Early Man – Page 35

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Gobekli Tepe: What Mean These Ancient Stones?

March 10, 2009

Imagine stone carvings and monuments whose age make the pyramids and Stonehenge look like artifacts of modern history. Such monuments exist on a hill in Turkey at a site called Gobekli Tepe. Squared-off limestone blocks stacked like the letter T, arranged in circles, with ornate animal carvings on them, have been baffling archaeologists for the […]

Early Man

Tracking Human Ancestors

March 2, 2009

“Earliest human footprints found,” the BBC News announced, and National Geographic echoed, “Oldest Human Footprints With Modern Anatomy Found.” Presumably these are to be distinguished as human rather than pre-human. What was discovered? A photo of a modern-looking footprint accompanies the two articles. The print was found in volcanic ash in Kenya dated […]

Early Man

Language Is Not a Simple Genetic Matter

February 18, 2009

It sounds so simple. The title on an article in PhysOrg announced, in Kipling Just-So Story Format, “How gorilla gestures point to evolution of human language.” Because gorillas have an extensive repertoire of over 100 gestures, human conversation was only a matter of evolutionary time. Is this mere storytelling, or do such explanations have scientific […]

Early Man

What Mean These Observations?

February 5, 2009

Science news outlets report many interesting findings every week. It’s not always clear, though, whether the conclusions drawn from them are warranted by the data. Here are some recent cases: Jaws of steel: A skull labeled Australopithecus robustus was studied for the force its jaws could generate. Interpretation: “Early humans had jaws of steel.” With […]

Early Man

Darwinists Frustrated at Public

January 26, 2009

“The creationists got what they wanted,” moaned Barbara Forrest in Science News of the Week (23 January 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5913, p. 451, DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5913.451b). All they got was the right for teachers to use supplementary materials in Louisiana schools. This followed a “wave of so-called academic freedom bills,” complained Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in his […]

Dumb Ideas

Monkey See, Darwin Do

January 15, 2009

Science Daily thought so. In an article adorned by a picture of macaques enjoying a hot spring, the title read, “Primate Culture Is Just A Stone’s Throw Away From Human Evolution, Study Finds.” The studious studiers were researchers at the Primate Research Center in Kyoto, Japan. They discovered what children already know: monkey […]

Dumb Ideas

Language Evolved from Whistling

December 29, 2008

Meet Bonnie, the whistling orangutan. According to National Geographic News, she is giving evolutionary anthropologists something to talk about: the evolution of human language. NG reported on a new theory: Lead author Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, said orangutans in Indonesia have been seen pretending to wash clothes. “We know they […]

Dumb Ideas

Blame Hiccups on Your Inner Fish

December 16, 2008

Why do humans get hernias and hiccups? Neil Shubin says it’s because of your inner fish. In the Scientific American series on Darwin, the discoverer of Tiktaalik was trying to show how evolutionary theory sheds light on human anatomy. He looked back to fish and amphibians and found insight. “A glimpse inside the […]

Dumb Ideas

How Floppy Feet Produced Marathoners

November 26, 2008

A picture of a muscle-bound furry gibbon adorns a story on Science Daily that claims, “Floppy-footed Gibbons Help Us Understand How Early Humans May Have Walked.” The story describes how two European researchers photographed the footwork of wild gibbons to find connections to human evolution. It turned out that gibbon footfalls are very different from […]

Early Man

Scientific Terms Can Obfuscate, Not Enlighten

October 29, 2008

When scientists classify things and use scientific terms, are they really shedding light on nature and natural history? It’s possible they may just be glossing over their own ignorance, suggested three articles in Nature last week. They underscore cases where subjective human conventions are falsely assumed to correlate with external realities. They lead us to […]

Dumb Ideas

Brain Candy as Tiger Milk

October 1, 2008

Observation: the human brain appears able to use lactate as fuel instead of glucose during strenuous exercise (see Science Daily). Deduction: From an evolutionary perspective, the result of this study is a no-brainer. Imagine what could have or did happen to all of the organisms that lost their wits along with their glucose when running […]

Early Man

End of the Neanderthal Myth?

September 23, 2008

A grim Neanderthal face stares out from the cover of the October 2008 National Geographic Magazine. Coinciding with the cover story is a TV special, Neanderthal Code, about the Neanderthal genome. Both are replete with artwork from the magazine’s army of illustrators charged with putting flesh on bones and bringing lost prehistories to life. The […]

Bible and Theology

Amazonia Supported a Cosmopolitan Civilization

September 2, 2008

Today’s naked, spear-hunting tribes in the jungles of the Amazon live in the shadow of a complex society that once thrived there. By increasing their scope from the single site to the wider region, archaeologists from Florida and Brazil have discovered a cosmopolitan culture that left large earthworks and evidence of complex urban societies. Their […]

Early Man

Neanderthals Win Toolmaking Olympics

August 26, 2008

Scientists have taken another step toward debunking the myth of the “stupid Neanderthals” who went extinct when competing with their supposedly advanced neighbors, the “modern humans.” Science Daily is one of several news sites reporting a study on toolmaking by the two groups of humans, that concluded that “stone tool technologies developed by our species, […]

Early Man

Early Art Confounds Evolutionists

August 16, 2008

The artwork on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France is too good to have been made by early modern humans. “Chauvet should be removed from assessments of early modern humans in Europe,” said UK archaeologist Robin Dennell. “Including it leads to a gross distortion of their cognitive abilities.” Other experts who dated the artwork […]

All Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly" cat_id="31"]