How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here. If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time. But archeologists want to be more specific. And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here. We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea. Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago. A simple matter for specialists, you say? Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...
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One of the common arguments of creationists is that (a) evolutionary theory is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossils, and (b) that dating is utterly unreliable. Both propositions are false. Just for the record, "radiocarbon dating" is only of several methods of radiometric dating, and not one that is important for work on the evolutionary tree. Radiocarbon, specifically, is very useful for archeologists but utterly useless for paleontologists. It is the use of a radioactive isotope of carbon to tell time, given knowledge of the half-life of that isotope. For anything older than about 50,000 years, there is so little carbon-14 left that it can't be measured accurately. For older finds (those of interest to a paleontologist) one looks for the isotopes of other elements, which have longer half-lives and so different ranges of utility. Somebody once tested a dinosaur fossil using the radiocarbon method, and THAT system declared that fossil to be 50,000 years old. This ...
Here's a link to a fascinating piece in the online magazine Science Alert. It concerns "a possible human ancestor known as 'Little Foot'" and the latest evidence about how old is the hominid skeleton that gave rise to the term. L.F. may have lived at the same time as, or even earlier than, the more famous australopithecine "Lucy," aka australopithecine afarensis. The proper Latin term for L.F. is still a subject of discussion, but some suggest Australopithecus Prometheus.
The September issue of HARPER's included a review by David Quammen of three recent books on the subject of the Neanderthals. What caught my attention, and made me want to commonplace a bit of this, was Quammen's digression onto the two different sorts of biology in general. There are biologists who look at their field as a batter of applied chemistry -- molecules interacting and compounding. There are also biologists who look at life on the level of the organism, or on the still broader level of the whole populations or ecosystems. Reductionists versus holists, if you will, although those words are judgment freighted. Quammen speaks of organismic versus molecular biology. Here's a passage, without further comment. You may have missed this argument, unless you work in the field or are somehow involved with the allocation of university budgets and buildings. It has been quiet and internecine but bitter, and traceable back to the late 1950s and early 60s, when Edward O...