Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution

 

Image courtesy of Phil P Harris, CC BY-SA 2.5

Joel Kontinen

Did early humans live in the rainforests ages ago? This is what new study suggests.  

Nearly 70,000 years ago, modern humans created stunning rock art in an unexpected place: the tropical Indonesian island of Sulawe. The finding, announced in January, made headlines for being the oldest known rock art in the world.

But the discovery's location also highlighted another surprising finding: that members of our species, Homo sapiens, were thriving in the tropics tens of thousands of years ago.

But that perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi's ancient rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

Understanding how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped our evolution — "may give us an insight into something about what it means to be uniquely human," Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the book "Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History" (Penguin, 2022), said, .

But the evolution thing is not true.

Conventional wisdom held that modern humans emerged from one parent population in an East African savanna and did not encounter rainforests until around 12,000 years ago, after agriculture emerged to support survival in these climes. The lack of H. sapiens fossils from Africa's tropics appeared to support this view.

Then, in 2017, scientists identified the oldest modern-human fossils — except they weren't in East Africa, but rather in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. The following year, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and her colleagues reviewed archaeological evidence, including the Jebel Irhoud fossils, and integrated it with genetic data from present-day populations. The evidence pointed toward H. sapiens originating from many subdivided populations across Africa.

Source:

Sophie Berdugo 2026 Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution | Live Science 26 June

 

 

 

 

 

Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy

 

Image courtesy of Spark802, CC BY-SA 4.0

Joel Kontinen

The centre of our galaxy is a strange and chaotic place, but we may finally have an explanation for  three populations of stars, all strikingly different from one another but with similar ages, and researchers have come up the with a relatively simple model that can explain all of them at once.

This is a Darwinian explanation of the origin of  a  galaxy and black holes and stars.  The history of the Sagittarius A objects  is based on fables and not  objective science.

The closest objects to Sagittarius A* are called S-stars: a spherical swarm of stars, many of which are on elongated orbits that take them dangerously close to the black hole. Their distribution also has a strange, unexplained gap called a zone of avoidance. The next layer contains clockwise disc stars, which are massive stars that sit in a relatively orderly disc outside the orbits of the S-stars. Finally, there are the off-disc stars, which are on more scattered orbits, including some that appear to circle in the opposite direction from the rest.

Source:  

 Leah Crane 2026 Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy | New Scientist 24 June

Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann.

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science. 

“Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.”

Walking sharks does not mean that they have discovered a breaks  that makes Darwin’s theory that says walking fishes do away  with fishes with legs cannot form.

“The new species the Darwinian has been named Hemiscyllium after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.”

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Never-before-seen shark that 'walks' on land discovered off Papua New Guinea | Live Science 16 June 

Elusive dwarf fox, feared extinct, photographed for the first time on island of Yucatán

 

Image courtesy of (Rathe fael Chacón.

Joel Kontinen

The Lazarus effect  is evident in tiny foxes in the Yucatan.

The tiny animal was part of the mysterious Cozumel fox population, a potentially undescribed species that had not been officially sighted in more than 20 years.

Park and museum officials spotted and captured the fox in 2023 and, after a health assessment, released it back into the wild. Researchers have now shared the photographs and documented the encounter in a new study published May 4 in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.

Although the rediscovery confirms that Cozumel foxes are still alive, they are likely on the brink of extinction, the study authors noted

.Cozumel foxes are an example of insular dwarfism, an evolutionary process in which larger animals, including fox-sized mammals, evolve to be smaller after colonizing islands, where there are limited resources and less space than on the mainland. The foxes aren't the only mammals that have shrunk on Cozumel over time; other examples include the island's.critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) and dwarf coatis.

The Darwinist tend to picture this an evolutionary process, but it is not.  

Source:

Patrick Pester 2026 Elusive dwarf fox, feared extinct, photographed for the first time on island off Yucatán | Live Science 21 June

 

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Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science

 

Image courtesy of MV Erdmann

Joel Kontinen

Sharks are living fossils that defy the cause of evolution. Walking sharks are not new in evolution, but this one is new to science.  

Sharks in the genus Hemiscyllium, commonly known as walking sharks or epaulette sharks, use their pectoral fins like legs to move around and are only known to be in Australia and New Guinea.

The new species has been named Hemiscyllium dudgeonae after Christine Dudgeon at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who was part of the team that formally identified it.

She first encountered the shark after midnight one day in March 2025, swimming in just a metre of water covering a meadow of seagrass in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.

Dudgeon was looking for a different species, Hemiscyllium michaeli, known to inhabit nearby waters. “Because it was so late and I had been in the water for a while, I was a bit over it,” she says. “Then I just saw one swimming along the bottom.”

She shone her torch in front of the shark, which was nearly three-quarters of a metre long, making it freeze as a defensive response. Then she grabbed it and gently employed a jiujitsu-like move that researchers call the “flip and tuck”. “You sort of just flip them over and tuck the tail under your armpit and it stops them from wriggling away,” she says.

Once the shark was secure, she handed it over to her colleague, Jess Blakeway, who was in a boat drifting nearby.

The species that the team had been expecting to find has a more leopard-like pattern. “This new one has got lots of spots and dashes that reminded me of braille or morse code,” says Blakeway.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Walking shark found in Papua New Guinea is new to science | New Scientist 16 June 

Gas from Uranus reveals it has an icy centre

 

Image courtesy of JPL/NAS

Joel Kontinen

Carbon monoxide in Uranus's deep atmosphere in dictates that the planet contains more ice than rock, suggesting it formed more like Neptune than we thought.

It  seems that  Uranus has more water than scientist taught, but it is inside the planet.  Genesis seems to indicate that all planets had water in them.

Uranus appears to have far more water frozen as ice in its interior than astronomers thought, potentially settling a long-runnig mystery about whether it formed differently to its closest neighbour, Neptune.

Ice giants like Uranus and Neptune have thick, gassy atmospheres. This makes it hard to know what is inside the planets’ interiors or how they formed. Scientists can, however, measure gases in their atmospheres, which they can then link to processes and elements deeper inside.

Carbon monoxide in a planet’s atmosphere is often associated with its deepest parts being rich in water or ice, but while neighbouring Neptune has displayed abundant carbon monoxide suggestive of an ice-rich centre, Uranus has been lacking, which has led some astronomers to argue it instead has a rocky interior. If true, this would mean that Neptune and Uranus formed in very different ways and aren’t as similar as they appear

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2026 Gas from Uranus reveals it has an icy centre | New Scientist 19 June 

Complex life on Earth may last 500 million years longer than expected

 

Image courtesy of Vimal-S/Unsplash,

Joel Kontinen

How long  will complex life dwell on Earth? Some researchers say that it will be 500 million years in the future.

As the sun expands over the coming billions of years, Earth will become inhospitable to any life more complex than a microbe – but that might take longer than we thought.

The sun is getting brighter and expanding as it ages, and will one day begin to cook our planet before engulfing it altogether – but complex life may be able to hold on in this hellish Earth scenario for much longer than we previously thought.

Estimates based on looking at other stars suggest that our sun is maturing into a red giant, a process that will destroy Earth in around 5 billion years, but it remains an open question as to how long the planet will remain habitable. As far as complex life goes, the last standing will be the vegetative biosphere – plants, both aquatic and terrestrial. Their ability to continue thriving will be mediated in part by the temperature of the planet, but mainly by the levels of carbon dioxide, which is necessary for photosynthesis.

But  according to the book of Revelation, life on Earth will be very different.

 Source:

 Leah Crane 2026 Complex life on Earth may last 500 million years longer than expected | New Scientist18 June