Early Man – Page 38

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Fossil Gorilla Forces Hominid Ancestor Earlier

August 23, 2007

A set of gorilla teeth found in Ethiopia pushes the evolutionary story of a split between apes and humans back almost twice as far as previously thought. Nature reported the fossil announcement that estimated the date of the teeth as 10.5-11 million years old.1 The prior estimate for a human-ape divergence was about 6 million. […]

Early Man

Homo habilis Contemporary with Homo erectus

August 9, 2007

Homo habilis couldn’t have been the ancestor of Homo erectus, because they lived side by side. This has been all over the news since it was announced in Nature yesterday: see the Times UK, PhysOrg, the BBC News, Reuters Africa, National Geographic, and MSNBC News, which says the new discovery paints a “messy” view of […]

Early Man

Romanian Neanderthal May Have Interbred With Modern Humans

August 2, 2007

A report in National Geographic says that a skull found in a Romanian cave is shaking up ideas about Neanderthal Man and its relationship to modern humans. The mostly modern skull shows a feature that was characteristic of Neanderthals: “The otherwise human skull has a groove at the base of the back of the skull, […]

Early Man

Human Variability May Swamp Ancestral Hominid Claims

July 22, 2007

Here are some things to think about when paleoanthropologists draw inferences from fossils alleged to be human ancestors. A seven-foot-nine-inch man in Mongolia just married a lady more than two feet shorter (see picture at National Geographic). And a man with just a narrow rim of brain material inside his skull had no symptoms except […]

Dumb Ideas

News Reporters Knuckling Under to Darwinian Storytelling

July 17, 2007

The science news media are virtually going ape over a claim about how chimpanzees might have evolved into upright-walking humans: what is going on? It began with a paper in PNAS.1 Sockol, Raichlen and Pontzer measured the gaits of chimpanzees and humans and concluded that it is more efficient to walk upright than to propel […]

Early Man

But Is It Evolution?

July 14, 2007

Every week the news media cheerfully present the latest finding that is claimed to be evidence for evolution. The following recent examples, though, might leave a perceptive reader wondering, “What’s Darwin got to do with it?” Slow? No!: If you thought evolution was a gradual process too slow to watch, get a load of this: […]

Early Man

The Chimp-Human 1% Difference: A Useful Lie

June 29, 2007

Jon Cohen made a remarkable admission in Science this week.1 The popular notion that humans and chimpanzees are genetically 99% similar is a myth, and should be discarded. Since 1975, textbooks, the media and museums have emphasized this close similarity; but now, Cohen quoted a number of scientists who say the number cannot possibly be […]

Early Man

Chimp Altruism: Is it All True?

June 27, 2007

Humans are the only inhabitants of earth that are masters of true altruism: helping others with no thought of reward. Previous experiments had shown that chimpanzees lack this trait. Given an opportunity to help another chimp get a banana, they showed no pattern of charity. New experiments by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for […]

Bible and Theology

The Evolution of Pride: Psychology Trumps the Bible?

June 19, 2007

“The Bible got it wrong,” announced a subtitle on Science Daily: pride doesn’t come before a fall (Proverbs 16:18). A proud look and haughty eyes may be the first two of the Bible’s seven deadly sins (Proverbs 6:16-19), but psychologist Jessica Tracy (U of British Columbia) begs to differ. She says pride can be a […]

Dumb Ideas

Did Walking Evolve in the Trees?

June 4, 2007

The news media are all echoing a report from Science1 that orangutan behavior in trees tells us something about the evolution of human bipedalism (see National Geographic, Fox News, and MSNBC News). If this new view gains acceptance, it means the old iconic image of man emerging upright from a stooped-over ape posture (05/03/2007) is […]

Dumb Ideas

When Is a Primate a Human Ancestor?

May 14, 2007

Behold Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, an extinct fossil monkey. It had a brain smaller than a lemon, smaller than that of modern lemurs. Why, then, are the news media touting this as a human ancestor? The new specimen of Aegyptopithecus is more intact and complete than previous specimens. Two surprises were noted; the amount of […]

Early Man

Passings: Howell Dies, of Time-Life Book Fame

May 3, 2007

Nature contained an obituary for F. Clark Howell, paleoanthropologist (1925-2007). He knew and worked with most of the 20th century fossil-man hunters from Raymond Dart to the Leakeys. Students will probably remember the Time-Life series he authored, Early Man, with its fold-out panorama by illustrator Jay Matternes of the march from furry monkey to naked […]

Dumb Ideas

Cave Chimps Suggest Cave Men

April 11, 2007

Some chimpanzees have been found in Senegal using caves for shelter from the heat. Jill Pruetz (Iowa State) took note of this and is publishing a paper about it in Primates. National Geographic speculated that this sheds light on human origins: The adaptations of savanna chimpanzees are particularly interesting to researchers because early humans are […]

Early Man

Lucy the Gorilla?

April 10, 2007

Three scientists from Tel Aviv found a “gorilla-like” jaw structure on a recently discovered specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, of which “Lucy” is the best-known example. This is a problem, because Lucy was supposed to be transitional between chimpanzees and humans, not gorillas. Publishing in PNAS,1 they said, “The presence of the morphology in […]

Early Man

Chinese Claim Early Man Fame

April 3, 2007

The “out of Africa” hypothesis must be wrong, some Chinese anthropologists claim, because they have a modern skeleton 40,000 years old. The story is reported by the BBC News, EurekAlert, National Geographic News and Science Daily. The BBC News report starts, “The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, […]

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