Nuclear DNA From the Simo de los Huesos Fossil Material

Nature has a paper that focuses on DNA that has been extracted from the Sima de los Huesos fossil material from the site of Atapuerca, in northern Spain.  The letter does not appear to be behind the pay wall, at the moment.  In 2014, researchers completed a mitochondrial genome sequence for a hominin and the results were interesting, to say the least.  Here is the abstract from the 2014 paper:

Excavations of a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain have unearthed hominin fossils that range in age from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene¹. One of these sites, the ‘Sima de los Huesos’ (‘pit of bones’), has yielded the world’s largest assemblage of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils^{2, 3}, consisting of at least 28 individuals⁴ dated to over 300,000 years ago⁵. The skeletal remains share a number of morphological features with fossils classified as Homo heidelbergensis and also display distinct Neanderthal-derived traits^{6, 7, 8}. Here we determine an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos and show that it is closely related to the lineage leading to mitochondrial genomes of Denisovans^{9, 10}, an eastern Eurasian sister group to Neanderthals. Our results pave the way for DNA research on hominins from the Middle Pleistocene.

The authors argued at the time that Denisovans and the population from Sima de los Huesos shared a common ancestor, with a split of about 700 kya, and that both are more closely related to each other than either is to Neandertals.  This strongly suggests that Neandertals are a later derivation from a common crown group that represented the progenitors of all three groups.  The authors suggest that these findings are unexpected because of the incipient Neandertal traits found in the Sima collection, including occipital bunning in the back of the head and some mid-facial prognathism (it looks like the maxilla is puffed out).  Arsuaga and others have stated previously that they thought all of the Sima de los Huesos material belonged to the Neandertal lineage. That, apparently, is not the case.  As these authors point out, there may have been more than one evolutionary lineage roaming the valleys and forests of Europe.

Now the nuclear DNA has been  sequenced and these results strongly suggest that the people represented by the SH population were, in fact, early Neandertals.  From the paper by Meyer et al:

The nuclear DNA sequences of femur AT-5431 and the incisor show that they belonged to the Neanderthal evolutionary lineage, and the limited data available for the molar suggest that the same is true for this specimen. Thus, the results show that the SH hominins were early Neanderthals or closely related to the ancestors of Neanderthals after the divergence from a common ancestor shared with Denisovans. Although it is difficult to determine the age of Middle Pleistocene sites with certainty, geological dating methods¹, as well as the length of the branches in trees relating the mtDNAs from femur XIII and an SH cave bear to other mtDNAs^{2, 12}, suggest an age of around 400,000 years for the SH fossils. This age is compatible with the population split time of 381,000–473,000 years ago estimated for Neanderthals and Denisovans on the basis of their nuclear genome sequences and using the human mutation rate of 0.5 × 10⁻⁹ per base pair per year⁷

These authors now suggest that, in combination with the MtDNA results from last year, that the SH hominins are ancestral to Neandertals and that the MtDNA found in later Neandertals is derived relative to that in the SH hominins and that the SH hominins may have had several different MtDNA strands. 

It appears that the evidence supports a model in which the classic Neandertals from France and Germany, which are dated to between 50 and 70 kya, represent a more stabilized, homogenous genome relative to that of earlier hominins.  I have always been struck by the similarities between the Atapuerca 4 cranium and Petralona, from Greece, and this suggests that there may have been extensive migration between regions and considerable gene flow between groups (J. Lawrence Angel, again).  We know that the range of Neandertals extended from the lower Iberian peninsula to Teshik-Tash, north of the Taurus Mountains and Okladnikov, in Siberia.  It does not seem like a stretch that their precursors did the same thing. 

Hat tip to Todd Wood.

Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends...

Keith Emerson, formerly of the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, has passed away.  Reports are that he had been in spotty health and had a degenerative neurological disease in his right hand that was robbing him of his ability to play the keyboards, and there is speculation that this led him to take his own life.  That is such a great loss.

I got plugged into ELP in the early 1970s, when I was 12 and followed them through their break-ups and reunions.  Rolling Stone has put together a “Ten Essential Songs” page with commentary on each song.  Of those, probably Emerson's adaptation of Aaron Copeland's Hoedown shows off his technical skill the best.

It has been a bad last twelve months for those of us that grew up in the 1970s. Chris Squire, Paul Kantner, Glenn Frey, David Bowie, and now Keith Emerson. I saw Todd Rundgren in Atlanta last month. Who knows how many more shows he is going to do, as he is pushing 70. Going to the Steve Hackett show in April. He is 66. Time marches on.

Rest in Peace.

Klinghoffer Responds to the Retraction

David Klinghoffer followed up his initial post about the grasping hand paper with a post involving its inevitable retraction.  Called Censorship in Real Time, he writes:

That was fast. The sound of one hand clapping? Now, it's no hands. Besieged by a furious mob of censors, the editors at the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE have retracted a paper on the "architecture" of the human hand that repeatedly invoked notions of "design" and a "Creator."

This was in the works so it is not a surprise that it happened. It is true that there was a good deal of hand-waving in the process but the claims had no place in a paper of that sort. Then Klinghoffer writes this:

I must note here that the theory intelligent design does not infer a "Creator," a religious idea that goes beyond what the scientific evidence says. ID infers a source of intelligence, and leaves it to others to argue about the identity of the source.

This comment is illogical on its face and cuts to the heart of the position that the Discovery Institute has tried to take.  Something either arose by chance or it was created.  It cannot be neither.  If it did not arise by chance, which is the position of many of the DI fellows on different aspects of our anatomy (eye, blood-clotting cascade), then it was created.  If it was created, then by whom or what?  ID absolutely does infer a creator.

While it is quite true that they do their best to deflect attention away from the Christian God as the source of these creations,  it was shown pretty conclusively at Dover that the two are linked at the hip.  This is further exacerbated by public pronouncements by prominent ID proponents such as William Dembski that ID represents the Logos of John's Gospel restated in information theory (1999) as well as their preferred choice of venues for conferences.

That being said, whether or not it is the Christian God or Cosmic Muffin,  it is a “creator.” 

That Didn't Take Long...

Sure enough, the Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer has penned a response to the ruckus involving the retracted paper in PLoS ONE about the human grasping hand.  Called Mob with Pitchforks Forms as Science Journal PLOS ONE Acknowledges "Proper Design by the Creator", complete with picture of an angry mob from what looks like the 1930s. In this post, he recounts some of the comments that appeared in response to the publication of the paper:

Another self-identified editor: "As an editor of PLOS ONE, I am ashamed this ever got to be published, and I am ready to resign if this is not retracted immediately."

Still another: "There is no room in the scientific literature for Intelligent Design. This is more than just a 'language issue'."

More:

"Plos One must here intervene to avert damage from all Plos ONE publishers."

"I published three times in P One. Is my career ruined?"

"It is assumed by the scientific community that PLoS ONE is a science-driven journal. If so, this manuscript must be retracted."

"PLoS must remove this article in total, along with the Editor who handled the manuscript."

"I am appalled by this paper and its reference to a 'Creator'. This paper should be retracted immediately."

It goes on. The note of career anxiety -- no, panic -- is telling. These folks don't want to be rendered ritually impure by contact with a bit of injudicious language. Predictably, Twitter is aflutter. And the ever-useful website Retraction Watch has already reported on it. The paper's editor apologized: "I am sorry for this has happened. I am contacting PLoS one to see whether we can fix the issue."

To be sure, a good bit of this is hyperbolic. This paper ruined nobody's career. It did, however, give pause because, briefly, science is in the business of explaining the natural world in terms of natural causes. As Dennis Lamoureux once remarked (paraphrased), it is quite possible that the socks that are missing from my dryer were taken by fairies, but it is much more likely that they got sucked out the drain tube and that is something we can test.

The position that the grasping hand reflects the genius of the creator is broadly analogous to the claim made by Ray Comfort that the Banana must have been crafted by God rather than by evolution because it fits perfectly in the hand, although no such anti-evolutionary claim was made by the authors of the hand paper and Ray Comfort's claim was idiotic, in light of what we know of artificial selection of the banana.

The problem that is giving people the vapors is that the grasping hand claim is baldly non-scientific.  Science is simply not capable of determining whether or not the hand's ability to grasp is divinely bestowed or not.  That is a matter of faith.

And Just In Case You Wondered...

...what the major scientific organizations think about Intelligent Design, here are short, paragraph-long summaries of their positions.  For example:

National Academy of Sciences:

Those who oppose the teaching of evolution in public schools sometimes ask that teachers present evidence against evolution. However, there is no debate within the scientific community over whether evolution occurred, and there is no evidence that evolution has not occurred. Some of the details of how evolution occurs are still being investigated. But scientists continue to debate only the particular mechanisms that result in evolution, not the overall accuracy of evolution as the explanation of life's history.

The American Association for The Advancement of Science:

The [intelligent design] movement has failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim that ID undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution... the lack of scientific warrant for so-called intelligent design theory' makes it improper to include as a part of science education.

The Paleontological Society:

Because evolution is fundamental to understanding both living and extinct organisms, it must be taught in public school science classes. In contrast, creationism is religion rather than science, as ruled in recent court cases, because it invokes supernatural explanations that cannot be tested. Consequently, creationism in any form (including scientific creationism, creation science, and intelligent design) must be excluded from public school science classes. Because science involves testing hypotheses, scientific explanations are restricted to natural causes.

There are many more on the page, as well as links to the statements of other organizations.  One might almost get the idea that they don't think too highly of it as a scientific theory.

St. Paul's Cathedral Ceiling Shows Evolution?????

Really? That would be quite something, if true. Hannah Tooley writes in Premier:

Google Cultural Institute's feature means that online visitors can explore the building on Streetview and see of in-depth details that are usually too far away in the high ceilings to be seen with the naked eye.

The access is significant because, for more than 1,000 years, the three domes in London's famous Cathedral were thought to show beasts, birds and fish as God created them - however, new technology appears to suggest the images portray something different.

The images, painted by William Blake Richmond in 1890, could appear to depict the theory of evolution.

The cathedral's head of collections, Simon Carter, told The Times newspaper that the mosaic appears to support Darwin's theories about the survival of the fittest - which he said is shown through a depiction of a fish with teeth "fighting for survival."

This will not sit well.

PLoS ONE Intelligent Design Paper on Grasping Hand Retracted

A paper published in the journal PLoS ONE has raised a huge ruckus with the scientific community and has led to (apparently successful) calls for its retraction.  Doug Bolton of the Independent writes:

The paper, titled: 'Biomechanical characteristics of hand coordination in grasping activities of daily living' was written by a team of four researchers, three from Huazhong University in China, and one from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

Published in the PLOS ONE journal, the fairly conventional study looked at the mechanics of how we grasp things, and involved the measurement of the hand movements of 30 participants.

However, members of the scientific community have demanded the paper be retracted, for its several perceived references to the pseudoscientific theory of intelligent design and a possibly divine 'Creator'.

In the opening sentences of the study, it claims the link between muscles and hand movements is the product of "proper design by the Creator."

Later, it says human hand coordination "should indicate the mystery of the Creator's invention," and concludes by again claiming the mechanical architecture of the hand is the result of "proper design by the Creator."

If you want a copy of this paper, you should probably hurry. It is going through the retraction process even as we speak:

“In light of the concerns identified, the PLOS ONE editors have decided to retract the article, the retraction is being processed and will be posted as soon as possible. We apologize for the errors and oversight leading to the publication of this paper.”

The authors, themselves, have retreated to the excuse that the uses of language that appear to support intelligent design were “translation errors.”

Hat Tip to Rob Mitchell.

UPDATE: There is now a retraction notice on the page that reads thus: 

Following publication, readers raised concerns about language in the article that makes references to a 'Creator', and about the overall rationale and findings of the study.

Upon receiving these concerns, the PLOS ONE editors have carried out an evaluation of the manuscript and the pre-publication process, and they sought further advice on the work from experts in the editorial board. This evaluation confirmed concerns with the scientific rationale, presentation and language, which were not adequately addressed during peer review.

Consequently, the PLOS ONE editors consider that the work cannot be relied upon and retract this publication.

The editors apologize to readers for the inappropriate language in the article and the errors during the evaluation process.

4 Mar 2016: The PLOS ONE Staff (2016) Retraction: Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0151685. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151685

I am quite sure the Discovery Institute will weigh in at some point about this.

Neandertals and Modern Humans Had Longer Period of "Intimate" Contact

New research suggests that the earliest time that Neandertals and moderns humans got jiggy with it was around 100,000 years ago.  This is a break from the conventional (if you can call an argument five years old “conventional”) argument that most of these interactions occurred between 50 and 60 thousand years ago.  According to Jennifer Viegas, in Discovery News:

Remains of a Neanderthal woman who lived around 100,000 years ago in the Altai Mountains of Siberia reveal that human and Neanderthals mated much earlier than previously thought.

One or more of her relatives were actually humans, a new study shows.

It has been known that Neanderthals contributed DNA to modern humans, so people today of European and Asian descent retain Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, but the Neanderthal woman offers the first evidence that gene flow from interbreeding went from modern humans into Neanderthals as well.

The study, published in the journal Nature¹, "is also the first to provide genetic evidence of modern humans outside Africa as early as 100,000 years ago," Sergi Castellano, who co-led the study and is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discovery News.

Given the now closely intertwined histories of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, Castellano added that "it is better to refer to Neanderthals and modern humans as two different human groups, one archaic and one modern, and not different species."

This last point is hotly contested. The prevailing wisdom is that they were two different species that could interbreed when they came into contact but had their own stable genomes. If the time of contact can be stretched from 100 kya to 50 kya, though, it lends more credence to the ideas that their lifestyles were largely compatible, especially given the new information from Schöningen, which seems to indicate complex patterns of subsistence emerging as early as 300 kya. Oddly, missing from the story is that the researchers suggest that these hybridizations may have occurred in the ancestors of the Neandertals in Southwest Asia, not northern Europe.  This would one of the natural corridors for people coming out of Africa, although recent research has focused on the Arabian peninsula for that migration.

¹Kuhlwilm, Martin, Gronau, Ilan, Hubisz, Melissa J., de Filippo, Cesare, Prado-Martinez, Javier, Kircher, Martin, Fu, Qiaomei, Burbano, Hernán A., Lalueza-Fox, Carles, de la Rasilla, Marco, Rosas, Antonio, Rudan, Pavao, Brajkovic, Dejana, Kucan, Željko, Gušic, Ivan, Marques-Bonet, Tomas, Andrés, Aida M., Viola, Bence, Pääbo, Svante, Meyer, Matthias, Siepel, Adam, & Castellano, Sergi. (2016). Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals. Nature, 530(7591), 429-433.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16544

Idaho Bible Reference Bill Amended to Omit Science

ID Education News is reporting that a bill that had been drafted that would permit the use of the Bible as a reference for various school subjects has been amended to omit the sciences. According to Kevin Richert:

A bill designed to clarify the role of the Bible in public schools is headed to the Senate floor — for some rewrite.

The Senate State Affairs Committee voted unanimously to send Senate Bill 1342 to the floor for amendments. And the committee discussion offered a glimpse into how the bill might be reworked.

For one thing, senators said they wanted to delete references to using the Bible to teach astronomy, biology and geology. They also said they wanted to rework the bill to address not only the Bible, but other religious texts.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, R-Cottonwood, said she was amenable to both changes.

As currently written, SB 1342 would allow the use of the Bible as a reference work, “to further the study of literature, comparative religion, English and foreign languages, United States and world history, comparative government, law, philosophy, ethics, astronomy, biology, geology, world geography, archaeology, music, sociology, and other topics of study where an understanding of the Bible may be useful or relevant.”

Sen. Todd Lakey, R-Nampa, suggested striking the sciences from this list — as a safeguard against using the Bible to teach creationism. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against teaching creationism in public schools.

Good idea, since the Bible is not a science textbook.  Hat tip to the NCSE.

Human/Gorilla Split at Eight MYA?

Scientific American is running an article, which details work by Gen Suwa and colleagues, in the Afar Triangle, where nine gorilla-sized teeth were found in 2007 that have now been securely dated to around eight million years ago.  The researchers named the species Chororopithecus abyssinicus.  Charles Choi writes: 

The age and location of these fossils strengthen the view that the human and the modern ape lines originated in Africa and not Asia, the researchers said.

"Until now, no mammalian fossils south of the Sahara have been securely dated to 8 million to 9 million years ago," Suwa said. "Any and all fossils from this crucial time period of Africa would help unravel the story of human origins and emergence. These are the first such fossils."

In addition, until recently, "most scientists, especially geneticists, thought that the human-chimp split was as recent as 5 million years ago, and that the human-gorilla split was only about 7 million to 8 million years ago," Suwa said. "This contradicted the fossil record. For example, fossils thought to be on the human side of the split such as Ardipithecus kadabba from Ethiopia and Sahelanthropus from Chad were 6 million years old — or, in the case of the Chad fossil, perhaps 7 million years old."

The new findings suggest that Chororapithecus is 8 million years old, so "the actual gorilla-human split must then have been up to several million years before that," Suwa said.

More pieces to the puzzle. The other mystery, of course, is when the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived.

Update: Mississippi Bill Dies in Committee

NCSE is reporting that HB 50, the Mississippi “Academic Freedom” bill proposed by Mark Formby has died in committee.

Mississippi's House Bill 50, whose principal sponsor acknowledged was intended to allow teachers in the public schools to present creationism, died in the House Education Committee on February 23, 2016, when a deadline for bills to be reported out of committee expired. HB 50 was the first antiscience bill in the state since 2010.

If enacted, the bill would have allowed teachers "to help students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught" — and blocked administrators from preventing the teaching of pseudoscience.

Things might have gone okay for the bill had it not been for the fact that Formby tipped his hand by suggesting strongly that the bill could be used by teachers to teach creationism. The publicity that generated was probably enough for the committee to realize that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that, if enacted, the law wouldn't be challenged in court.

Aside: while the Discovery Institute went public recently with its repudiation of the bill's intent (to teach creationism), it is naive, given what we know of what happened in Dover and the general leanings of the promoters of these sorts of bills, not to think that the ultimate goal of most of them is to either teach creationism or attempt to take evolution out of the curriculum. Despite the lofty ideals of “academic freedom,” every one of them has focused almost exclusively on evolution. Sometimes climate change and synthetic biology are thrown in just to disguise the bill's true intent. It is here, in Mississippi, however, that we have the smoking gun.

Discovery Institute Weighs in on the Mississippi Academic Freedom Bill

On the website Evolution News and Views, Sarah Chaffee of the Discovery Institute attempts to distance the position of the DI from that of young earth creationists—a position I have not known them to take up to this point.  She writes:

In most states where academic freedom bills for science education are considered, it's the critics who are wrongly claiming that the bills would authorize the teaching of creationism.

But if media accounts from Mississippi are accurate, it appears that at least some legislators who support academic freedom legislation wrongly think it would permit creationism. The Mississippi legislature is currently considering HB 50, which was taken virtually verbatim from Discovery Institute's model academic freedom bill for science education. The language of the bill clearly does not authorize the teaching of creationism. It does not even authorize the teaching of intelligent design. Unfortunately, some of the bill's sponsors apparently think otherwise.

To clear up the confusion, Discovery Institute has sent a letter to the Mississippi House Education Committee explaining what the language of the bill would really do and asking the Committee either to drop the bill because of the inaccurate statements put out by some of its sponsors or to make clear that the legislature understands that the bill does not protect creationism.

This is a critical stance for the DI because, while they have always hidden behind the “academic freedom” legislation as being good for academics in general (when in fact, the central premise behind the vast majority of the academic freedom bills has been to bring creationism in through the back door) they have never explicitly endorsed young earth creationism, likely because they know that academically, it is a scientific non-starter and cannot be separated from a narrow, early 20th century misreading of the early chapters in Genesis.

The letter is produced in the post and has the stark admission that the current Mississippi bill was drafted used a model bill for academic freedom that came from the DI, itself.   There are problems with how evolution is presented in the letter, however.  The DI still seems focused on the role of mutation and natural selection, without considering all of the other ways in which evolution acts.  This is especially evident in their continued use of the partial Lynn Margulis quote in which she argues that mutations don't create new species.  Of course they don't.  But in combination with genetic drift, flow, selection and a host of other mechanisms, they provide one part of the puzzle to how new species form.

I will be curious to see how this bill fares, now that the mask is off regarding its proposal and also how this letter from the DI is received. 

Ken Ham and the Church of Darwin

Ken Ham was the subject of an article on Christian News Service, which began the piece with the astounding claim that Ham is "a biologist."  He has a bachelor's degree in applied science, with an emphasis in environmental biology.  That doesn't make him a biologist.  No matter.

Michael Chapman writes:

In an interview on VCY America on Feb. 10, two days before the international Darwin Day, host Jim Schneider said to Ken Ham, “I was disturbed in my spirit to hear we have House now and Senate resolutions declaring Feb. 12 to be Darwin Day, and as much as that grieved me, it grieved me even more though to see that churches are doing the very same thing.”

Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum, said, “Churches are doing the very same thing. And think about this: At the same time, they’re trying to throw nativity scenes out of public places, take Christ out of Christmas, and then they claim there’s separation of church and state but there is no such thing as church and state.”

“The First Amendment doesn’t even have that terminology in it,” said Ham. “The establishment clause is about the state not establishing a church. But the state has established a church, it’s the Church of Evolution, with Darwin as the high priest, if you like, and a lot of these teachers and professors as priests in this religion of evolution that they’re imposing through the schools.”

Welllll...where to start.

January 13 is Stephen Foster Memorial Day, January 15 is Lee Jackson day, January 18 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, February 4 is Rosa Parks Day, February 15 is President's Day, February 15 is Daisy Gatson Bates (I had to look her up) Day, February 28 is Linus Pauling Day, March 7 is Casimir Pulaski Day (Had to look him up, too)...Do I need to go on?

So why would “Darwin Day” be a problem? It is a problem because, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, Ham thinks evolution is a religious point of view. There is not a shred of evidence for this perspective but that is the one he has. Consequently, to create a Darwin Day is to create a “church” holiday. The post continues:

“Molecules-to-man evolution is a fairy tale,” said Ham, author of The Lie: Evolution. “That’s really what it is. It’s man’s story, in rebellion against God, to try to be his own god, to try to explain life without God. We need to make people realize what it is.” “We actually, we have this on our website too, we actually will encourage you to say ‘not the theory of evolution but belief in evolution,’” said Ham. “The reason is because when people say theory, the idea of a theory is that there’s evidence for it. There’s no evidence for evolution, so it’s not even a theory.”

It is unconscionable for Ham to regard evolution as having no evidence when quite the reverse is true.  This brings me to a harsh accusation.  Even Todd Wood, the young earth creationist in Dayton, Tennessee, who actually works with biological data, recognizes that there is a mountain of evidence for evolution, even if he chooses not to accept it. 

For Ham, on the other hand, to continually state that evolution has no evidence despite the multitude of people who have shown him otherwise is a lie.  It simply is.  Ken Ham makes no effort to learn even the basics of evolutionary theory because he chooses not to.  That is his choice, but to pontificate from AiG and state that evolution has no evidence is irresponsible, arrogant, duplicitous and mendacious. 

40,000 Year-Old Bracelet Found at Denisova Cave

A bracelet has been discovered at the site of Denisova Cave that excavators have dated to c. 40,000 years BP.  Archaeology Hub has the story:

In what is quite an amazing discovery, scientists have confirmed that a bracelet found in Siberia is 40,000 years old. This makes it the oldest piece of jewelry ever discovered, and archeologists have been taken aback by the level of its sophistication.

The bracelet was discovered in a site called the Denisova Cave in Siberia, close to Russia’s border with China and Mongolia. It was found next to the bones of extinct animals, such as the wooly mammoth, and other artifacts dating back 125,000 years.

The cave is named after the Denisovan people — a mysterious species of hominins from the Homo genus, who are genetically different from both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

Here is the image of the bracelet from this site:

We know very little about the Denisovans, except that they coexisted with Neandertals and early modern humans and that their genetic fingerprint is present in modern-day Melanesian populations.  Here is a link to the National Geographic special that was done a few years back that covers the basics behind these mysterious hominins.  This find gives us a window into their culture. 

The Importance of Schöningen to the Story of Human Evolution in Europe

A lake site in northern Germany, near Schöningen, has lifted much of the veil of how advanced Homo heidelbergensis was during the later Lower Palaeolithic.  As Heritage Daily reports:

The excavations in the open-cast coal mine in Schöningen running from 1994 until today show that we have long underestimated the cultural capacities of Homo heidelbergensis. Schöningen is a key site for documenting both a high resolution record of past climatic change and how hominins lived in northern Europe during the Ice Age. Since 2008 Professor Nicholas Conard and Dr. Jordi Serangeli of the University of Tübingen have led the excavations with a major international research team in close cooperation with the Cultural Heritage Office of Lower Saxony.

the Journal of Human Evolution is making available for a time, all of the papers of a special issue on the site. That is how important it is. That link is here. 

What has been discovered, since the opening of the excavations, is that Homo heidelbergensis created advanced bone and stone implements, engaged in complex hunting behaviors and exhibited behaviors consistent with a high level of “planning depth.”  Further, they appear to have lived in a society with divisions of labor and a highly advanced communication system.

This has been referred to by the authors of one of the papers as “paradigm shifts in human evolution” and appears to represent, at least at this site and at this time period, a radical change in the way that humans were dealing with their surroundings.  In other words, at around 300,000 years ago, we seem to have the roots of modern human behavior, in Europe.  How much earlier this behavior actually shows up is, at the moment, anybody's guess.

Human Evolution in Two Minutes

I missed this when it came out.  The Indian Express has a link to a video done By Yale University Press by John Gurche, the same artist who did the Tower of Time, a wonderful mural that adorned the halls of the Natural History Museum, in Washington D.C. for years.

This video shows human evolutionary change as a morphing set of images.  Here it is.

Here's Irony For Ya...

A study has found that residents of South Africa, historically the hotbed of human evolutionary studies, have a poorer understanding of human evolution than their neighbors.  Jacaranda FM reports:

The study, published in the South African Journal of Science this month, used responses from visitors to the Cradle of Human Kind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg. “South Africans were less likely to accept human evolution than their international counterparts,” the article said. “The survey I did was mainly of adults who would never have learned of evolution at school,” said author of the study, Professor Anthony Lelliott from Wits University in Johannesburg. The study surveyed more than 800 visitors and assessed their understanding of human evolution and the concept of “cradle”. The article explained that 60 percent of the people who rejected evolution used a religious foundation as the reason.

I guess that in a rural setting, most of the people living in South Africa would not encounter this information or understand its true significance. Still, the entire region has been at the forefront of this research for decades, and yet most people still reject it. The hold of creationism is strong, it seems, no matter where you go.

Indigenous Arabs Direct Descendents of Modern Human Wave From Africa?

PhysOrg is running a story about research coming out of Weill Cornell Medicine and Qatar.  Abigail Fagan writes:

The investigation, published online Jan. 4 in Genome Research, sequenced the genomes of 104 Arabian Peninsula natives and compared them with 1,092 genomes from worldwide populations. The researchers compared each pair of genomes in the sample, which allowed them to cluster research participants by genome similarity so that an evolutionary tree emerged. The genomes of indigenous Arabs resulted in a unique cluster separate from the initial African population, illustrating the formation of a distinct population. European and Asian clusters diverged after the Arab population.

These data reinforce the "southern route" model of early modern human origins, which argues that early modern humans left Africa initially by crossing over or ferrying over the northern tip of the Gulf of Aden, near what is currently Djibouti.

Sorry for the light posting

I have been in poor health for the last month or so and have not been able to post much.  Sorry for the absence.

Mural Depicts Plant Evolution

The Amherst Bulletin has a story on a unique mural that adorns the botanical museum at Smith College, in Northhampton, Massachusetts.  Mickey Rathbun writes:

The mural is situated in a long, light-filled corridor that runs between the Church Exhibition Gallery and the Palm House at the Lyman Greenhouse. Until now, says the botanic garden’s director, Michael Marcotrigiano, “This had been an absolutely unvisited hallway. The only time people came in here was when they came to the spring bulb show and were waiting in line for the bathroom. I thought it would be the perfect place for a plant history mural.”

Marcotrigiano, who came on board at the botanic garden in 2000, said he first broached the mural concept in the early 2000s with Madelaine Zadik, the garden’s manager of education and outreach. But nothing came of the idea until 2006, when Zadik noticed a photograph in the Gazette of a Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation van, the side of which was adorned with a realistic forest scene. Zadik showed Marcotrigiano the picture and asked, “You’re looking for a muralist?”

Here is an image from the mural, which is sixty feet in length.

Neat.