Todd's Blog

  New research last week documents a startling record of Neandertal hunting.  Now we've known for some time that Neandertals were good hunters and that they could take down big game.  This new work based on an ancient lake deposit from Germany where the remains of a couple dozen straight-tusked elephants ( Paleoloxodon ) were found.  They were originally excavated in the 1980s and 1990s during rescue excavations ahead of mining operations.  There were plenty of stone tools found with them, and they've long been known to be an odd deposit.  The remains were largely from adult bull elephants, which in African elephants are known to be kind of loners.  There was a dearth of young or female animals.  The way they were deposited was also peculiar, with a few sites concentrating just tusks.  Not surprisingly, the concentration of stone tools matched that of the elephant bones. The new research by Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues examined the bones for cut marks, and they found a

At his Carnegie Science lecture tonight, Lee Berger just announced abundant evidence of fire use in the Rising Star Cave, where the famous Homo naledi remains were found.  That's beyond HUGE. To recap: A massive fossil trove from a cave called Rising Star has been excavated by Lee Berger's team over the last decade.  The creatures are called Homo naledi , and the peculiar attributes of their deposition suggests they were intentionally placed their by the fellow Homo naledi . I've written about this a lot ( just search for naledi ), and I've taken flak from fellow creationists who have criticized my position on Homo naledi .  My own research has shown that Homo naledi is human, and the evidence for intentional body disposal (human burial?) is pretty overwhelming.  No one has yet proposed anything close to a model that explains the peculiar features of the Rising Star Cave and that is NOT intentional body disposal. As I mentioned, tonight Berger announced evidence of fi

Seeds of the Indian Pea, Lathyrus sativa . Photo by Andrew Butko, Wikimedia , CC BY-SA 3.0 .   There's a new report this week on Neandertal cooking.  Now, we've known for a long time that Neandertals hunted and used fires, but this is the first that I know of that supports the idea that they selected, processed, and mixed vegetative ingredients to make maybe a bread or cake or something like that.  I'm kind of disappointed it isn't more evidence, because I'm not really sure how excited we should be. The report comes from a team of researchers based at English institutions, primarily the University of Liverpool.  They were working with charred bits of stuff found at previous cave excavations.  Their work was mostly electron microscopy to identify the components of the charred bits.  There was only one bit from a Neandertal site, namely Shanidar in northern Iraq.  This piece contained ground up remnants of pulses , legumes of the genera Lathyrus (Indian peas, shown

  I can't tell you how long I've been hoping that we'd find something like this.  A research team from Israel this week published their findings on the cooking of fish at a site they estimate is 780,000 years old.  Zohar and colleagues show three important "ingredients" for their argument: (1) The accumulation of fish remains differs when it's a natural fish kill vs. a cultural accumulation, (2) the culturally accumulated fish remains are found in proximity to ancient hearths, and (3) the chemical structure of the remains supports moderate heating rather than burning. The site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov ("Daughters of Jacob Bridge," GBY) sits near the Jordan River some eight miles north of the present Sea of Galilee (yes, there's still a bridge there).  It's a well known site for many reasons, especially for the appearance of Acheulean tools, stone tools associated with Homo erectus .  There are also evidences of controlled burning in h

  There's a fascinating new research paper from last week's Science looking at large-scale trends in mammal skull shapes, and I'm still still thinking about it.  These comments are very preliminary. Authors Goswami and colleagues examined a sample of 322 mammal skulls covering the majority of mammalian diversity.  They analyzed changes in shape using 3D models of the skulls and landmarks to track how skulls differ from group to group and how they believe mammals have evolved over the last 100 or so million years on the conventional timeline.  They reach a few very interesting conclusions based on their results.  First, the highest rates of skull change in mammal "evolution" occur primarily at the base of the mammal tree, near the beginning of the Cenozoic.  Second, the highest rates of skull change among the mammals occur in groups like the whales, elephants, and sea cows.  Third, the lowest rates of skull change occur in the rodents and bats. That sounds really

Short answer: no. Long answer:  It's still no, but let me explain. As a biochemist by training, I've been interested in research on the origin of life for a long time.  I'm not talking about God speaking creatures into existence, either.  This research begins with the assumption that life emerged naturally from nonliving chemicals.  You might remember from high school biology hearing about Stanley Miller's experiment, where he zapped some ammonia, methane, and water vapor to make simple amino acids.  That experiment essentially jump-started the field of origin of life research, where scientists try all sorts of weird conditions to see if they can make biochemicals using random processes.   This research has not been successful.  Oh, it's definitely made progress of sorts.  Different sorts of chemicals have been formed, and we've found interesting organic compounds in space.  But no one has successfully generated a living system from any of these experiments.  K