Scientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debate

 

The skull of a 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.3 million years ago, discovered at the site of Dikika in Ethiopia. Image courtesy of Zeresenay Alemseged

Joel Kontinen

Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.

For a half century, the iconic "Lucy" fossil species, Australopithecus afarensis, has held the title of being the most likely direct ancestor of all humans.

Now, a key paper published last month in the journal Nature could overturn that theory entirely, some scientists say. They argue that, given the new evidence, an older species, Australopithecus anamensis, was our direct ancestor, not Lucy.

The proposal has revealed intense disagreements in the field. Some say A. anamensis is our direct ancestor, others argue that we don't know which Australopithecus species we descended from, and still others say the new analysis doesn't shake up the family tree at all.

The new discovery is "not altering our picture of human evolution in any way, in my opinion," Zeray Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist and professor of organismal biology University of Chicago who was not involved in the new study said.

The roots of the debate requires going back a century. In 1925, Raymond Dart announced the discovery of the first known Australopithecus — a skull dubbed the Taung Child unearthed in what is now South Africa that dates to around 2.6 million years ago. For the next 50 years, researchers thought that humans descended directly from the Taung Child's species, Australopithecus africanus.

But Lucy's discovery in 1974 at the Hadar site in Ethiopia rewrote that picture. The 3.2 million-year-old fossil became the oldest known australopithecine specimen at the time.

And Darwinian  researchers found her species, A. afarensis, walked upright on two legs similarly to how humans do today, yet it had a smaller brain — about the size of a modern-day chimp's. This suggested Lucy's kind could represent a "halfway" point in human evolution between the last common ancestor with chimps and us, making her species a good candidate for our direct ancestor among the many known hominins, the lineage that encompasses humans and our closest relatives.

According to evolution, Darwinian  evolution, with its millions of years, is the only reason for how we evolved, However, according to intelligent design, we were not produced that way,

Source:

Sophie Berdugo 2025 Scientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debate | Live Science December 22

Smart new book takes an axe to the myth of human exceptionalism

 

Image courtesy of Simone Rotella

Joel Kontinen

Christine Webb's provocative and moving book The Arrogant Ape explores our unjustifiable sense of superiority in the living world, laying out the evidence against it, says Elle Hunt.

Tests of chimps’ intelligence often take place in labs, not in the wild or in sanctuaries like this one.

In the beginning, God made man in his image, granting him dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

According to evolution, most people don’t look to the Bible to understand the world and our place in it, yet this view of humans as superior to nature and non-human life is sneakily persistent.

The characteristics said tao distinguish humans and justify our dominance – including the ability to reason, use tools, feel pain, act morally – aren’t exclusively human, it seems. Chimps, crows and others show nuanced intelligence, have complex social bonds and use tools; fish and crustaceans feel pain; bees are cultural beings; even plants may have senses akin to ours.

But it seems that animals have their traits, which does not make them humans. They create things that look like they tools for making you well.

Apes are not the only animals that can make human like tools. For instance, crows do the same.

 Source:

Elle Hunt 2025 Why non-human culture should change how we see nature | New Scientist 12 November 

See beautiful comet as it nears its closest approach to Earth

 

Comet C/2024 E1 has been photographed as it nears Earth - but even at its closest, it will still be 150 million kilometres away. Image courtesy of Ian Griffin

Joel Kontinen

This beautiful streak of light is comet C/2024 E1 hurtling through the southern constellation Grus. It was first spotted in 2024 and is thought to have originated from the Oort cloud, a region of icy rocks at the edge of the solar system, far beyond Pluto. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on 17 February – when it will still be almost 150 million kilometres away

The Oord cloud is a system that scientist haven’t recognised, it is thought to hold millions of comets.

Source:

New Scientist 2026 See beautiful comet as it nears its closest approach to Earth | New Scientist 11 February 

Evolutionists think that Bonobo's pretend tea party shows capacity for imagination

 

Kanzi the bonobo at the age of 43. Image courtesy of Ape Initiative

Joel Kontinen

Bonobos are our closed relatives and that they share the same traits that we do.  

Kanzi, a bonobo with exceptional language skills, took part in a make-believe tea party that demonstrated cognitive abilities never seen before in non-human primates. A bonobo that took part in a pretend tea party like those acted out by young children has shown that our closest primate relatives have the capacity for make believe.

Kanzi the bonobo (Pan paniscus) was born in the US in 1980 and died at age 44 in March last year. He spent most of his life at the Ape Initiative in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was renowned for being able to communicate by pointing at symbols on a board.

In the year before he died, Amalia Bastos at the University of St Andrews, UK, and her colleagues ran a series of experiments aiming to understand whether, along with his superior language skills, Kanzi was also able to engage in what researchers describe as “secondary representations”. This is the ability to imagine an alternative reality and, in some situations, share that pretense with another individual – a skill that humans develop at an early age.

At 2 to 3 years old, children can follow the movement of imaginary liquid between containers and keep track of where the “tea” is or isn’t, says Bastos. “That’s exactly the sort of context we presented to Kanzi to test this ability in a non-human animal.”

In the first stage of the experiment, researchers pretended to pour non-existent juice into two empty cups before pretending to empty one of the cups and then asking Kanzi which one he wanted. More than two thirds of the time, Kanzi chose the cup that hadn’t been emptied and still contained the pretend juice.

“If Kanzi hadn’t conceived of ‘imaginary juice’ in the cups throughout the study, he should have picked between the two cups at chance – after all, they were both empty,” says Bastos.

Then the researchers placed an empty cup and one containing juice on a table in front of Kanzi. He chose the cup containing juice more than three quarters of the time. This test was to ensure the bonobo could differentiate between real and fake juice.

For the third test, the team started by placing a real grape into one of two cups; Kanzi selected the real grape every time. Then a pretend grape was placed in each of two cups before one was emptied. Again, in over two-thirds of attempts, Kanzi correctly chose the cup that still contained a pretend grape.

Bastos says all of the team’s studies with great apes are fully voluntary. “The fact that Kanzi stuck around and continued to engage even in trials where he knew there would be no reinforcement says to me that he must have at least enjoyed it a little bit.”

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Bonobo's pretend tea party shows capacity for imagination | New Scientist 5 February 

 

 

Why Tucker Carlson is Dead Wrong About Christian Zionism

 

Why Tucker Carlson is Dead Wrong About Christian Zionism? It has to do with Israel.

Neanderthals and early humans may have interbred over a vast area

Image courtesy of Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were probably interbreeding over a huge area stretching from western Europe into Asia.

We have long known that early humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) interbred, which is why most non-African people today have some Neanderthal DNA, typically about 2 per cent of their genome. The interbreeding also saw the Neanderthal Y chromosome lineages replaced by lineages from H. sapiens.

But where this interbreeding happened and on what kind of scale has long been a mystery, even if we are now starting to get a handle on when it occurred. The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 600,000 years ago, hea offding into Europe and western Asia.

Neanderthals left Africa about 600,000 years ago, heading into Europe and western Asia. And the earliest evidence of H. sapiens migrating out of Africa is skeletal remains from sites in modern day Israel and Greece, dating back around 200,000 year Asia.  

The dating for this study is off by many thousands of years. The Neanderthals were the descendants of Adam and Eve, so  their "interbreeding" is not  unexpected.

 Source:

Chris Simms 2026 Neanderthals and early humans may have interbred over a vast area | New Scientist 2 February 

Tucker Carleson is clueless of the Saudi persecution of Christians

 

Tucker Carleson is clueless of the Saudi persecution of Christians.