The human race was divided into two separate groups within Africa for as much as half of its existence, says a Tel Aviv University mathematician. Climate change, reduction in populations and harsh conditions may have caused and maintained the separation.

Dr. Saharon Rosset, from the School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University, worked with team leader Doron Behar from the Rambam Medical Center to analyze African DNA. Their goal was to study obscure population patterns from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Rosset, who crunched numbers and did the essential statistical analysis for the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, said the team was trying to understand the timing and dynamics of the split into at least two separate groups.

Ferdinand Magellan set out from Spain in 1519 with hopes of claiming the wealth of the Spice Islands, or Moluccas, for the Spanish. Two years later the explorer claimed the first European contact with a Pacific island culture when he landed on Guam – 1,500 miles north of the Spice Islands.

Was he the worst explorer ever? No, says North Carolina State University archaeologist Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick. Magellan’s historic circumnavigation of the globe was beset by unusual weather conditions, like El Niño, which eased his passage across the Pacific Ocean but sent him over a thousand miles off course.

Yes, El Niño, bane or boon to global warming debaters, depending on which side you are on. Screwing us all up then too.

As you read In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You you may have wondered if I hated poor Henry David Thoreau. Not at all. He inspired me at the young and impressionable age of sixteen and has powered my engines ever since. There's a good chance that he did the same for you. But brace yourself for irony. Thoreau is the perfect example of the positive aspects of consumerism.

What is consumerism? It’s the flaunting of surplus. It’s the conspicuous display of surplus time, of surplus energy, and of surplus luxuries.

And what was Thoreau doing at Walden Pond? He was flaunting a small flood of hidden luxuries. He was flaunting the surplus time that the wealth of his father’s pencil factory had given him. He was flaunting his ability to escape the web of commercial trade and the meshwork of human technologies. He was celebrating his ability to ditch the conventions other rich kids followed - the obligatory trip to Europe and a permanent plunge into the newly-quickening madness of city life.

Complex issues demand complex decision-making and not forced simplification, asserts Lasse Gerrits in his dissertation 'The Gentle Art of Coevolution', and the temptation to make important decisions understandable by simplifying them will eventually turn against the decision maker.

And it is also a myth that complex social issues can be readily resolved as long as there is someone who creates order, he says.

How did he reach his conclusions? He investigated the decision-making concerning the expansion of the Hamburg and Antwerp ports and simplification tends to exacerbate rather reduce problems.

A team of researchers led by Danish professor Eske Willerslev shows that the ancestors of the North American Indians who came from Asia were the first people in America, and that they were of neither European nor African descent. It also shows that immigration to North America took place approximately 1,000 years earlier than assumed. These findings call for a revision of our understanding of the early immigration route to the American continent.

Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues recently conducted DNA tests on samples of fossilized human feces found in deep caves in the Oregon desert and came to a conclusion sure to cause debate - the oldest of the droppings have been carbon-dated to be approximately 14,340 years old. Willerslev’s feces samples clearly contain two main genetic types of Asian origin that are unique to present-day North American Indians.

It's taken weeks to get here but we've covered 13.7 billion years of cosmic quirks. We've gone from The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture through Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture to The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements.

We've seen the beginning of mass behavior among quarks, the proto-memory of atoms, and a strange preview of culture long before life arose. We've run a background check on Evolution (aka Mother Nature) and have discovered her track record of violence and destruction. Destruction from which she's pulled enormous leaps of creativity.

We've sifted through Nature's murderous past looking for the lessons we humans must learn if we are to have a future. And in the end it all comes down to two fundamental realizations--that climate stability is radically unnatural and that we aren't running out of resources, we're running out of ingenuity. Ingenuity that we can get back.

An international group of researchers has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought.

Based on a study of 10 donkey skeletons from three graves dedicated to donkeys in the funerary complex of one of the first Pharaoh's at Abydos, Egypt, the team, led by Fiona Marshall, Ph.D., professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Stine Rossel of the University of Copenhagen, found that donkeys around 5,000 years ago were in an early phase of domestication. They looked like wild animals but displayed joint wear that showed that they were used as domestic animals.

Since the reporting of the so-called “hobbit” fossil from the island of Flores in Indonesia, debate has raged as to whether these remains are of modern humans (Homo sapiens), reduced, for some reason, in stature, or whether they represent a new species, Homo floresiensis.

In a study funded by the National Geographic Society Mission Programs, Lee Berger and colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand, Rutgers University and Duke University, describe the fossils of small-bodied humans from the Micronesian island of Palau. These people inhabited the island between 1400 and 3000 years ago and share some – although not all – features with the H. floresiensis specimens.

From Gods To Avicenna

Originating as divine and supernatural, Greek medicine changed and moved toward analysis and logical thinking during the period 800 B.C. to 460 C.E.

Thales (636-546 B.C.), philosopher and scientist, undertakes examination about the laws of nature and physics. He supposed that water (moisture) was the first element from which the world was formed.

Empedocles (Agrigento c.495- c.435 B.C.) philosopher and physician, who lived in Sicily, wrote “On Nature” and “On Purification“. Its system was based on the interaction of the four elements (fire, air, earth and water), called by him “rhizomata” (roots) under the influence of love and hate (attraction and repulsion). He studied circulation of the blood and atmospheric pressure, foreshadowed view of evolution. He was the founder of Italian medicine.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed. In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory and in The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements we got into how that retained memory and supersynchrony really kicked things into overdrive.

In our last exciting episode we discussed how huge new atom communities, RNA and DNA, used membranes as fortifications, no-go zones, corrals within which RNA, DNA, and their membrane-weaving partners could maintain a specialized mini-sea, a Jell-O or Gatorade rich in vitamins, organic molecules, enzymes, sugars, carbohydrates, fatty acids, and proteins.

The Big Burp had produced cells. And each of these cells was a working community of 10^11 atoms(80)— a hundred trillion atoms combined to pursue a highly complex common purpose. But, more important, a hundred trillion atoms with a heritage passed on from mother to daughter, a past recorded in a literal inner-circle, an interior ring of genes.(81)