Category Archives: Post Human

GENEVA Microsoft announced Tuesday that it intends to contribute $5 million over five years to the United Nations human rights office, assistance the Geneva-based agency called a landmark partnership that could prod other big private-sector donors to follow suit.

The Redmond, Washington-based company plans to develop and use technology to help the U.N. rights office predict, analyze and respond to critical human rights situations at a time of arbitrary killings, rapes, detentions without trial and other abuses around the world.

As a global company that sees the problems of the world, we believe that we have a responsibility to help solve them, Microsoft President Brad Smith said.

The partnership was launched quietly last year. U.N. human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said it reflects a commitment to using technology to promote human rights and recognition of the role the private sector can play in advancing that cause.

An example of the technology being developed is an information dashboard, Rights View, to aggregate data on human rights violations by country and type in real time.

Microsoft also pledged to support the U.N.s human rights advocacy and outreach campaigns, including the development of corporate principles for tackling LGBT discrimination in the workplace.

The announcement comes amid uncertainty about the rights offices main funding source: countries and governments. The United States, traditionally a major donor, is considering cuts to its funding for U.N. institutions as part of Trump administration plans to trim the U.S. State Department budget.

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United Nations, Microsoft announce $5 million partnership on human rights - The Denver Post

Ex-prosecutor: But Wheres the Actual Crime?

Andrew McCarthy, a longtime opponent of special prosecutors, notes at PJ Media that their investigations inevitably metastasize far beyond the original inquiry because there is no supervisor to keep them focused on the subject matter. But you dont need a prosecutor unless you first have a crime not just some untoward or sleazy form of behavior. And it is simply not a federal crime for a foreign country to intrude on an American election by spreading information or misleading propaganda that favors one candidate or damages another. Nor is collusion a crime. Yes, a president found to have schemed with a foreign country to corrupt American election processes could be impeached. But thats a political process not a legal one.

Foreign desk: How Trump Can Lead on Human Rights

President Trump has made clear he wont routinely pressure foreign regimes on human rights. But Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post suggests he launch an America First campaign to deter other governments from mistreating or unjustly imprisoning US citizens in some cases, simply because they are Americans. The prez has already won the release of Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American freed last month when Trump raised her case, as well as several Americans held by China. If Trump chooses to make such cases a priority, there are plenty more out there in Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. Trump has an opportunity to carve out a role as a fierce defender of Americans abroad, notes Diehl, and if he seizes it, even those who despise his values-free foreign policy will have to give him some credit.

Policing expert: Comey Was Cops Champion

Whatever former FBI Director James Comeys failings in other matters, his firing is a loss for Americas police officers and public order, says Heather Mac Donald at City Journal. Ironically, he gave Donald Trump the most powerful message of his campaign: policing matters. Long before Trump seized the issue, she notes, Comey was virtually the only official in the Obama administration to warn that the chill wind blowing through American law enforcement thanks to anti-cop protests, and that it was resulting in a rising homicide toll among black people. In an eloquent defense of proactive policing in 2015, he rejected the notion that cops target minorities: Law enforcement targeted neighborhoods where people were dying, he said; race had nothing to do with it. That speech was a direct rejection of the Obama administrations line that the criminal-justice system is racist.

Law prof: Be Thankful This Isnt a Constitutional Crisis

Calling James Comeys firing a constitutional crisis is an exercise in crying wolf, even if some serious constitutional experts are saying so, asserts Noah Feldman at Bloomberg. Thats not just analytically mistaken but also potentially dangerous, because a constitutional crisis signals a fundamental breakdown in the structure of government and calls for decisive action to resolve it. And the last thing we need, he says, is for President Trump to step into the breach and violate the Constitution on the theory that hes saving us from a constitutional crisis. In true crises, the resolving action almost always has some features that could be characterized as unconstitutional. So save constitutional crisis for when its accurate and we have no choice but to use it.

From the right: Can Bannon Foil Afghan Plan?

President Trump will decide soon whether to send at least 3,000 US troops to Afghanistan in a bid to stabilize the government in Kabul led by President Ashraf Ghani against a resurgent Taliban as well affiliates of ISIS and al Qaeda, reports Michael Warren at The Weekly Standard. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and the entire national-security team are behind the plan but senior White House counselor Steve Bannon heads the list of those skeptical of increasing military action in the region. Indeed, the Afghanistan proposal has been dubbed by its critics in the White House as McMasters war, and Bannon has been the primary force pushing that line. Still unclear: Where do other advisers such as Jared Kushner stand?

Compiled by Eric Fettmann

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How Trump can lead on human rights and other comments | New ... - New York Post

Donald Trump has made it clear enough that he has no interest in pursuing the traditional U.S. human rights strategy of pressuring foreign regimes, including U.S. allies, to release political prisoners, stop torture or allow free elections. But what about an America First campaign to deter other governments from mistreating or unjustly imprisoning U.S. citizens in some cases, simply because they are Americans?

A bit haphazardly, the Trump administration has already made a start at such a policy. If it wants to build on it, there is plenty of opportunity.

The start includes Aya Hijazi, a 30-year-old Egyptian American who was freed in late April after Trump raised her case with strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. Hijazi and her husband had been imprisoned for nearly three years on bogus child abuse charges; they had established a nonprofit to help Cairos street children, thus drawing the attention of a security apparatus that targets all civil society groups with American connections.

Releasing Hijazi was an easy way for Sissi to pander to Trump without altering the most repressive regime in Egypts modern history. Trump, in turn, was foolish to embrace the dictator, who is slowly driving his country over a cliff.

Still, Hijazi was freed. So was the family of Xie Yang, a courageous Chinese lawyer who released a damning account of how he was tortured after his 2015 arrest. When his wife and children fled to Thailand, Chinese agents tracked them down and had them arrested. They were on the verge of being forcibly returned to Beijing when U.S. diplomats spirited them out the back door of a local jail, according to a report by the Associated Press. Xies wife, Chen Giuqiu, and her two daughters one of whom is a U.S. citizen arrived in Texas in March.

As The Posts Simon Denyer reported, they are not the only prisoners the administration has sprung from China. In April, American business executive Phan Phan-Gillis was deported two years after being arrested on spying charges. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly raised her case during his first visit to Beijing.

If Trump chooses to make such cases a priority, there are plenty more out there. North Korea is now holding four Americans, including University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier. Iran has at least four, including businessman Siamak Namazi and his 80-year-old father, Baquer, who was jailed when he traveled to Tehran in an attempt to free his son. Venezuela keeps Joshua Holt, who was arrested on bogus weapons charges after he traveled to Caracas to marry a Venezuelan. And at least three more Americans are among the 40,000-plus political prisoners imprisoned by the Sissi regime.

The abuse of Americans abroad is in part the inevitable result of a nation of immigrants and the resulting ubiquity around the world of U.S. passport holders. But its probably been encouraged by the failure of the past several administrations to take it seriously enough.

President Barack Obama, like a couple of presidents before him, preferred to downplay cases where U.S. citizens were held. For more than a year the State Department would not say anything in public about the Hijazi case. When Post reporter Jason Rezaian was arrested in Iran, Obama declined to connect his jailing to the ongoing nuclear negotiations. Rezaian and several other Americans were finally released only after the administration agreed to a prisoner swap.

Obama did manage to free an Egyptian American, Mohamed Soltan. But that took a year, and the administration eschewed some of the tough measures recommended by State Department human rights staff, such as expelling Egyptian military attaches in Washington if a deadline for Soltans release was not met.

Ive always felt we should be more militant about getting unjustly detained Americans out of prison, said Tom Malinowski, the former State Department assistant secretary in charge of human rights during the Obama years. Malinowski defends Obamas record of advocating for imprisoned Americans, but said, I think if we were willing to signal in several such cases that we are prepared to go to war for our people, fewer countries would mess with Americans in the future and quick, quiet diplomatic solutions would become easier when they do.

Of course, Malinowski does not mean actual war, but tough steps such as expelling envoys and holding up aid payments. Neither he nor other human rights advocates see it as a substitute for a global policy. The Hijazi release is not going to change the disastrous situation in Egypt or the threat it poses to vital U.S. interests.

Still, Trump has an opportunity to carve out a role as a fierce defender of Americans abroad, distinguish himself from past presidents and score a few relatively easy wins. If he seizes it, even those of us who despise his values-free foreign policy will have to give him some credit.

Read more from Jackson Diehls archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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How Trump could lead on human rights. Really. - Washington Post

By Rachael Rettner By Rachael Rettner May 14 at 10:00 AM

President Trump reportedly eschews exercise because he believes it drains the bodys finite energy resources, but experts say this argument is flawed because the human body actually becomes stronger with exercise.

Trumps views on exercise were mentioned in a New Yorker article this month and in Trump Revealed, The Washington Posts 2016 biography of the president, which noted that Trump mostly gave up athletics after college because he believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.

[Exercise is fundamental to your health. So why do so few people stick with it?]

Exercise does deplete stores of glucose, glycogen and fats from the bodys tissues, but these fuels are restored when a person eats, said Michael Jonesco, a sports medicine and orthopedics specialist at Ohio State Universitys Wexner Medical Center.

Rather than thinking of energy stores as a battery, a better analogy would be like the fire that you continue to fuel with more coal or wood, Jonesco said. You need to continue to add fuel, or your flame will die. This is true whether you exercise or not. ... Simply by existing, we are burning energy.

Whats more, although exercise puts a temporary stress on the body, the body adapts to that stress so that the heart and muscles become stronger and more efficient. If we can create a battery that, every time its used, actually becomes more powerful and efficient, then sure, our body is like that battery, Jonesco said.

Some studies have even found that exercise makes people feel more energized. In one study, conducted in 2008, researchers tested the effects of exercise on 36 people who reported feeling chronically tired but didnt have a medical condition to explain their fatigue. They found that the people who engaged in 20 minutes of low-to-moderate-intensity exercise three times a week reported a 20 percent increase in their feelings of energy,compared with a control group of people who didnt work out at all.

According to the American Council on Exercise, starting an exercise program can improve the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to muscle tissue, allowing muscles to produce more energy. Overall, exercise improves muscle and heart health, which boosts peoples endurance, giving them more energy, according to the Mayo Clinic.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity such as brisk walking per week.

Numerous studies have found links between physical activity and improved mood as well as reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, according to a 2005 review paper on the topic. One study published last year found that people who got up for short bouts of activity during the day reported better mood, more energy and lower levels of fatigue than when they sat all day.

Regular exercise is also linked with a number of physical health benefits, including a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and osteoporosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Exercise may even help you live longer. In a 2015 study, researchers analyzed information from more than 660,000 adults in the United States and Sweden who answered questions about how much time they spent doing physical activity. The study found that people who engaged in the recommended level of physical activity were 31 percent less likely to die during the 14-year study period, compared with those who did not engage in any physical activity.

Jonesco noted that if you ever become stranded on a desert island with limited food sources, it would be a good idea to skip working out, because you wouldnt be able to replenish your bodys fuels. But any other time, your body will thank you for exercising, he said.

Live Science

4 Easy Ways to Get More Exercise

7 Common Exercise Errors And How to Fix Them

The 3 Best Back Exercises Anyone Can Do

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Trump thinks that exercising too much uses up the body's 'finite' energy - Washington Post

A Republican lawmaker sent shockwaves through Missouris LGBTQ community when he argued that there is a distinction between human beings and those who identify as gay.

On Monday,Missouri Rep. Rick Brattin (R-Harrisonville) was arguing against an amendment to Senate Bill 43, which would have banned discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the state, The Kansas City Star reports. At present,residents can be fired from their jobs or evicted from their apartments for being gay, or just being perceived as gay. But Brattin said he believed extending anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ Missourians would infringe on religious liberty.

When you look at the tenets of religion, of the Bible, of the Quran, of other religions,Brattin said from the Missouri House floor, there is a distinction between homosexuality and just being a human being.

The bills author, Republican Rep. Kevin Engler, ended up scrapping the amendment when it became clear that there were not enough votes to support it, making Brattins statement on queer people even more troubling. Without any LGBTQ-specific language in place, Senate Bill 43 passed 98-30 and will now head to Gov. Eric Greitens.

A Kansas City Star editorial published Tuesday condemned Brattins remark. The statement, made on the Missouri House floor, was deplorable, it read. It betrayed a stunning lack of understanding of theology and self-government: The Constitution protects all Americans from the tyranny of any single faith-based approach to secular law.

Others criticized the representatives words on Twitter.

It isnt the first time Brattins words have sparked controversy. In 2014, he proposed an extreme bill that would require women who are seeking an abortion to get permission from the man responsible for the pregnancy, The Kansas City Star reported.At the time, he cited his wifes approval of hisvasectomyas his inspiration for the legislation.

So you couldnt just go and say, Oh yeah, I was raped, and get an abortion, Brattin said, echoing sentiments that former Missouri Congressman Todd Akinused to defend anti-abortion measures. It has to be a legitimate rape.

Brattins abortion bill never made it out of committee.

For the latest in LGBTQ news, check out the Queer Voices newsletter.

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Lawmaker Says There's A 'Distinction' Between Being Gay And 'Being A Human Being' - HuffPost

RIVIERA BEACH

A 24-year-old Port St. Lucie man helped force women and teen girls to prostitute themselves and sell drugs out of a Riviera Beach home, authorities said in arresting him Thursday on a charge of human trafficking.

Ali Ameers arrest is the latest in an effort by local authorities to crack down on the crime, which some have called modern-day slavery. He would drive them in his silver BMW convertible to sell Xanax, oxycodone, Adderall and more, according to a probable-cause affidavit released Friday morning.

Ameer was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail after being taken into custody by Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office. It is the second arrest for human trafficking in recent weeks and the third by the sheriffs office since it announced a $1.5 million federal grant and partnership Catholic Charities in February to combat the crime.

Ameer faces one count of human trafficking for labor involving a juvenile. During Ameers initial appearance in court Friday morning, Judge Caroline Shepherd ordered he be held without bail. She also ordered he avoid contact with the victim and other minors.

Human trafficking occurs when a person uses force, fraud or coercion to control another for purpose of engaging commercial sex acts, labor or other services against their will. The Polaris Project a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that tracks calls to the national trafficking hotline reports that Florida had the third-highest number of reported cases in 2016, behind only California and Texas.

Between Oct. 1, 2015, and Sept. 30, 2016, there were 19 verified reports of human trafficking calls in Palm Beach County to the Florida Abuse Hotline, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Investigators last month arrested Andre Benjamin, alleging he used a 15-year-old girl to sell drugs. According to the arrest report, Ameer acted as Benjamins driver. The teen told investigators Ameer provided her with LSD to sell and, on one occasion, gave her marijuana when Benjamins supply ran out.

The sheriffs investigation focused on a home in the 400 block of Silver Beach Road, west of Broadway.

A woman who was not identified in the arrest report told investigators that Benjamin sold multiple women for sex at the home, including her. Ameer drove women to sell drugs and to have sex for money, the woman said. She said she witnessed Ameer having sex in the home and shooting up an unspecified drug on one occasion.

Ameer previously has been cited for traffic citations but had no prior criminal history in Palm Beach, Martin or St. Lucie counties, according to court records.

Since January, at least six people in Palm Beach County have been accused of labor or sex trafficking. In February, three men were arrested after authorities alleged they kidnapped a 19-year-old woman from a house in Boynton Beach and forced her to advertise her services for sex on the website Backpage.com.

One of the men allegedly told officers they had gone to the Boynton Beach home to pimp the woman out. The three suspects, Christopher Thomas, Jimmy Edmond and Jackson Poinvil, each waived his right to a speedy trial. Their cases are due for a status hearing in June.

The sheriffs office has also arrested a juvenile on a human trafficking charge. Authorities have not disclosed information about that case.

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BREAKING: PBSO human-trafficking probe makes second arrest - Palm Beach Post

Forensic scientists have caught a deer munching on human remains for the first time ever.

The animal was snapped gnawing on bones by a motion-sensitive camera set up by researchers in Texas.

Footage captured the deer nibbling at rotting corpses inside a 26-acre body farm a section of woodland designed to allow researchers to watch cadavers decompose and discover which animals they attract.

Raccoons, turkeys, foxes and vultures are typically seen feasting on the bodies.

But this is the first time a white-tailed deer widely believed to be a herbivore has been captured munching on human remains.

The corpse had been outside for 182 days.

Experts from the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility at Texas State University watched as the animal held the bone in its mouth like a cigar on two occasions in January 2015.

A paper recently published in the Journal of Forensic Scientists, claimed this was the first known photographic evidence of deer gnawing human remains.

It added the deer was likely chewing on the bones because it was deficient in minerals and that they had no evidence it had eaten any flesh.

Its thought deer probably chomp on animal bones during winter to obtain minerals absent in their diet like calcium, sodium and phosphorous.

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Deer found feasting on human remains - New York Post

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Police are at the scene of a building site next to a church in Arnold after human remains were dug up.

The site where the remains were discovered is next to Arnold Baptist Church in Cross Street.

Police are at the scene but have confirm that the remains are "thought to have been buried legitimately some time ago"

The church minister, Andrew Howe said: "Last night the police came to see us because some bones had been dug up at the site next door to the grave yard, where flats are being built.

"There is an old folk tale that says there was a body buried under the tree there but no one believed it.

The 70-year-old added: "Everyone buried in the grave yard area will be friends or relatives of the church but the fact that this grave didn't have a head stone means we don't know who it is.

"We will of course treat the remains with respect and when the police are finished with them we will hold a service and rebury the remains with dignity."

Mr Howe said services will go on at the church as normal while the police are looking into the incident.

The remains were discovered by builders from J Tomlinson, the Nottingham-based firm which is developing the site.

Mark Davis, chief executive of J Tomlinson, said: "Remains of a body were uncovered during excavation work yesterday, late afternoon by our site manager whilst undertaking work on our Ernehale site at Gedling.

"Work was immediately stopped, the site restricted and boarded off and the issue reported to police, principle designer and client.

"The matter is currently being investigated by the police."

A spokesman for Nottinghamshire Police said: "Officers were called at 4.15pm on Tuesday, May 9, to reports of human remains discovered following land development.

"Officers are now working with the local authority, the land owner and the church to establish the most appropriate way forward in relation to the human remains, which are thought to have been burred legitimately some time ago."

The police are not treating the incident as suspicious at this time.

J Tomlinson is building six houses and 12 new apartments on the site of former sheltered accommodation in Cross Street, Arnold.

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Human remains found at Arnold building site next to church - Nottingham Post

Homo naledi, a strange new species of human cousin found in South Africatwo years ago, was unlike anything scientists had ever seen. Discovered deep in the heart of a treacherous cave system as if they'd been placed there deliberately were 15 ancient skeletons that showed a confusing patchwork of features. Some aspects seemed modern, almost human. But their brains were as small as a gorilla's, suggesting Homo nalediwas incredibly primitive. The species was an enigma.

Now, the scientists who uncovered Homo naledihave announced two new findings: They have determined a shockingly young age for the original remains, and they found a second cavern full of skeletons. The bones are as recent as 236,000 years, meaning Homo nalediroamed Africa at about the time our own species was evolving. And the discovery of a second cave adds to the evidence that primitive Naledi may have performed a surprisingly modern behavior: burying the dead.

This is a humbling discovery for science, said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It's reminding us that the fossil record can hide things we can never assume that what we have tells the whole story.

Berger and his colleagues report Naledi's age and the new chamber in two papers published Tuesday in the open-access journal eLife. In a third paper, they argue that Naledi must be a long-lasting lineage that arose 2 million years ago during the early days of the genus Homo and somehow survived long enough to coexist with modern humans, who emerged about 200,000 years ago. The species' complicated anatomy and unexpected resilience raise a number of intriguing questions, they say: Was Naledi a result of, and perhaps a contributor to, hybridization within the Homofamily tree?Could Naledi be responsible for some of the stone tools found in South Africa during the period it was alive? Should paleoanthropologists shift their focus from East Africa to the continent's less-studied southern regions?

Several scientists not involved the Naledi research urged caution about some of Berger's bolder claims, including the suggestion that Naledi was burying its dead and crafting the sophisticated stone tools that characterize southern Africa's Middle Stone Age.

But they agreed with Berger on this point: Naledi reminds us that human history is even richer than we realized.

The past was a lot more complicated than we gave it credit for and our ancestorswere a lot more resilientand lot more varied than we give them credit for, said Susan Anton, a paleoanthropologist at New York University who was not involved in theresearch. We'renot the pinnacle of everything that happened in the past. We just happen to be the thing that survived.

Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said finds like this should prompt people todiscard the familiar image of a stooped chimp evolving into a modern human walking upright and carrying a briefcase.

We'vehad for so long this view that human evolution was a matter of inevitability represented by that march, that progress, he said. But now that narrative of human evolution has become one ofadaptability. There was a lot of evolution and extinction of populations and lineages that made it through some pretty tough times, and we're the beneficiary of that.

The original Homo naledi skeletons were discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star cave system, one of the twisted and branching limestone caverns that make up a World Heritage Site known as the Cradle of Humankind. This same 180-square-mile region in South Africa has yielded a number of 2-million-year-old Australopithecus fossils, but Homo naledi was the first species to fit in the genus Homo.

The Dinaledi (star in the Sesotho language) chamber, which contained the Naledi skeletons, was so narrow and difficult to access that Berger had to seek out an all-women team of petite, extremely agile spelunkersto excavate it. What they found astonished the paleoanthropology community not only had a new species been discovered but, with 15 skeletons, it was suddenly the best-documented species in the history of hominins.

And theRising Star system wasn't done giving up its secrets.SpelunkersRick Hunter and Steven Tucker, who discovered the bones in the Dinaledi chamber, had alsonoticed a large leg bone in a different part of the cave. They didn't think much of it at the time, but after the importance of the Dinaledi fossils became clear, they realized the bone they had passed before was probably from a hominin. As soon as the Dinaledi excavation was complete, the team went back to this second chamber, dubbed Lesedi (light").

Lesedi was shallower and easier to access than the Dinaledi chamber, but only marginally so. It fit just oneexcavator at a time, working on his or her hands and knees to brush reddish brown clay from fragile bones. Berger himself only ventured into the chamber once he got stuck coming back out of the narrow entrance and decided not to pushhis luck again.

Yet, somehow, more than 130 hominin bones wound up in this dark and humid cavern hundreds of thousands of years ago. The excavators uncovered remains from at least three Homo naledi individuals. One of them, an adult male they call Neo (gift in Sesotho), is arguably the most complete fossil hominin ever found.

Berger and his colleagues don't yet have an age for the Lesedi individuals, and without DNA evidence from both caverns, it will be impossible to tell whether they are related to those from Dinaledi. But he and his colleagues argue that the presence of a second cavern full of bones bolsters thetheory that Homo naledi was deliberately leavingits dead in these chambers.

One, perhaps, was a singular event, Berger said. Two is not a coincidence.

Not everyone is convinced. Ritual disposal of the dead is an advanced behavior, suggesting that a species was capable of symbolic thought and saw itself as separate from the natural world.Only humans and Neanderthals have been conclusively found to bury their dead, and several scientists said we cannot yet rule out the possibility that the bones were deposited in the cave naturally. The Lesedi chamber also yielded some small animal fossils. (The absence of nonhuman remains in Dinaledi was considered a strong piece of evidence that the hominins were placed in the cavern intentionally, rather than falling or wandering into the cave and then dying there.)

Scientists say new bones of homo naledi reveal they existed at about the same time homo sapiens evolved. (Reuters)

Alison Brooks, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution who was not involved in the research, suggested that the immediate ancestors ofHomo sapiensmight be the ones who put the bodies there. She said it is possible theydropped the bodies into the caverns throughan opening that has long since closed. She noted that no artifacts were found with the caverns that might indicate how to interpret the remains. She also questioned whether the cave was really asdifficult to accessin the past as it is today.

But if Homo naledi was placing the bones in the cave for ritual reasons, that wouldmean the specieswas capable of something profound.

There's a potential that we are looking at some kind of rudimentary cultural practice associated with this widely shared emotion of grief, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who helped lead the Rising Star expedition. It'stellingus that this is something that's very deep in our history as humans. When you're looking at a group that takes one of their members and takes the body and put it somewherehidden, thats like saying, 'Were different.The leopards are not going to eat you. Youre one of us.'

Yet even as the scientists puzzled over the implications of the second cave, they still had to figure out the age of the fossils in the first one. In a 2015 interview with National Geographic (which helped fund the Rising Star excavations), Berger speculated that Naledi had emerged about 2 million years ago, based on its constellation of traits, and was positioned near the root of the Homofamily tree.

Homo naledi's small brain case and curved fingers suggested the species was primitive, more closely related to our Australopithecus ancestors than to us. But its long legs, small teeth and dexterous wrists appeared modern. The bones were too old to be dated using the traditional radiocarbon technique, and too poorly preserved for researchers to extract any ancient DNA.

Meanwhile the stratigraphy, or ordering of the rock layers, of the Dinaledi chamber was difficult to decipher. Water had periodically washed through the cavern during its several-hundred-thousand-year history, causing sediments to accumulate weirdly. Water also affects radiation levels in the chamber, which can throw off calculations of age based on rates of radioactive decay.

All this gets quite, quite complicated, and this is one of the reasons why it took so long to do, said Paul Dirks, a geologist at James Cook University in Australia who led the dating effort. We did not want to put a garbage age out there.

In the end, the research team employed six different dating techniques at 10 labs around the world. Each technique was tried independently by at least two labs to ensure that the results were as robust as possible. Based on analysis of the Naledi teeth and several measures of radioactivity in the cave, the team concluded that the fossils date back to between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago just beforethe arrival of modern humans.

Our ancestorsdid not live in a single species world the way we do, Brooks said. The real take-home message of this paper is that we were not alone until very recently.

Several other hominin species roamed the globe during this period, known as the Middle Stone Age:Homo erectus in Asia; tall, large-brained Homo heidelbergensisin Africa and Europe; eventually Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans (who are known only from DNA and a few fossil teeth). But these species were a lot like us: They walked primarily on two feet,used tools and probably mastered fire.Even the smallest-brained species had a brain that was three-quarters the size of ours.

For years, scientists assumed that all members of the Homo genus in Africa were quite advanced by the Middle Stone Age how else would they be able to compete with the formidable new speciesHomo sapiens and its direct ancestors?

Homo naledi complicates that narrative. Its limbs and teeth suggest that it had a human's walking habits and diet, and perhaps roamed the same lands and ate the same foods asour recent ancestors. But its brain was only 30 percent the size of a human's, and no bigger than that of a gorilla today.

How the heck did these guys survive alongside of us, alongsideourancestors? Hawks wondered.

Perhaps, he speculated, brain size is not everything. After all, Naledi was arguablyable to navigate the Rising Star cave system. He and Berger both suggested the species may have been capable of other feats of intelligence, including crafting the stone tools normally attributed to Homo sapiens and our direct ancestors.

Pottsofthe National Museum of Natural History,compared Naledi to Homo floresiensis, the tiny, small-brained hobbit people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until about 60,000 years ago. Scientists think that the Flores people descended from taller human species but shrank as a result of island dwarfism, the tendency of species trapped on islands with limited resources to evolve smaller stature, requiring less food. Perhaps Naledi evolved from a similar phenomenon, Potts said.

Africa can be seen as an island of forests in a sea of grass, he said. There are all sorts of refuges that occur and the great biodiversity of Africa emerges through that. Nature constantly experiments in isolated evolution, and this happens to have occurred in our own evolutionary tree, and that's just really neat.

But Berger brushed off the comparison to Homo floresiensis. Southern Africa isn't an island,he said, and Homo naledi did not evolve in isolation.

We have a very healthy population of individuals that survived for millions of years and are clearly well adapted to their environment, Berger said. That has profound implications.You cant just write them off.

Berger and Hawks hedged when asked where Homo naledi might fit on the human family tree.

The late age for the Dinaledi skeletons suggests that the species survived for many years, but more research is needed to pin down whenit first evolved. The species may have emerged near the root of the Homo genus, during an initial phase of diversification that gave rise to Homo habilisand other primitive species. Or itcould have branched off later, and may be even more closely related to Neanderthals and modern humans than Homo erectus is.

But both said it might be more accurate to think of human evolution as a stream rather than a branching tree. Tributaries maysplit off from the main waterway and then loop back; species may diverge, then interbreed. Naledi, with its amalgam of advanced and primitive features, could be a result of hybridization. It may also have contributed to the human gene pool:researchsuggests that many modern humans retain traces of an archaic species in our DNA.

In all likelihood,Hawks said, the full story of human evolutionhas not been uncovered yet. If a species such asHomo naledisurvivedfor millions of years without us realizing it, what else might the fossil record be hiding?

We keep finding stuff that we didnt think existed, Hawks said. This is not the first, and it's not going to be the last.

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Humanity's strange new cousin is shockingly young and shaking up our family tree - Washington Post

Warning: This post includes images of human remains that might be disturbing to some readers.

Although they are herbivores, deer have been spotted eating meat and gnawing on bones before. But not this kind of bones.

Peer closely at the photos below, and you might discern that dem bonesare people bones. More precisely, they are rib bones.

Wellget right out of the way that no horrified relatives are just now learning that their missing loved ones fate was to be deer dinner. The body from which these bones came was placed withthe highest scientific goals in mind on the floor of that forest, which is better known as the ForensicAnthropology Research Facility in San Marcos, Texas.

The 26-acre facility is one of several body farms around the nation where researchersplunk donated bodies out in the elementsto study the process of human decay and decomposition.Usually the bodies are placed inside a cage to prevent the interference of scavengers. But sometimestheyreleft unprotectedto see justwho might come along to snack on the carcass. Images from remote cameras have revealed that regular diners include rodents, coyotes, raccoons and foxes.

[Nest cam livestreams bald eagle parents feeding a cat to their eaglets]

This particular body, which researchers deposited in July 2014, was initially stripped by vultures. Then, the following January, a remote camera snapped shots of a new visitor to the scene: a young white-tailed deer. It looked very daintybut for the human rib bone extending from the side of the mouth like a cigar, in the words ofthe researchers, who wrote about these first-ever imagesin the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Eight days later at the same location, a deer maybe the same one was spotted casually gnawing on another rib bone, looking like one of those rare people who make it through a giant turkey leg at a Renaissance festival.

Other ungulates, or hooved mammals, have also been known to nibble on animal remainsdespite their vegetarian reputation. This often occurs in the cold season,when bone is a good source of essential minerals, such as calcium and sodium, that deer and their cousins cannot procure fromtheir local forests barren midwinter produce section.

In an email, lead author Lauren Meckel, a graduate student at Texas State University, emphasized that the deer caught on camera was not flesh-eating. It was bone-eating, and more specifically, it was dry-bone eating.Carnivores typically go for fresh remains and puncture the bones, whereas ungulates prefer desiccated bonesand leave behind a stripped, forked pattern withtheir zigzagging jaws, the paper notes.

This might actually be useful, and not just grisly, information. While ungulates are not big players inwhat the authors refer to as the scavenging guild, Meckel saidthe Texas discoverycould help investigators who are analyzing human remains determine the cause of bone damage and whether it happened at the time of death or later, perhaps when Bambineeded a calcium boost.

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Bambi's revenge? Deer photographed nibbling on human bones, a ... - Washington Post