Fossils unearthed in northern Spain are around 1.1 million years old
and represent our earliest known European’ hominin ancestors
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13537-first-european-had-a-mountain-retreat-in-spain.html
Here’s one for my book wishlist:
The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us
The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.
by Jane Bosveld
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95) Read the rest of this entry »
The Flores Hobbits Were Members of a Separate Species
… according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study compares skull measurements of Flores material with a wide range of other hominid data and concludes that Flores cannot be clustered with Homo sapiens.
Pedal to the metal for human evolution
Mass migrations, the population explosion, and city living fuel rapid rate of genetic change
We can’t see it in our short lifetimes, but human evolution is going faster than ever before. Today, the rate of our evolution is over 100 times faster than it was in the depths of time, according to a paper published in PNAS called “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.”
These statements are misleading since they confuse microevolution with ‘evolution’ itself, in the sense of that which produces Man as Man. And they can lead to passive complacency about the effects of ‘civilization’.
Conversation: Evolution OverdriveVolume 61 Number 2, March/April 2008
The human genome is changing faster than ever
While it is of tremendous interest to study the genetic compoent of ‘recent’ evolution, the fact remains that human evolution began to go in a different direction in the wake of the Great Explosion (ca. 50000 years ago), especially with the Neolithic/Rise of Civilization. And this is driven by a different form of (macro) evolution visible in the dramatic, and decisive, evidence of the so-called Eonic Effect.
(Courtesy John Hawks)
Human evolution has been gathering speed for the past 50,000 years, Read the rest of this entry »
In yesterday’s post,More on Neanderthals/FoxP2 gene I cited the Times article on Neanderthals, here’s the full text:Neanderthals May Have Had Gene for Speech.
There was one point I didn’t discuss:
Dr. Klein said he was disappointed to have lost the genetic support from Dr. Paabo’s work but had not changed his views. “The archaeological record suggests a major change in human behavior 50,000 years ago, and I think there is overwhelming evidence for that.”
But Klein doesn’t need this evidence.
Klein’s important work on the Great Explosion is entangled in wrong genetic explanations, and I think that this misses the point. It seems to me this focus on the FoxP2 gene is misdirected (although important in its context). Klein is looking perhaps for the magic gene to match with his evidence for the Great Explosion period.
Check out history and evolution.com’s The Great Explosion, a short piece connecting with the material in the sections before it on the eonic effect. Whatever the genetic basis for the emergence of modern man we have to be strongly suspicious that the kind of non-genetic evolution seen in the eonic effect is involved in the sudden transformation suspected by students such as Klein.
One problem with the Great Explosion data/hypothesis is that it is assumed that man’s evolution is purely genetic. Perhaps not!!
The eonic effect shows purely abstract system evolution occurring in ca. 10000 years burst of directed evolutionary change, involving all the complex cultural variables falsely ascribed to genetic determinants.
This view is unacceptable to reductionists, but the evidence from the eonic data is unmistakable, and what’s more we have the rationale for the direct comparison of history and earlier evolution.
Time to face the facts, that genetic Darwinism doesn’t foot the bill for a theory of the descent of man. Read the rest of this entry »
Wrist bones bolster hobbit statusApe-like wrists suggest that Homo floresiensis was a distinct species.
See also: Hobbits Read the rest of this entry »
Reading The First Word (see yesterday’s post), on the evolution of language, I am struck once again by the short depiction of the emergence of man, as it unwittingly shows the smoking gun clues to something Darwinists don’t suspect, but which the evidence suggests in the various statements about the Great Explosion, and the take-off after that. Read the rest of this entry »
Continuation of previous post on the eonic effect, punctuated equilibrium, and gaia, posted to chaosmos@yahoogroups.com
Read the rest of this entry »
The True — and Shocking — History of the CIA
An on-the-record master history of the CIA has finally been published, and it lesson is that an incompetent intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all. Tools
This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).
A new version of the blogbook, Descent of Man Revisited is now online.
Updated complete version of Descent of Man Revisited the blogbook is now online in a new directory.
The online blog book Descent of Man Revisited has a new complete draft, with the beginnings of a world history outline in an appendix.
The next iteration is going to show some major surgery, and change gears, so this is the last phase of the old format/chapters.