Category Archives: Post Human

Asecurity camera recorded four black-clad gunmen as they rushed into a Netherlands supermarket. The camera watched them wave a gun in the face of a female employee. It watched her quietly hand over the money.

Later,MarieLindegaard, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, reviewed this crime and21 other commercial robberies to study the behavior of victims and bystanders.

The supermarket robbery hit close to home. It was Lindegaard's local grocery store.

After the crime, a few nearby male employees approached the victim, talking for a few seconds. A female employee left her position at the tobacco counterto walk across the length of the store.She embraced the victim intensely. She held the victim in her arms for a very long time, as if the victim was a small baby, Lindegaard said, hugging her and moving her back and forth. The victimbegan to cry.

Women were more likely to console victims than men, Lindegaard and her colleagues reported Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.If a victim was an employee, another employee was more likely than a stranger to soothe the victim, a factor the study described as social closeness. These findings and others show that humans are a lot like other great apes.

Only a few species have been scientifically documented consoling victims of aggression: human children, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. The new study is the first to observe consolation in adults, Lindegaard wrote in an email to The Washington Post. Other studies had concluded that consolation behavior in chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates was similar to humans, but they actually meant human children, she said.

For both humans and chimpanzees, scientists defined consolation as afriendly touch. The cameras recorded 249 people and 3,680 possible pairs of interactions. Gender, social closeness and the threat of violence played a role. Physical proximity did not.

Whenrobbers wielded weapons, or forcefully threatened victims, the odds of consolation increased sharply. A co-worker was several times more likely to offer consolation than a stranger. Women were about three times more likely to provide comfort than men.In 4 of 22 robberies, no one was consoled.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University who was not involved with the research,called for more studies like this one, based on observations instead ofsurveys. Many human studies based on questionnaires don't find gender differences in empathy, he said. In real-life observations, however, striking gender differences have been found in children, with girls expressing empathy (consolation behavior) more often than boys, de Waal said, just as in the present study.

The reaction by bystanders, such as embracing and touching of the victim, is extremely similar, de Waal said. It is the prototypical empathy response of the primates.

A few weeks ago, Dear Science answered a question about evolution that sparked a flurry of more questions. The Post's Sarah Kaplan answers them here. (Gillian Brockell,Julio Negron,Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)

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Chimps and people console victims in surprisingly similar ways - Washington Post

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner on Wednesday met with notorious Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, who isaccused of allowing thousands of extrajudicial killingsas part of a drug crackdown. The Colorado Republican says the pair talked about human rights abuses in the Philippines, battling extremismand North Korea.

I am very concerned about the direction that things are heading in the Philippines, Gardner told The Denver Post in a phone interview Thursday after getting off a plane back to the U.S. Im very concerned about the extrajudicial killings and Im very concerned about the rule of law, and if it is being followed when it comes to human rights. Imvery concerned about human rights abusesand thats why I brought it up face to face.

Gardner said he also met with several other high-ranking Filipino officials, as well as the chairman of the Philippines Human Rights Commission, Chito Gascon.

Instead of engaging in press release diplomacy, Gardner said, Im actually going to do something about it.

Gardner met Duterte in Manila, the Philippines capital. ThePhilippines Presidential Communications Operations Office, which released photos of the two men shaking hands and speaking, called the meeting a courtesy call.

The meeting came during a four-day trip that Gardner, chairman of a Senate subcommittee on East Asia, took to the regionwhile Congress has been in recess. On that trip, he alsovisited withU.S. military leaders in the region, senior officials in South Koreas newly elected government and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

The senator from Yuma met, too, withSung Kim, U.S. ambassador to the Philippines.

ProgressNow Colorado, a left-leaning advocacy organization, quickly criticized Gardners meeting with Duterteand demanded a full accounting of Gardners meeting with a murderous strongman who has been condemned by international human rights organizations.

Sen. Cory Gardner owes the people of Colorado an explanation for why he cant meet with us, but has time to visit with murderous Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte, said ProgressNows executive director Ian Silverii. Since taking office last year, Dutertes regime has been accused of thousands of extrajudicial killings, encouraging lawless vigilante violence against civilians, and threats against journalists. Duterte has boasted about personally committing murder. Duterte is the last person Sen. Gardner should be associating with, and yet there he was a headline in Filipino news media, smiling and shaking hands with this murderous strongman.

Gardner brushed off the criticism, saying liberal groups did not attack U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, his Democratic counterpart in Colorado, after hisvisit to Cuba.

Gardner also said he was able to secure a guarantee from Duterte that the Philippines would stop trade with North Korea. That they would help us on North Korea.

President Donald Trump and Duterte spoke on the phone about two months ago. A White House statement in April described the call as very friendly and said the U.S.-Philippine alliance is now heading in a very positive direction.

Duterte has taken a friendlier approach with Trump versus the antagonistic stance he had toward President Barack Obama, whom Duterteoncetold to go to hell for criticizing the Philippines leaders bloody anti-drug crackdown.

During Obamas final months in office, the Philippine president moved to build closer economic ties with China and Russia while repeatedly threatening to end his nations longstanding military alliance with the U.S.

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In interview, Cory Gardner says he talked with notorious Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte about human rights abuses - The Denver Post

Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Corey Stewart on Tuesday accused one of his rivals of participating in human trafficking, a claim he based on work Ed Gillespies lobbying firm did for Tyson Foods when the poultry giant was charged with smuggling Mexicans across the border to work in its U.S. plants.

In essence, Ed Gillespie is complicit in smuggling illegal aliens into this country, Stewart said. Hes complicit in human trafficking.

Stewart, who faces Gillespie and state Sen. Frank Wagner (Virginia Beach) in the June13 GOP primary, made the claim one day after The Washington Post reported that Tyson paid Quinn Gillespie & Associates more than $1million for help on a range of issues, including the criminal case, which ended in acquittal.

[GOP front-runner Ed Gillespie in a tight spot on immigration]

Gillespies campaign dismissed Stewarts claim which came exactly two weeks before the primary as a baseless attack.

Corey Stewarts campaign has been a constant stream of fabrication and falsehoods, Gillespie spokeswoman Abbi Sigler wrote in an email. Tyson Foods retained Quinn Gillespie in 2001 to provide public relations services dealing with charges for which a jury later found the company not guilty. As The Washington Post reported, Tysons made clear the firm was not retained to lobby on the issue and Ed was not involved in the day-to-day work for them.

Polls show Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman and onetime adviser to President George W. Bush, with a double-digit lead over Stewart, who is chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, and Wagner heading into the homestretch. Gillespie left the lobbying firm in 2007. Many political analysts think Stewart turned himself into a fringe candidate months ago by making the preservation of the states Confederate monuments the central issue of his campaign.

[Do Corey Stewarts Confederate antics help Ed Gillespie or hurt the GOP brand?]

But Stewart sees an opportunity to reset the race by playing up Gillespies ties to Tyson, noting that a sizable chunk of the electorate is undecided or even unaware of the race.

Now people are tuning in, he said, suggesting that voters will turn away from Gillespie when people find out that Ed Gillespie has been complicit in human trafficking of illegal immigrants into this country, illegal immigrants who are murdering and battering and raping American citizens.

On Facebook, Stewarts campaign promoted The Post story under an inaccurate headline of its own making: BREAKING: Gillespie Exposed for Receiving $1M+++ for Colluding with Illegal Alien Human Trafficker. The actual Post headline was, In Va. governors race, Gillespie in a tight spot on immigration in Trump era.

Tyson hired Quinn Gillespie & Associates in December 2001, just days before the U.S. Justice Department charged the poultry giant with illegally smuggling Mexicans into the country to work at processing plants in Virginia and elsewhere. Tyson acknowledged some smuggling at the time but maintained that it had been the work of rogue employees and was not sanctioned by corporate leaders. The company was acquitted.

Tyson paid Gillespies firm more than $1.1million from 2001 to 2007 to lobby Bushs White House, the Senate and the House on a range of issues, according to federal lobbying disclosures. Gillespie was listed as a Tyson lobbyist for several of those years. He was registered to handle issues that included amnesty proposals, immigration reform, country of origin labeling, and labor and workforce issues, according to those forms.

Gary Mickelson, a Tyson spokesman, told The Post last week that the company hired Gillespies firm for public affairs consulting, not lobbying, when our company was facing immigration charges. ... Most of the work done by Quinn Gillespie for our company did not involve Mr. Gillespie.

In response to Stewarts comments Tuesday, Mickelson issued a statement saying: Wehave zero tolerance for employing anyone who is not authorized to work in this country and use all available tools provided by the U.S. government to check the documents of the people we hire.

Even without this latest development, immigration has been a tricky issue for Gillespie, who hails from the partys establishment wing and supported the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration initiative in the U.S. Senate that called for tighter border security as well as a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 12million undocumented immigrants. Gillespie now says he never supported the amnesty aspect of the proposal; he says he wanted a pathway to legal status, not citizenship.

Gillespie has struck a big tent tone in TV commercials, which have him promising to be a governor for all Virginians, while his Facebook ads show images of a massive border wall and a handcuffed illegal immigrant.

Stewart also tried to appeal to various GOP constituencies as he blasted Gillespies work for Tyson, by turns describing the illegal Tyson workers as murderous and exploited.

He spoke at a morning conference at a county office building, surrounded by photos of Virginians who he said had been killed by illegal immigrants.

If it werent for the efforts of Ed Gillespie and Tyson, some of these people would still be alive today, Stewart said.

Asked whether he had any evidence that illegal immigrants who had worked at Tyson plants had killed anyone, Stewart said, No, but I know a significant portion of those who come here illegally, they have criminal backgrounds and commit crimes.

At the same time, Stewart suggested that Gillespie had helped to exploit the immigrants, saying that they were smuggled into the country to work for wages and under conditions that no American would accept.

Theres another victim, too, and that is the illegal immigrants themselves, Stewart said. Theyre paid next to nothing, and theyre forced to work in conditions that no American would work in. ... And hes been making a million dollars.

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Stewart blasts Gillespie's work for Tyson Foods - The Washington Post - Washington Post

Scientists have created an earpiece that gives you an actual chill if the person youre speaking to is an AI impersonating a human.

The anti-AI AI is worn like a Bluetooth headset and uses a set of algorithms to warn you if the voice youre listening to isnt human. The algorithms are similar to the ones that allow a computer to sound like a human in the first place.

When the device detects synthesized vocal patterns, a small thermoelectric plate will alert you with a cold sensation on the back of your neck.

So you will literally feel a chill down your spine if the human youre talking to is a robot.

DT, a research agency in Australia, created the technology as a proof-of-concept in just five days.

Beyond distinguishing AI from humans, the company emphasizes that the earpiece could help separate real and fake news.

The post-truth era is just getting started, the company wrote in a blog post. The media, giant tech corporations and citizens already struggle to discern fact from fiction. And as this technology is democratized, it will be even more prevalent.

To demonstrate how it works, DT included a video in the post that used the technology on a video of Donald Trump and an AI-generated voice that sounded like him. The device correctly identified the real Donald Trump as human and the recording as robot.

The company wrote that the device is a work in progress, and likely has a long way to go. Lets hope it becomes available before were all tricked into servitude by an army of human-sounding AIs.

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This device tells you if a robot is pretending to be human - New York Post

Firstpost

Kashmir human shield row: Bipin Rawat should maintain military discretion and focus on building morale Firstpost Subsequent chiefs and three star generals in the past forty years have had different agendas with a posse of aspirants jockeying for post-retirement plum assignments in the public and private sector and spending much of their time sliding up to ... India's army chief defends soldier who used man as human shield against stone-throwersRT India army chief defends soldiers who tied man to vehicle and used him as a human shieldThe Guardian Army Chief Bipin Rawat Defends Use Of 'Human Shield', Says 'Dirty War' Has To Be Fought With 'Innovations'Huffington Post India all 211 news articles »

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Kashmir human shield row: Bipin Rawat should maintain military discretion and focus on building morale - Firstpost

The fossilized piece of a cheek bone was spotted in a chunk of sandstone sticking out of the dirt in the scorching badlands of northeastern Ethiopia.

Zeresenay Alemseged knew almost immediately that hehad stumbled upon something momentous.

The cheekbone led to a jaw, portions of a skull and eventually collar bones, shoulder blades, ribs and perhaps most important the most complete spinal column of any early human relative ever found.

Nearly 17 years later, the 3.3-million-year-old fossilized skeleton known as the Dikika Baby remains one of the most important discoveries in archaeological history, one that is filling in the timeline of human evolution.

When you put all the bones together, you have over 60 percent of a skeleton of a child dating back to 3.3 million years ago, which is more complete than the famous australopithecine fossil known as 'Lucy,' " Alemseged, a 47-year-old professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, told The Washington Post. We never had the chance to recover the face of Lucy, but the Dikika child is an almost complete skeleton, which gives you an impression of how children looked 3.3 million years ago.

[Ape that lived in Europe 7 million years ago could be human ancestor, controversial study suggests]

The fossil, also calledSelam peace in the Ethiopian Amharic language has revealed numerous insights into our early human relatives. But Alemseged said one of the most startling findings comes from the toddler's spine, which had an adaptation for walking upright that had not been seen in such an old skeleton.

The result, he said, is a creature whose upper body was apelike, but whose pelvis, legs and feet had familiar, humanlike adaptations.

If you had a time machine and saw a group of these early human relatives, what you would have said right away is, 'What is that chimpanzee doing walking on two legs?' " Alemseged said.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show for the first time the spinal column was humanlike in its numbering and segmentation. Though scientists know that even older species were bipedal, researchers said Selam's fossilized vertebrae is the only hard evidence of bipedal adaptations in an ancient hominid spine.

Yes, there were other bipedal species before, but what is making this unique is the preservation of the spine, which simply is unprecedented, Alemseged said. Not only is it exquisitely preserved, but it also tells us that the human-type of segmentation emerged at least 3.3 million years ago. Could there have been other species with a similar structure, yes, but we don't know for sure.

Human beings share many of the same spinal structures asother primates, but the human spine which has more vertebrae in the lower back, for example is adapted for efficient upright motion, such as walking and running on two feet.

Among the larger questions researchers like Alemseged are trying to answer include:When did our ancestors evolve the ability to bebipedal?When did we become more bipedal than arboreal,or tree-dwelling? Andwhen did our ancestors abandon an arboreal lifestyle to become the runners and walkers that eventually populated Africa and then the world?

One of the significant barriers to answering those questions is that complete sets of vertebrae are rarely preserved in the fossil record.

For many years we have known of fragmentary remains of early fossil species that suggest that the shift from rib-bearing, or thoracic, vertebrae to lumbar, or lower back, vertebrae was positioned higher in the spinal column than in living humans, but we have not been able to determine how many vertebrae our early ancestors had, said Carol Ward, a curator's distinguished professor of pathology and anatomical sciences in the University of Missouri School of Medicine, and lead author on the study. Selam has provided us the first glimpse into how our early ancestors spines were organized.

[Why these researchers think dinosaurs were minutes away from surviving extinction]

Unpacking the intricacies of Selam's spinal structure would not have been possible without the assistance of cutting-edge technology, researchers said.

After 13 years of using dental tools to painstakingly remove portions of the fossil from sandstone which risked destroying the fossil Alemseged packed up Selam in his suitcase and took the fossil from Ethiopia tothe European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, in 2010. Alemseged and the research team spent nearly two weeks there using high-resolution imaging technology to visualize the bones.

The fossil had undergone a medical CT scan in 2002 in Nairobi, Alemseged said, but that scanner was unable to distinguish objects with the same density, meaning that penetrating bones encased in sandstone was impossible. Once in France, that was no longer a problem, and the results, he said, were mind-blowing.

We were able to separate, virtually, the different elements of the vertebrae and were able to do it, of course, without any damage to the fossil, Alemseged said. We are now able to see this very detailed anatomy of the vertebrae ofthis exceptionally preserved fossil.

The scans revealed that the child possessed thethoracic-to-lumbar joint transition found in other fossil human relatives, but they also showed that Selam had a smallernumber of vertebrae and ribs than most apes have.

For researchers, the skeleton is a window into the transition between rib-bearing vertebrae and lower back vertebrae, which allowed our early human ancestors to extend at the waist and begin moving upright, eventually becoming highly efficient walkers and runners.

Though hehas been studying Selam for nearly two decades, Alemseged thinks the fossil has more secrets to share with the modern world.

I don't think she will stop surprising us as the analysis continues, he said. Science and tech is evolving so much that I'm sure in a few years well be able to extract even more information that we're not able to extract today.

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How a 3.3 million-year-old toddler offers researchers a window into ... - Washington Post

IRBIL, Iraq The Iraqi government said it has begun an investigation into one of its elite police units amid allegations that security forces have committed human rights abuses, including torture, rape and extrajudicial killings, in the battle to retake Mosul from Islamic State militants.

The inquiry comes after the German magazine Der Spiegel published a report by Iraqi photojournalist Ali Arkady this week detailing abuses allegedly committed by the Interior Ministrys emergency response division. On Thursday, ABC television broadcast footage recorded by Arkady, who had been embedded with that unit.

One video broadcast by ABC and carrying a warning of graphic content shows a blindfolded man balanced on a stool in the middle of a room, his arms bound and fastened to the ceiling. A man in military uniform kicks the stool away, leaving the blindfolded man hanging and whimpering.

The Interior Ministry said in a statement that it would investigate the matter clearly and impartially and take legal action in accordance with the laws. The emergency response division said the report was fabricated.

In a video posted online, the division accuses Arkady of stealing cameras from a public affairs soldier and says he is wanted by Iraqi authorities.

Arkadys allegations prompt concerns about whether the United States is doing enough to vet the forces with which it is partnering in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq. Arkady said he witnessed the abuses late last year, around the time the U.S.-led coalition expanded its advise-and-assist mission to work closely with Iraqi Interior Ministry forces including the emergency response division on planning operations and in providing air support.

However, as they are not directly armed or trained by the United States, the emergency response division forces are unlikely to be covered by the Leahy Law, which prohibits the United States from providing military assistance to units that carry out human rights abuses with impunity.

While the Coalition cannot confirm the veracity of these allegations, any violation of the law of armed conflict would be unacceptable and should be investigated in a transparent manner, Army Col. Joseph Scrocca, a spokesman for the coalition, said in an email. Those deemed responsible are held accountable in accordance with due process and Iraqi law.

Arkady said he had initially set out to document the heroic actions of the unit as it fought to wrest control of Mosul from the Islamic State, following two officers one Sunni and the other Shiite to counter the narrative of sectarianism in the Iraqi armed forces and show they were liberators not destroyers.

Mosul is a majority-Sunni city, and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military has tried to showcase the lengths to which it has gone to avoid any sectarian strife.

Arkady said, however, that he found himself documenting what could amount to war crimes. In his account in Der Spiegel, he said he later saw the body of one of the men he had seen being tortured in the headquarters of the units intelligence department. Detainees were accused of having links to the Islamic State or of having pledged allegiance to the group.

Arkady, who has received threats, has fled Iraq.

In a bid to refute Arkadys allegations, the emergency response division released a video showing soldiers revisiting a man who they say was featured in one of Arkadys videos, to prove that he is still alive although he is not one of the people Arkady alleges were killed.

Morris reported from Beirut.

Read more:

Away from Iraqs front lines, the Islamic State is creeping back in

Final stages of Mosul battle will be extremely violent, U.S. commander says

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Iraq investigating elite unit accused of human rights violations in Mosul campaign - Washington Post

By Associated Press By Associated Press May 25 at 11:59 AM

A computer beat Chinas top player of go, one of the last games machines have yet to master, for a second time Thursday, a sign that the field of artificial intelligence is advancing faster than expected.

An IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. But many go players expected it to be at least 10 more years before computers mastered go, which is considered far more complicated for machines to master.

Go players take turns putting white or black stones on a rectangular grid with 361 intersections, trying to capture territory and each others pieces by surrounding them. The near-infinite number of possible positions requires intuition and flexibility traits that human beings long believed a computer could never possess.

But then European and South Korean go champions began to fall to Googles AlphaGo computer program. The program defeated Ke Jie (pronounced kuh jay), a 19-year-old Chinese prodigy, on Tuesday and then again two days later, during an artificial-intelligence forum that Google organized in the Chinese city of Wuzhen (woo-jen).

Ke lost despite playing what AlphaGo indicated was the best game any opponent has played against it.

What happened? Ke said his loss was probably the result of something all too human: emotion.

I thought that I was very close to winning the match in the middle, Ke said. I could feel my heart thumping. But maybe because I was too excited, I did some wrong or stupid moves. I guess thats the biggest weak point of human beings.

[Not even the best go players feel they have mastered the game]

He and AlphaGo play a final game Saturday in a country where go is extremely popular. Google says 60 million people in China watched online when AlphaGo played South Koreas go champion in March 2016.

This time, Chinese censors blocked most of the countrys Web users from seeing the Google site carrying the feed. None of Chinas dozens of video sites carried the live broadcasts but a recording of Tuesdays game was available the next night on one popular site.

The government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to material considered subversive, or rebellious. Social media and video-sharing websites such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked, and Internet companies are required to have teams of censors to watch social media and remove banned material.

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In China, the scoreboard reads: Computers, 2. Humans, 0. - Washington Post

AS the stories of human desolation and suffering emerge from the simple statistics of the numbers killed and maimed in the Manchester bombing, a pattern emerges.

Numbers on the one hand and the heart rending details of the stories that are broken human lives on the other; washed in tears that wont stop, shed by families like our own; teenage girls like our own daughters, who will never walk again, or for some, never even breathe again.

Within minutes of the assassination of our children, there was an outpouring of goodness. It began with Manchester Muslim taxi drivers turning their taxi meters off and offering to drive anyone in need anywhere. Theatre nurses on a conference near Manchester offered to come in to work with surgeons in the middle of the night. Hotels threw open their doors to give tea and shelter to anyone looking for their kids.

We know what goodness looks like. It weeps with those who weep. It aches with those who mourn. It digs its hands into its pockets to give anything it can find there to help ease the suffering just a little.

Pity, mercy, kindness, join human hearts to human stories. Love looks at a strangers face and their humanity is unlocked by suffering.

William Blake wrote a poem about this and one of the verses runs:

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

By which I think he means that mercy sees through statistics and numbers by connecting heart to heart, wound to wound.

Discovering someones suffering promotes them from an it to a you.

Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher tried to explain this by talking about the I-Thou ness of human relationships. The key in the door that separates humans from each other is turned by the I-Thou connection.

And evil of course, is the opposite. In order to do evil to another human being we have to wipe the humanity from off their face. We have to see them as an it. I-thou becomes I-it and once we have got there, we are free to do the most dreadful things to one another.

How was it that Nazi guards in Auschwitz could gather together the tiny shoes from the children whom they ushered naked into the gas chambers and collect them for recycling for the war effort? Unless they stripped them of their identities as children and saw them as things instead crowds of its, that were both dangerous and disposable.

Islamic suicide bombers are not unique. Islam may be the most violent religion on earth, but Muslims are as human as anyone else, and in some cases of course better people than others. But the suicide bomber has to persuade himself (and the friends who planned it with him or her) that the teenage children in the Manchester concert were not precious beloved sons and daughters learning to sing and dance, but dangerous and disposable its.

Evil works on a sliding scale I think. It starts off small before it can grow and gain the kind of control that maims and murders.

We give it its first foothold in our own lives, when we wipe the human suffering off the face of our political enemies; the its of our own opposition.

Sometimes the its are foreigners of one description or another. Sometimes in a failing marriage, the warring, unreasonable impossible spouse.

Evil uses our imagination to seduce us into this other narrative or pattern, by numbing the imagination, so we see only facts instead of faces, and problems instead of people.

Blake saw the solution clearly. In the last verse of his poem he wrote:

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew;

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell

There God is dwelling too.

If you have a problem with the idea of God, replace it with the words Loving Compassion and then we find we are all talking the same language again. We can disagree about whether the compassion that makes us human has an exterior cosmic origin that has found an echo in our psyches, or whether we just made it up ourselves.

What matters most is whether we put it into practice. In the Gospels we find Christ was pretty severe about this. He warned people who thought they ticked enough moral boxes that if their actions werent at least as good as their language and labels, they were in more trouble than they knew.

After Manchester, those whose lives have been wrecked will be hoping that their wounds, along with the wound of all the bereaved and maimed, will heal if only a little, in time.

For the rest of us, there is the challenge not to respond to degrading humans to an it with another it. Somewhere deep down in the tortured self-righteousness of the Jihadist bomber, there is a person, crushed long ago by hate and self-righteousness. Within each bomber, is, or was, a hurting human being. Like us.

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Comment: Numbers give way to the human tragedies behind - Jersey Evening Post

In 1944, German soldiersconstructing a bunker in Greece uncovered afossilized jawbone. The specimen was in poor shape, just a curve of mandible with its teeth mostly chipped away. It was considered to be a specimen that nobody really knew what to do with, said paleobiologist David R. Begun,a professor at the University of Toronto. But a new analysis of this broken jaw revealed that the bone is about7 million years old. The jawalso has some humanlike characteristics, he says.

Begun and his colleagues say the fossil could represent the oldest known human ancestor. They further suggest that the fossil means our ancestors diverged from apes in Southern Europe not Africa.

Both are bold and highly disputed claims. But the fossil itself is a rare specimen ofan ape from around the time of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

Ina pair of reportspublished Monday in the journal PLOS One, the scientists describe the fossil and the possible savanna environment in which the specieslived. Theresearchers claim that the Eastern Mediterranean could just as likely be the location of ape and human diversification, as well as human ancestororigins, as tropical Africa.

Other experts on human prehistory disagree, pointing to extensive fossil evidence that hominins, meaning non-ape humans and their ancestors, originated in Africa and migrated north.

David Begun has repeatedly proposed that the African ape and human clade arose in Europe and that gorillas, chimps and humans arose from an early European member of this group that migrated into Africa, said Jay Kelley, a paleontologist at Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins. This 'back into Africa' scenario has garnered few if any adherents. The near consensus, Kelley said in an email, is that the hominin lineage arose in Africa.

The jaw in question belonged to a primate that anthropologists had previously namedGraecopithecus freybergi.In the new study, researchers at theUniversity of Tbingen in Germanyused a CT scan to peer insidethe jaw. They also analyzed an upper premolar tooth from another primate, dated via paleomagnetic studies to 7.2 million years ago, discovered in the Balkans in Bulgaria. The authors of the new studiessuggest that this loose tooth could have come from another member of the same species.

The scans of the jaw showed some similarities with human ancestors.Despite the chipped teeth, the roots buried inthe jawbone remained intact. The canine root was very short, Begun said. The premolar roots were simplified, partly fused.Both of those characteristics we find only in members of human lineage.

For the loose tooth, the thickness of the enamel ruled out other, better-documented ancient apes, the scientists said, such asOuranopithecus. But they could not prove with absolute certainty that the tooth camefrom Graecopithecus freybergi.

I really appreciate having a detailed analysis of the Graecopithecus jaw the only fossil of its genus so far, said Richard Potts, a paleoanthropologist who directs the Smithsonian Institutions Human Origins Program.But I think the principal claim of the main paper goes well beyond the evidence in hand.

Potts, who was not involved in this study, noted that the heyday of ape diversity occurred in Eurasia between 12 and 10 million years ago. This diverse group of primates migrated to lower latitudes namely, Africa and Asia to escape cooling northern temperaturesand more powerful seasonal changes. There was little to support the idea that hominins appeared before leavingEurope.

I don't think it's a strong case for hominin origins in Asia rather than Africa. Possible, yes, said New York University'sSusan C. Antn, a professor of anthropology who was not affiliated with the recent study. But because all of the later hominins are found inAfrica, the simplest explanation, she said, is an African origin.

Kelley questioned the significance of the fused premolar root. Some of the earliest hominins didnt have these fused tooth roots, whereas some of the later hominins did, he said. Given this discrepancy, it's a feature that may have evolved independently in several different lineages, he said.

The evidence that canine root reduction indicates the hominin status of Graeco is also not very convincing, Potts said. Only one canine root was studied. Plus, he said, there's no way to consider the root in the context of the entire tooth the canine crown had snapped off.So theres little basis for accepting the exceptional claim that a 7.2 million year old fossil from Greece is the oldest known human ancestor!

I'm the first to admit that what we have is less than ideal, Begun said. We need better-preserved jaws, and some limb bones to tell us if it was bipedal.The site in urban Athens where the jaw was discovered is now too developedto hunt for fossils.But where the lone tooth was found in the Balkans, to the north across the Aegean Seafrom Athens, ancient rocky outcrops remain.

Begun said he plansto travel to Bulgaria tolook for additional fossils.If you have one tooth, he said, that means there has to be other specimens out there.

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Originally posted here:
Ape that lived in Europe 7 million years ago could be human ancestor, controversial study suggests - Washington Post