Hooray for Evolution!

Anthropologist Alice Roberts studies forensic model of early European who would have lived some 35,000 years ago

A picture, or sculpture, is worth a thousand words. I can imagine that this face created by British forensic scientist Richard Neave of a man or woman who lived in the ancient forests of Romania more than 35,000 years ago, is giving those holding onto ideas of white racial superiority a fit. The face was pieced together using fossilised fragments of a skull and jawbone found in a cave seven years ago, and was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. As the long growing consensus among most who study hominid evolution is that modern humans arose in Africa some 60,000 years ago and spread out across the globe, this early European was given facial charateristics to more accurately depict this migration.

Read full article here.

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And be sure to support the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in their attempt to preserve the teaching of evolution in public schools.



In a related story,

Meet the ancestors: DNA study pinpoints Namibia as home to the world's most ancient race

May 2009



Scientists have long known that humans originated in Africa, but now a groundbreaking DNA study has revealed our 'Garden of Eden' is likely to be on the South African-Namibian border.

For it is the San people (pictured above), hunter-gatherers in this area for thousands of years, who researchers now believe are the oldest human population on Earth.

They are descended from the earliest human ancestors from which all other groups of Africans stem and, in turn, to the people who left the continent to populate other corners of the planet.

Full article here.