Auch Affen haben Kultur
Schimpansen können auch harte Nüsse knacken – mit einer Baumwurzel als Amboss. Was die Tiere aber als Hammer benutzen, hängt offenbar davon ab, was ihre Gruppenmitglieder tun. Forscher sehen darin einen weiteren Beweis, dass die Menschenaffen kulturelle Eigenheiten pflegen.
Are Humans Still Evolving?
Humans can evolve even when monogamy limits their potential to produce children, according to research published today (April 30) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using church records of the marriages, births, and deaths of nearly 6,000 people living in Finland in the 18th and 19th centuries, an international team of researchers showed that the population’s reproductive fitness varied enough for natural selection to act.
“This is a good confirming instance, with solid evidence” that humans still have the potential to evolve in modern times, said Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, whose own work has suggested the potential for continuing human evolution beyond prehistoric times. Stearns, who did not participate in the current study, explained that the extremely strong data set, in which researchers could track each individual from birth through death, helped bolster the argument for evolution.
California Meteor Found Packed With Alien Organics
A sonic boom heard in California last week had an out-of-this world origin as ”a large meteoric event” according to NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. Scientists now estimate the blast measured in near 5 kilotons or roughly 1/3 the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II.Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, estimates the object was about the size of a minivan, weighed in at around 154,300 pounds.
“Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand and their trail lasts all of a second or two,” said Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Fireballs you can see relatively easily in the daytime and are many times that size – anywhere from a baseball-sized object to something as big as a minivan.”
The meteor appears to be much more valuable than scientists first thought. Meteorite hunters found fragments of the rock, identified by the “fusion crust” that forms when it burns in the atmosphere. NASA and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also mobilised a search team of about 30 scientists to search for the small black rocks.
The Cosmic “Life-Distribution Kit” –New NASA Research Reveals Primordial Building Blocks of Life
Creating some of life’s building blocks in space may be a bit like making a sandwich – you can make them cold or hot, according to new NASA research. This evidence that there is more than one way to make crucial components of life increases the likelihood that life emerged elsewhere in the Universe, according to the research team, and gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by impacts from meteorites and comets assisted the origin of life.
“The Virus Planet” — A Hidden Universe that would Reach Out 100 Million Light Years
In the invisible, parallel world of Earth’s they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Planet Earth, which is more stars than are in the Universe — stacked end to end, they would reach out 100 million light years.
Over tens, hundreds and millions years, our ancestors have been picking up retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) that reproduce by taking their genetic material and inserting it into our own chromosomes. There are probably about 100,000 elements in the human genome that you can trace to a virus ancestor. They make up about 8 percent of our genome, and genes that encode proteins only make up 1.2 percent of our genome making us more virus than human.
Occasionally, a retrovirus will end up in a sperm cell or an egg and insert its genes there, which then may give rise to a new organism, a new animal, a new person where every cell in that body has got that virus.
Beyond DNA! Prions Point to a New Form of Evolution in Nature
In 2010 scientists from the Scripps Research Institute showed for the first time that ‘lifeless’ organic substances with no genetic material — prions similar to those believed responsible for Mad Cow disease and similar, rare conditions in humans — are capable of evolving just like higher forms of life, a discovery that could reshape the definition of life and have revolutionary impacts on how certain diseases are treated.”
Tageslicht förderte soziales Miteinander
Als die urzeitlichen Vorfahren des Menschen nicht mehr nachts sondern am Tag jagen gingen, bildeten sie erstmals Gruppen. So waren sie sicherer vor Feinden. Die Ur-Primaten legten dabei die Grundlage für das heutige soziale Miteinander.
Has the Long-Sought Link to Modern Humans Been Found?
Scientists say a pair of fossils from a South African cave— an adult female and a juvenile — which display a small brain, but a brain that’s beginning to reorganize in some ways that resemble our brain–could be the long-sought transition between ape-like ancestors and the first humans.
It’s surmised that Australopithecus sediba still used his hands for climbing in trees, but it was likely also capable of making the precision grips believed necessary to make stone tools, according to Tracy Kivell, paleoanthropologist, with the Max Planck Institute
The “mix-and-match” anatomy, with traits of both primitive and modern animals,make the
South African fossils, dated at 1.9 million years ago is “probably the best candidate ancestor for giving rise to our immediate ancestor.”
Fossilien revolutionieren Bild der Menschwerdung
Ist das der Ahn aller heutigen Menschen? Die Fossilien einer Vormenschenart aus Südafrika, die jetzt erstmals im Detail untersucht wurden, erlauben einen beispiellosen Blick in die Evolution. Australopithecus sediba war wohl schon in der Lage, Werkzeuge zu bauen. Die größte Sensation aber ist sein Gehirn.
“Humans are Designing their Evolution” –Stephen Hawking
In the past decade, we’ve examined our Solar System’s orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. We’ve launched missions seeking out habitable Alien Earths and the existence of dark energy and have migrated from wondering if there’s life on Mars to searching out and studying myriads of exo planets in the Milky Way and infinite galaxies beyond.
Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. “At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information.”
Is Earth’s DNA Unique or a Universal Constant?
“Life has been using a standard set of 20 amino acids to build proteins for more than 3 billion years,” said Stephen J. Freeland of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that many other amino acids were plausible candidates, and although there’s been speculation and even assumptions about what life was doing, there’s been very little in the way of testable hypotheses.”
Sugar Molecule in Milky Way’s Habitable Zone Hints at Possibility of Life
Scientists recently detected an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life, in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist. Glycolaldehyde, the simplest of the monosaccharide sugars, can react with the substance propenal to form ribose, a central constituent of Ribonucleic acid (RNA), thought to be the central molecule in the origin of life.
The international team of researchers, including a researcher at University College London (UCL), used the IRAM radio telescope in France to detect the molecule in a massive star forming region of space, some 26000 light years from Earth.
A Single Genome Reveals Entire Span of Human History
Stored inside your genome are clues to the history of humankind, including global migrations and population crashes. So say researchers who have analyzed DNA pioneer, Craig Venter’s publicly published DNA sequence, and those of 6 others, to reveal major milestones in human history.
The analysis, published in Nature, suggests that descendants of the first humans to leave Africa shrunk to as few as 1,000 reproductively active individuals before rebounding. The study also suggests that, contrary to popular theories, these early humans continued to breed with sub-Saharan Africans until as recently as 20,000 years ago.
Is Human Population Growth Accelerating Evolution?
“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”
John Hawks — University of Wisconsin anthropologist
In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.
Evolutions Two Great Leaps: Scale of Life from Bacteria to Blue Whale
All life on Earth all sprang from the same single-celled organisms that first populated the planet, so how did life grow in size from bacteria to the blue whale?
“It happened primarily in two great leaps, and each time, the maximum size of life jumped up by a factor of about a million,” said Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental science at Stanford.
Payne, along with a dozen other paleontologists and ecologists at 10 different research institutions, pooled their existing databases, combed the scientific literature and consulted with taxonomic experts in a quest to determine the maximum size of life over all of geological time. In addition to quantifying the enormity of the two leaps in maximum size, the researchers also pinned down when those leaps took place. Both leaps coincided with periods when there was a major increase in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Werden wir unsere zukünftige Evolution selbst kontrollieren?
In the past decade, we’ve examined our Solar System’s orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. We’ve launched missions seeking out habitable Alien Earths and the existence of dark energy and have migrated from wondering if there’s life on Mars to searching out and studying myriads of exo planets in the Milky Way and infinite galaxies beyond. Our incredible advances have also underscored own, very human limitations — our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler in his new book, Heaven’s Touch: From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe, see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter. Kaler calls our visual spectrum “…but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.”
Human Infant Brains Mirror Our Evolution from Apes
“Through comparisons between humans and macaque monkeys, my lab previously showed that many of these high-growth regions are expanded in humans as a result of recent evolutionary changes that made the human brain much larger than that of any other primate,” says David Van Essen, PhD, Edison Professor and head of the Washington University School of Medicine Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. “The correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s much too good to put down to chance.”
The high-growth regions are areas linked to advanced mental functions such as language, reasoning, and what Van Essen calls “the abilities that make us uniquely human.” He speculates that the full physical growth of these regions may be delayed somewhat to allow them to be shaped by early life experiences.
The scientists found that the human brain regions that grow the most during infancy and childhood are nearly identical to the brain regions with the most changes when human brains are compared to those of apes and monkeys.
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