I do love learning about just how resilient the human body is.

A lot of advances in psychology came from observing people with brain damage. In a similar vein, if it were possible to examine the genetics of this brain perhaps it could shed light on the genes behind all the folds we have.

Although chimps do have a large amount of muscle, it's no greater than that seen in other mammalian species that are perfectly capable of swimming if they need to. Their lack of swimming prowess seems to stem from the fact they're ability to doggy paddle (the preferred stroke of terrestrial quadrupeds) is compromised by their arboreal adaptations. Perhaps as a result of this they've lost the innate knowledge of how to doggy paddle. As such they have to learn how to swim from scratch, which is rather difficult and dangerous.

The same is true of all apes, including humans. None of us have an innate knowledge of how to swim or the anatomical capacity to swim well using the typical strokes of terrestrial animals. We have to start from scratch.

I was more disappointed in Sir David's endorsement. I thought more of him.

One of my favourite pieces of "evidence" for AAT is the fact that hominins fossils tend to be found near water; conveniently forgetting - as my childhood dinosaur books pointed out - that watery environments are more likely to preserve animals. Books aimed at children contain enough information to disprove this evidence, yet it's still mentioned in most AAT discussions I've seen.

Yeah, discussing the museum itself was a mistake and one I've avoided in all subsequent posts on the subject. In the future I promise to focus on what I can see!

As for why bother discussing it in the first place, you have to remember Answers in Genesis isn't the only party involved. There are countless people on both sides of the debate trying to learn more about these topics and by putting the information out there hopefully I can inform them and maybe even persuade some of the less dogmatic ones. Of the people I've encountered through posts like this, many times I've changed their mind on something; sometimes even turned them away altogether.

The trick is not to think of it as an attempt to convince AiG; but to use the debate as an excuse to put resources out there which may be useful to others interested in AiG

Whenever I hear about the population bomb going away, I breathe a sigh of relief. When I learn it's because of advances in education, medicine and equality I feel pride for humanity.

Excellent post.

That is true. I looked at Columbia and was thinking "is it any different?"

I'm not sure people aren't aware of earlier continents because it's hard to conceptualise. It's just that Pangea was the one that happened during the time of the dinosaurs, and nobody cares about anything earlier that dinosaurs. It's a fact.

I've got nothing. Although I think it would be great to leave a chimp alone in a room with a mirror and some facepaint, just to see what happened. Don't know what science you'd get from that, but if you're getting dolled up chimps do you really need an excuse?

Listening to a post. What kind of witchcraft is this?

The scale of things becomes even more mind boggling when you realise that the migration out of Africa wasn't done by people deliberately setting out to explore; but by people being forced to spread further afield by increasing population sizes. It took us 50,000 years to fill up the planet. When you realise how gradual and imperceptible it was the time frames seem even more daunting.

I'm always a bit wary when talking about endurance running, particularly in the context of the Bramble and Lieberman study. Whilst they do make some valid points about the importance of endurance running amongst some modern tribes; they then go on to claim that a large part of modern anatomy evolved to enable endurance running.

That second part is almost certainly wrong. Many adaptations appear to benefit long distance carrying and walking more than long distance running; and persistence hunting as a strategy is more energy intensive than persistence walking (which is why few modern groups practice it, but many more engage in persistence walking).

That's not to say persistence running isn't important to those groups which now do it, nor that it had no influence on our evolution; it's just the endurance running hypothesis overstates this importance and I fear lending credibility to it.

They're small, so easily disturbed by natural forces, broken/damaged or just missed entirely during excavation.

There was a study a few years back in which they sieved through all the mud that had been excavated from an archaeological site and found hundreds of extra bones (most of them of small animals, or the small bones of larger animals such as heel bones). Unfortunately this process is very time consuming - which also makes it expensive - so is not routine practice unless it is believed a deposit is very likely to contain small bones of great importance.

As a general rule brain size relative to body size is a good predictor of intelligence, although other measures can be better in different lineages. For example, primates have a high neuron density thus absolute brain size is a good predictor of intelligence amongst them.

This high neuronal density also means that humans - despite not having the biggest brains - appear to have the most neurons of any animal.

That is a rather interesting talk. When you look at mammal brains they all have a very similar structure. The human brain, for all intents and purposes, is just an enlarged chimp brain. So it's easy to forget that other groups are just plain freaky in the neuron department.