all over the news lately – human DNA shows surprisingly divergent regions from chimpanzee counterparts.  The Houston Chronicle, for instance, summarizes the find: Searching across the four genomes, the team looked for regions of DNA about 100 letters long that had made the biggest leaps. One, they found, had changed nearly twice as […]
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Early Man

Team Claims “Hobbit Man” Is Fully Human
August 21, 2006
The bones of Homo floresiensis that caused such a stir two years ago (10/27/2004) are human ancestors of the current population of pygmies living on the island today, not a new species, according to a press release from Penn State.  The individual with the small skull (LB1) suffered from microcephaly and the rest of the […]
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Early Man

Human Heads Are Shrinking
August 5, 2006
There’s no correlation between brain size and intelligence, and if anything, brains today have gotten smaller since the days of our Pleistocene ancestors.  That’s the gist of a report on ABC News Australia based on research at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research: “The genes that are thought to have helped humans evolve big brains […]
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Early Man

Neanderthal: Am I My Sequencer’s Brother?
July 21, 2006
Associated Press reported a two-year initiative to sequence the Neanderthal genome (see MSNBC News, and also a separate report on News@Nature).  A progressive creationist society headed by Dr. Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe, is predicting the results “will show Neanderthals did not evolve into modern humans.” RTB has long contended that Neanderthal Man had nothing […]
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Early Man

The Evolution of Immaturity
June 28, 2006
[Guest Article]  Blame evolution for your teen’s immaturity.  The Discovery Channel has published a review of an upcoming paper by Bruce Charlton, professor of biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England.  Charlton is a promoter of Evolutionary Psychology, a developing field of Psychology that attempts to explain all human characteristics in light of […]
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Early Man

When Evolutionist Rebukes Evolutionist, Watch Out
June 14, 2006
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” Solomon said.  Sometimes comrades need to rein in their own when they stray too far.  Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan (Dept. of Anthropology, Penn State) had some stern rebukes for Nicholas Wade, who was just trying to praise Darwin in his new book Before the Dawn: […]
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Early Man

Hobbit Man, Neanderthal Man Further Scrutinized
June 6, 2006
The positions of two alleged human ancestors in the family tree is becoming clearer, or murkier, depending on whom you ask.  This illustrates the uncertainty and disparity of opinions in this field. Hobbit workshop:  Regarding the diminutive skeletons dubbed Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia, opinions seems to be condensing around the idea they were true […]
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Early Man

A Challenge to our Victorian Ethics: Humans and Chimps Interbreeding
May 22, 2006
[Guest article]  Newspapers chipped away at Christian ethics last week with articles describing evidence that “early humans” bred (hybridized) with their supposed ancestors, the chimpanzees, for millions of years after becoming another species.  The New York Times reports: David Page, a human geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the design of the new […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Slapstick
May 2, 2006
Some Darwinists think they have figured out the origin of laughter.  When our ape-like ancestors started walking, they found it awkward and often tripped over their feet.  Bystanding apes apparently found this humorous for some reason, and thus slapstick comedy was born.  The Times Online found this story good for some one-liners. How can this […]
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Early Man

Hominid Claim Is More Philosophy Than Fossils
April 27, 2006
Two weeks ago, the media had a feeding frenzy over Tim White’s claim that his team found bones in Ethiopia from three hominid species lined up in a vertical row, showing a clear progression toward humans.  Now, the fine print has come out.  A review in Nature1 begins, “Deciding whether our ancestors evolved as a […]
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Early Man

Ethiopian Missing Link: Location, Location, Location
April 19, 2006
The Associated Press reported that a new fossil discovery proves the link between two ancestral species of man, and shows the change happening right before our eyes: Fossils have long provided snapshots of the human family tree, but a new find in Africa gives scientists a kind of mini home movie showing man’s primal development. […]
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Early Man

Paleoanthropologists Announce the Middle Man
April 12, 2006
In unison, the news media joined the most recent chorus over alleged fossil human ancestors: “Fossil find improves knowledge of human origins” (Live Science): “Fossils fill gap in human lineage,” (BBC News); “Ancient fossils fill gap in early human evolution” (Yahoo News); “Fossil discovery fills gap in human evolution” (MSNBC News, which adds, ‘We just […]
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