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Sunday, October 11, 2015

Oriental Institute Puts Select Photos From Its Archives Online

Absolutely fascinating, darlings!  The Oriental Institute has made some  photo archives from various expeditions to the Middle East available online.  Add this to your list of research resources.

ORIENTAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVES - Selected Photos

A Review of What We Know About Ancient Human "Species Interbreeding" (as the scientists call it, what bunk!)

Hola darlings!

A fundamental tenet of biology teaches us that like breeds with like.  As our technology continues to improve and we continue to dig more deeply into our human origins and people aren't afraid to toss off preconceived notions and never stop asking "but what about this? What about that?", I think all the crap some of learned in school (and some people still believe) about "ape men" and the classic Darwinian take on "evolution" is a bunch of baloney.  Now, on to the article at Phys Org - and do try to ignore the silly title:

How a one night stand in the Ice Age affects us all today

October 8, 2015 by Darren Curnoe, The Conversation

Over the past half decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years.  Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human.

But where in the world did these cross-species matings occur? Which archaic species were involved? Just how much of the  comprises DNA from these archaic relatives?And what impact did interbreeding have on our evolution and general biology as a species?
These are questions are the core of current research into interbreeding as revealed by DNA sequences obtained from fossils in Europe and Asia, as well as from comparisons with the genomes of living people.