#both genetics and fossils have now shown that clearly

[wheel-of-fandoms]

Excellent example. Though Musteloidea is the probably the clade that unites raccoons (Procyonidae) and red pandas (Ailuridae) (along with Mustelidae (weasels etc) and Mephitidae (skunks)). I don't think I've seen red pandas placed *within* Procyonidae, at least not any time recently?

Phylogeny is the study of branching evolutionary histories. Understanding phylogeny helps us paint a picture of our pals like the platypus, who their ancestors were, and why they look so... distinguished today. https://youtu.be/545PhCCpmlM

¿Quieren ver este episodio en español? ¡Exploren nuestro canal “Crash Course en Español”! https://youtu.be/q9R0PX1oKWw

[sciencespies]

Mysterious Skull Found in Greece May Contain A Shocking Twist About Early Human Migration

https://sciencespies.com/humans/mysterious-skull-found-in-greece-may-contain-a-shocking-twist-about-early-human-migration/

Mysterious Skull Found in Greece May Contain A Shocking Twist About Early Human Migration

A skull fragment found in Greece has inspired a startling hypothesis about when our species first arrived in Europe and immediately generated excitement and skepticism among experts who study how and when Homo sapiens dispersed from Africa.

Researchers say the fossilized skull, found in the late 1970s in a cave in southeast Greece and stored since then in a museum, belonged to an individual with anatomically modern features who lived about 210,000 years ago.

If true, that would be earliest example of Homo sapiens ever discovered outside the African continent. The date also precedes by a whopping 160,000 years the age of any Homo sapiens fossil previously found in Europe.

The bold claim, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, comes from a respected team of researchers, but it was met with caution from a number of other paleoanthropologists who were not involved in the research.

Disagreement is not unusual for this field, in which hypotheses and conjectures about human prehistory can emerge from a solitary jawbone or even a finger. Fossils are rare, difficult to date and usually fragmentary, and human prehistory is inherently a misty narrative.

The new study focuses on the damaged remains of two skulls — named Apidima 1 and Apidima 2 — found just inches apart in a crevice. Initially scientists assumed the skulls were of the same age because they were found together.

But researchers recently used laboratory techniques that looked at the radioactive decay of trace amounts of uranium in the specimens, and concluded that the individuals came from different eras. The tests indicated that Apidima 1 is about 210,000 years old and Apidima 2 about 170,000 years old.

Those dates contained a shocking twist to the consensus about early humans in Europe. The researchers used a variety of methods to model what the skulls would have looked like before being shattered and distorted across thousands of centuries.

Apidima 2, the younger skull, looks clearly Neanderthal, which fits nicely with the understanding that Neanderthals — Homo neanderthalensis — were the dominant early humans in Europe in that period of prehistory.

But the older skull, Apidima 1, doesn’t look like it belonged to a Neanderthal, the scientists found. It looks more like an early Homo sapiens, they report.

There’s not much to this skull — just part of the back of the cranium. But it has a rounded shape and other features that the researchers liken to early modern humans.

Such an early presence of early modern humans in Europe is not implausible. Last year a different team of researchers reported the discovery in a cave in Israel of what they say is a Homo sapiens jawbone and teeth from an individual that lived roughly 177,000 to 194,000 years ago.

The new study proposes that the Levant and Turkey could have been migration routes for early modern humans to reach southeast Europe.

If this new interpretation is correct, the authors writer, Apidima 1 is “the earliest known presence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia, which indicates that early modern humans dispersed out of Africa starting much earlier, and reaching much further, than previously thought.”

This discovery also suggests that the early modern humans had contact with Neanderthals, who went extinct about 40,000 years ago, after a group of modern humans (often referred to as Cro-Magnons) had arrived in western Eurasia in force.

An extraordinary claim like this comes with inherent challenges. It’s essentially a single data point: one partial skull, damaged and distorted, with a “lack of archaeological context,” in the words of the new paper.

There’s nothing else: No stone tools, no burial signs, nothing to suggest modern human behavior. The claim would obviously benefit from a second Homo sapiens fossil of similar age somewhere in that part of the world.

“Of course it would be lovely to find more,” said lead author Katerina Harvati of Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen, in Germany, in a conference call with reporters. “We intend to try to look.”

Several paleontologists who read the paper came away skeptical. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said the new claim is a “one-off” with a date significantly different from what has been previously documented. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, though.

“Of course there’s got to be a time when you find the first one. But we don’t know yet until we find multiple examples of this,” he said.

Melanie Lee Chang, a Portland State University evolutionary biologist who specializes in human evolution, echoed that sentiment: “Right now it is an outlier. It could be that there are whole lot of specimens in cabinets that people haven’t looked at in a while and will go back and reinterpret like this. But I’m not willing to sign on to all of their conclusions here.”

John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist, said genetic evidence has shown that Neanderthals had genes from African ancestors sometime before 200,000 years ago, and thus “finding a skull that might be that age that has clearly what seems like African modern human features make a lot of sense.”

But he also sounded a cautionary note. It’s odd, he said, that two skulls of such different ages were found right next to one another. The researchers believed the fossils were washed into a crevice and then were embedded in sediments that hardened about 150,000 years ago.

Said Hawks, “This is a weird scenario to have two human skulls that are next to each other that are so different in age, and it makes me want more evidence.”

One co-author of the Nature paper, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum of London, acknowledged that this is a “challenging new find” for which skepticism is appropriate initially.

“We don’t have the frontal bone, browridge, face, teeth or chin region, any of which could have been less ‘modern’ in form,” he said in an email. But he said the team tested their reconstruction efforts in multiple ways and that the fossil “certainly shows the high and rounded back to the skull that is typical only of H. sapiens.”

He said it would be helpful to find stone tools associated with Homo sapiens. “If we have interpreted the Apidima evidence correctly, the handiwork of these early H. sapiens must be present elsewhere in the European record,” he said.

All people alive today appear to have descended from an ancestral group in Africa that lived roughly 70,000 years ago. “Both the fossil evidence and genomic evidence of modern day humans still suggest that the permanent success of Homo sapiens beyond the African continent is maybe 70,000 years old,” Potts said.

But the finer details of human prehistory, including the fate of groups that dispersed but apparently died out, have gotten more complicated with each new discovery.

There was not a single, linear evolution of humans — which was the presumption among paleoanthropologists just half a century ago — but rather many hominid species that coexisted for millions of years before a single species replaced everyone else.

“We’re the last biped standing of what used to be a very, very diverse evolutionary tree,” Potts said.

2019 © The Washington Post

This article was originally published by The Washington Post.

#Humans

[power-in-christ-blog]

✝️CHRISTIAN TOPICS 2017✝️ #3 of #6 (May 2017) - CAN HUMAN INTELLIGENCE FIND ALL THE ANSWERS... 🤓 2017 is nearly halfway through and today's blog marks the halfway point of my series of Christian Topics for the year. This month's blog has been especially challenging due to limits on the amount of free time available to me since my second son, Jude, was born in April. But regardless, with some careful planning [and a lot of sacrificed lunch hours] it has finally reached fruition. The topic I am focusing on this month is close to my heart; I genuinely believe that as a species, humanity can be exceptionally arrogant to a point—myself included—with what we think we can know and understand in this life. I will try to explain my thought process below. 🌎MODERN AGE/MODERN WORLD 🌎 There can be no denying that we live in a remarkable age, we have many wonderful tools such as: science, medicine, technology, aeroplanes, cars, boats, spacecraft etc. Truly we live in a connected age of convenience where everything is just a touch away. As a species we certainly have accomplished many things, a lot of which can be credited to advancements in science and technology. In today's world it's possible to store a scary amount of our personal data on our phones—I am even writing this on my iPhone—to take anywhere for convenience; additionally on these very devices we have access to the largest resource of information on the planet directly within our hands in the form of the internet; this can provide a lot answers—albeit not always accurate—to a lot of life's questions. On a personally level, I also am a large fan of video game consoles, I have been since 11, this still remains a strong passion to this day. Video games allow us all to live out fantasies of adventures and enjoy escapism from the usual routine of daily living. 🎮 There are many other things around us that are connected; our cars (although not mine lol) can be fitted with GPS to help us travel and have computers storing data onboard also; hospitals have mountains of data on patients and treatments stored away - just remember the recent hacking incident with the NHS being held to ransom; even our roads and streets are monitored by CCTV to ensure everything runs as expected. So clearly technology is something in our day-to-day lives and science is all around us, sometimes subtly, other times not so, advancing all aspects of our societies. I hope this shows that I value both of these things and appreciate the value of aforementioned examples above. 📱 🔗HOW DOES IS ALL FIT? 🔗 The problem lies in the fact that sometimes the scientists and philosophers of our world think that they can answer, or attempt to answer, all of life's questions. This type of curiosity is definitely admirable but to believe we can find all of the answers of universe is quite unrealistic. Let's take a look at two of the most notable examples below: 💥Georges Lamaître proposed a study in 1927 that would go on to become know as The Big Bang Theory; this is normally recognised as one of the most popular theories for the creation of our universe (and yes I now he was a Catholic). 🐒Charles Darwin famously published "On The Origin of The Species" in 1859 thus laying the groundwork for what would become The Theory of Evolution. Now I won't disrespect the work of these two highly-intelligent gentlemen, in reality I know they are far more intelligent and accomplished than myself. But I personally believe that the problem with these types of theories is that they are constantly being modified and updated to the point where you are not sure what to believe. In something of a tradition I will now use some etymology to explain scientific theory, scientific fact and plan old regular facts. I will demonstrate this to show the subtle, but important, differences that are generally neglected by many when discussing science and facts. For this research I have used www.dictionary.com to ensure the answers remain grounded. ⚛️FACTS, FACTS & THEORY... ⚛️ 💡SCIENTIFIC THEORY💡 (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-theory) This simple term can cause a lot of confusion for people as the context is often misused. When people think of a theory, they generally consider it be an idea that hasn't been proven, science however as a different definition for the word: noun 1. a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation: the scientific theory of evolution. 🔬 SCIENTIFIC FACT🔬 (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-fact): Something that a lot of people are not clear on is the common vernacular used when explaining basic scientific ideas. For example: when science calls something a "fact", what it is actually referring to is a "scientific fact". This can cause confusion as an actual fact is not the exactly the same thing as a scientific fact. Below I will show the definition of both: noun 1. any observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and accepted as true; any scientific observation that has not been refuted. Examples The structure of a cell membrane is considered a scientific fact. ❗️FACT ❗️ (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fact) I am sure this one needs no introduction, if people are unsure on this one then hopefully the definition below will help: noun 1. something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
 2. something known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact. From the above you can see the differences, a fact is an absolute, something that is undeniable; whereas a scientific fact is an observation accepted as a truth by multiple scientists. Personally I think a scientific fact is a bit fluffy, scientists give themselves the freedom to declare a something a fact simple because multiples of scientists think the same, this doesn't mean they are always correct. Science provides itself with plenty of wriggle room to change its mind, theories and facts. Science does declare that this is because ideas are constantly evolving (no pun intended), however personally I feel this is just a glorified way of erasing or editing mistakes. A good example of scientific facts changing or being removed is in the hyperlinks below, this shows multiple scientific facts which are now obsolete; the point of the matter is that at one time, not so long ago, they were considered concrete fact, but now that is not the case. So to summarise, what is the difference between a scientific fact and a scientific theory? In short the scientific theory is a way of explaining a detailed hypothesis; these hypothesis then become scientific fact once multiple studies and scientists agree. Another point of confusion is that some might not realise is that science recognises Evolution as both a scientific theory and a scientific fact; the Big Bang Theory however is recognised only as a scientific theory - this is largely due to less evidence or agreement among the scientific community on the theory. 🤖SO WHATS THE REALITY?🤖 The truth is that Evolution has many supporters, it is usually categorised as macroevolution (changing from one species to another) and microevolution (small changes to a species over time), both of which have varying levels of evidence demonstrated in animals and wildlife. The Big Bang Theory, however still needs further work, but is largely accepted as the best possible answer to creation in the scientific world. However many respected scientists have recently suggested it may not be the definitive answer to the creation of the universe. As to the question of whether mankind evolved from apes through a common ancestor or not; there certainly are intriguing arguments to be made regarding the similarities in genetics and DNA between apes and mankind, but these theories don't necessarily disprove God. Science also declares that mankind shares a common ancestry with chimpanzees and gorillas, likely from Africa. It notes that the individual species of animals followed their own unique evolution timeline to become the various species we see around the world today. Fossil records are also used as evidence to show us the various evolutionary stages, but in some cases they can be incomplete or inconclusive. In short, science has some good evidence, lots of hypotheses, and many supporters to suggest the Man evolved to the point of homo sapien through common ape ancestry. It can also demonstrate that various species can adapt to suit their surrounding environments over time. But Evolution, like the Big Bang Theory, can't be fully demonstrated given the nature of the theories and hypotheses - even Richard Dawkins concedes to his point in the YouTube video in the hyperlinks below. Ultimately it boils down to this: science says the universe was created out of nothing, with a big explosion of creation using proven forces like gravity. But what then is there to declare God didn't cause the bang? It can show us partial clues, but neither of the two are unlikely to be able to be clearly shown, and certainly not demonstrated, to erase any traces of doubt. 📜AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD📜 From what you can see Evolution and the Big Bang Theory both are incredibly interesting ideas. They are also probably the best examples the collective human mind could imagine or theorise over to explain our very existence today. But as humans we are all limited, even the most intelligent among us should not be fooled into thinking that we can potentially understand everything the universe has to offer. Some people assume Genesis creation account was intended as metaphor written by Moses. What is there to say that when God created the world it didn't look like a Big Bang if it could have been observed from afar - perhaps Genesis was God's perception described to Moses in a firm he could comprehend?! The crucial mistake humanity makes is that we think we can know it all. The fact of the matter is that the universe is filled with many secrets, many of which will be beyond human comprehension forever despite our efforts. Science is truly important, we need it for our world; but how can we trust theories and hypotheses which constantly change or get disproved? With science the goalposts change always, God has always kept his word the same (with the exception on updating the language for modern audiences, but God isn't changing here). I think it's fair to say that the one limit of science is human intelligence and this is something that won't change ever. I won't say Evolution or the Big Bang Theory are wrong, but I do think they can fit within any faith depending on how you interpret and apply scriptures. After all, what is there to say that Adam and Eve didn't resemble our ape-like cousins in the beginning or Neanderthals?! The Bible itself does show some evidence of an evolution or adaptation of mankind. I will list some of these changes below: 🦍Goliath had 12 fingers and 12 toes - 2 Samuel 21:20 🦍 Methuselah lived for a whopping 969 years; this makes him the oldest person recorded in Biblical history - Genesis 5:27 🦍Giants lived during the Bible, Goliath was over 9 foot tall and King Og of Bashan was over 11 foot tall, plus there were many others - Amos 2:9 The above are just some of the examples of how the human race has changed and adapted according to the Bible since our creation. This clearly shows that mankind has changed throughout the ages for various reasons and is supported by the Bible. In a respect the Bible here is demonstrating that mankind has evolved and adapted to get to where we are today. Ultimately I believe we were created as Man and Woman by God, personally I would rather trust a higher power with faith rather than place my trust and faith in human intelligence, despite how intelligent the individuals may be. One thing that this world has shown me time and again is that it can't be trusted; it has taught me that man always has an agenda to fill; God on the other hand, I know I can trust and feel a relationship with through love and faith. I do believe species adapt to survive and improve, but I think in the beginning we were created human. Ultimately my final point is that science and mankind get things wrong a lot. Don't fall victim to assuming that everything the world tells you is true, history has shown that science is not infallible with facts; God on the other hand never lets us down if you trust him! I truly believe in God and trust his work and word totally, the secular world may think that is stupid but I don't care; I would rather this world label me stupid than trust in mankind. Truly I think the below sums it up for me: Psalm 118:8: "It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in humans." 🙏🏻 🔗USEFUL LINKS:🔗 Big Bang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître Dawkins Can't Prove Evolution: https://youtu.be/4Wp3Awd3MIk Evolution Questions: http://www.livescience.com/32503-why-havent-all-primates-evolved-into-humans.html Disproved Scientific Facts: http://list25.com/25-science-facts-that-were-proven-wrong/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/natashaumer/science-facts-you-might-have-believed-in-the-90s Adaptation In The Bible: https://answersingenesis.org/bible-characters/giants-in-the-old-testament/