Bits and Bites > A Little Rapunzel in Dubai; Neanderthal Families of Southern Siberia

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Rapunzel Syndrome: Rat-shaped hair ball retrieved from five-year-old

Dubai girl’s intestine

In a rare condition, Indian expat girl used to ‘ingest hair strands when she was a baby’

Published:  October 27, 2022 09:37

Sajila Saseendran, Senior Reporter

Gulf News

  

Dubai: In a rare medical condition named Rapunzel Syndrome, a rat-shaped ball of hair — 20cm long and 4cm thick — was recently removed from the small intestine of a five-year-old schoolgirl in Dubai.

When KG student Diya Rajesh complained of stomach pain on October 15, her mother Mahalakshmi Rajesh thought her daughter had not yet completely recovered from the viral fever she had suffered three weeks ago following a bout of vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain.

However, along with acute abdominal pain this time, she kept vomiting in greenish yellow colour for three days. When the pain did not subside even after three days of symptomatic treatment from a clinic, Diya was rushed to NMC Royal Hospital in Dubai Investment Park, where doctors diagnosed her with Rapunzel Syndrome and retrieved a rat-shaped ball of hair from her small intestine.

Only few such cases have been reported in world medical literature, said Dr Venkatesh M Annigeri, a consultant paediatric surgeon whose team treated Diya.

The syndrome

The syndrome is named after the fairy-tale character Rapunzel who was known for her long hair. However, the condition is caused by the habit of eating or ingesting hair, usually found in young women.

On clinical examination after her admission in the emergency department, Dr Annigeri said Diya was diagnosed to have acute intestinal obstruction (complete block in the small bowel).

“With abdominal ultrasound and Contrast Enhanced Computerised Tomography [CECT], the child was diagnosed with a rare clinical condition — primary small bowel trichobezoar — which was causing acute intestinal obstruction,” he added.

He said trichobezoar or concretion of hair refers to a mass of hair accumulated within the gastrointestinal tract.

Rat-shaper-hair-ball-retrieved-from-the-small-intestine-of-Diya-1666849050408

Rare in young age

After an emergency abdominal surgery that lasted for an hour, the rat-shaped hair chunk was removed from Diya’s small bowel on October 18.

“It is a rare clinical entity. Over 90 per cent of trichobezoars are found in young women and girls between 15 and 20 years of age. Our case is very rare due to her very young age.”

Dr Annigeri said a trichobezoar occurs mainly in association with a psychiatric disorder affecting usually young women, having the tendency of pulling out their own hair (trichotillomania) and eating it (trichophagia), which then remains undigested in the stomach.

“Stomach is the common site of occurrence. Primary small bowel bezoar without associated gastric bezoar like in our case is very rare,” he pointed out.

How did Diya get it?

Speaking to Gulf News, Diya’s mother Mahalakshmi said her child had suffered from the hair-ingesting syndrome only when she was a baby.

“That was when she was six-seven months or so,” she said. Mahalakshmi said she was aware of pica disorder in babies due to which they eat non-food items.

“We had noticed that she was picking up hair from the floor and eating. I had to keep cleaning the house three-four times a day. She used to go under the cot and find out some strands of hair. By the time I catch hold of her, she would have swallowed it,” she recollected.

Mahalakshmi said she was hoping that things would be normal when Diya starts having solid food. And it did. “She stopped that habit when she started eating food after some months.”

However, she never expected that her child had ingested such a huge concretion of hair. “She did not know she had this syndrome. When she grew, she loved growing her hair and she doesn’t like to cut her long hair now. So, it was a big shock to us,” she added.

First 'concrete picture' of Neanderthal family revealed by DNA

Researchers focus on multiple Neanderthal remains found in the caves in southern Siberia

Published:  October 19, 2022 23:18

AFP

A reconstruction of a Neanderthal father and his daughter is seen in this undated handout photo provided by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Image Credit: REUTERS

Paris: The original Flintstones? The largest genetic study of Neanderthals ever conducted has offered an unprecedented snapshot of a family, including a father and his teenage daughter, who lived in a Siberian cave around 54,000 years ago.

The new research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, used DNA sequencing to look at the social life of a Neanderthal community, finding that women were more likely to stray from the cave than men.

Previous archaeological excavations have shown that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than once thought, burying their dead and making elaborate tools and ornaments.

However little is known about their family structure or how their society was organised.

The sequencing of the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, which won Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo the medicine Nobel prize earlier this month, offered a new way to discover more about our long-extinct forerunners.

An international team of researchers focused on multiple Neanderthal remains found in the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves in southern Siberia.

The scattered fragments of bones were mostly in a single layer in the earth, suggesting the Neanderthals lived around the same time.

"First we had to identify how many individuals we had," Stephane Peyregne, an evolutionary geneticist at Germany's Max Planck Institute and one of the study's co-authors, told AFP.

'Seem much more human'

The team used new techniques to extract and isolate the ancient DNA from the remains.

By sequencing the DNA, they established there were 13 Neanderthals, seven males and six females. Five of the group were children or early adolescents.

Eleven were from the Chagyrskaya cave, many of them from the same family including the father and his teenage daughter, as well as a young boy and a woman who were second-degree relatives, such as a cousin, aunt or grandmother.

The researchers also worked out that one man was a maternal relative of the father because he had a genetic phenomenon called heteroplasmy, which only passes down a couple of generations.

In this photo provided by Bence Viola, researchers excavate a cave in the mountains of Siberia, Russia.

Image Credit: AP

"Our study provides a concrete picture of what a Neandertal community may have looked like," Max Planck's Benjamin Peter, who supervised the research along with Paabo, said in a statement.

"It makes Neandertals seem much more human to me," he added.

Genetic analysis showed that the group did not interbreed with its nearby relatives such as humans and Denisovans, hominins discovered by Paabo in caves just a few hundred kilometres away.

However we know that Neanderthals did breed with homo sapiens at some point - Paabo's research also revealed that almost all modern humans have a little Neanderthal DNA.

Except Africans!

Rampant inbreeding

The community of around 10 to 20 Neanderthals seems to have instead bred largely among themselves, displaying very little genetic diversity, the study found.

Neanderthals existed between 430,000 to 40,000 years ago, so this group was living in the twilight of its species.

This photo provided by Bence Viola shows the Chagyrskaya Cave area in Siberia, Russia. Image Credit: AP

The study compared the community's level of inbreeding to endangered mountain gorillas. Another explanation for the inbreeding could be that the Neanderthals lived in an isolated region.

"We are probably dealing with a very subdivided population," Peyregne said.

The researchers found that the group's Y-chromosomes, which are inherited from father to son, were far less diverse than its mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from mothers.

This suggests that the women travelled more frequently to interact and breed with different groups of Neanderthals, while the men largely stayed home.

Travelled!???!! Does that mean something like kidnapped?

Antoine Balzeau, a palaeoanthropologist at France's National Museum of Natural History, said that fossils found in the Sidron Cave in Spain prompted suggestions of a similar Neanderthal community there, but far less complete genetic material is available.

Balzeau, who was not involved in the latest study, said it was "a very interesting technical feat".

But "it will have to be compared with other groups" of Neanderthals, he added.

Covid-19 > Covid-19 A Political problem in China; Vienna protests mandatory vax;

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China’s True COVID-19 Death Toll 366 Times Higher

Than Official Figure, Analyst Says

By Eva Fu and David Zhang

The Epoch Times

January 15, 2022

Staff members wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) spray disinfectant outside a shopping mall

in Xi'an, China on Jan. 11, 2022. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The Chinese regime has likely understated the COVID-19 death rate by as much as 17,000 percent in a systematic data suppression campaign to sustain its political image, according to a U.S. analyst.

That would put the number of COVID-19 deaths in China at around 1.7 million rather than 4,636, the two-year cumulative death figure that the Chinese authorities have maintained on the books. That’s 366 times the official figure.

Those findings made by George Calhoun, director of the quantitative finance program at Stevens Institute of Technology, were based on data as of January generated by a model developed by The Economist.

A vast majority of China’s officially recorded deaths came from Wuhan during the first three months of the pandemic, with only hundreds more reported in the rest of the country.

The Chinese regime only reported two additional deaths since April 1, 2020, ranking China as having the world’s lowest COVID-19 death rate, which Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese epidemiologist overseeing China’s outbreak response, boasted about just last week.

But that jaw-dropping data point—hundreds of times lower than that of America, gave Calhoun pause.

“That’s impossible. It’s medically impossible, it’s statistically impossible,” Calhoun told NTD, an affiliate of The Epoch Times.

“Remember, in 2020, there was no vaccine, there was no treatment,” he said. “So you had an unprotected population that has shown zero COVID deaths, even though they’ve had tens of thousands of cases.”

Curating public records and previous research reports, and analyzing the regime’s pattern of hushing up scandals in the past, Calhoun arrived at a conclusion that to him seems obvious: China has made its “zero-COVID” policy a political objective, and is systematically falsifying data to prop up the claim.

“Somebody put a message out at the end of the first quarter and 2020 and said, ‘Okay, we want to see zero-COVID. That’s our policy.’ And it became zero-COVID,” he said.

Anomalies

The first “smoking gun” is a sudden drop of COVID-19 deaths since April 2020 from mainland China after a “raging” rate of infection, Calhoun said.

From April 1, 2020, to Jan. 8, 2022, over 22,102 cases have been reported in mainland China, according to data from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Only two deaths were recorded over the same period.

By comparison, Hong Kong, which counted about half as many COVID-19 infections over the period, reported 213 deaths.

The case fatality rate (the proportion of those infected who died) in Wuhan during the first three months of the pandemic averaged around 7.7 percent, more than five times that of the United States and four times the world average.

Case fatality rate in Wuhan in comparison with other parts of the world. (Courtesy of George Calhoun)

Two scenarios are possible: either the virus was “far more deadly in early 2020 in Wuhan than anywhere else, at any other time,” or alternatively, the official infection numbers from China were too small by a factor of three or four, Calhoun said.

Over the following 20 months, there has been a consistent lack of COVID-19 data from China. As of September, China has become the world’s only country that has not provided complete data on excess mortality—unexplained deaths beyond normal trends that can offer a crude estimate of uncounted COVID deaths, a survey from the University of Washington shows.

The Economist model seeks to make up for that data gap. Based on the model, Calhoun said China’s excess mortality was off by about 17,000 percent. This discrepancy, he added, surpasses those even by countries mired in large-scale civil unrest, such as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. Venezuela, the highest among the four, has an estimated excess COVID-19 death ratio of 1,100 percent.

Excess mortality for China and several other countries. (Courtesy of George Calhoun)

Undercounting virus deaths is widespread across countries. Based on The Economist’s model, the United States’ official tally is short by about 30 percent. But China’s case is extreme.

“They are through the roof,” Calhoun said of the discrepancy between China’s official figures and the estimated true death toll.

“Something’s driving that,” Calhoun said.

While the virus might not be all to blame for the jump, tight-lipped Chinese authorities have offered few clues as to what might have happened otherwise.

Calhoun’s estimate coincides with anecdotal evidence from local residents, troves of internal documents leaked to The Epoch Times, and research studies into the impact of the virus in China, all of which indicate that the official figures have been grossly understated.

During the early months when the pandemic first broke out in China’s Wuhan, some of the city’s funeral home workers told The Epoch Times they were working nonstop to cremate bodies. In March, thousands of ash urns were delivered to one of the crematoriums, when the official death number was over 2,000. The authorities raised the fatality figure by 50 percent a month later, attributing the gap to administrative inefficiencies.

A study published in The Lancet last March said as many as 968,800 people in Wuhan had antibodies by April 2020, which would mean they developed immunity to the virus after being infected.

The data inconsistencies are not limited to Wuhan alone. During a two-week period in February 2020, an internal document from Shandong health authorities showed that close to 2,000 people had tested positive for the virus, but only 755 infections were publicly recorded.

Leaked documents suggest that the regime has continued to deem virus control as a political task.

In files recently obtained by The Epoch Times, a top Chinese official of Shaanxi Province, where the virus-hit Xi’an is the capital, ordered the “toughest measures” to be put in place to block the virus’ further spread from Xi’an. With the Beijing Winter Olympics coming up, a spillover would create “systemic risk” and “smear the national image,” the document read.

Thousands protest Europe’s first mandatory vaccine plan

The Austrian government’s plan to make vaccination against Covid-19

mandatory has sparked mass protests

Protesters take to the streets of Vienna to demonstrate against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination

© Ruptly

Thousands of Austrians took to the streets of Vienna in protest of an upcoming parliamentary vote to make Covid-19 vaccines mandatory, with protesters calling for the government to be replaced.

Protesters carried Austrian flags through the streets on Saturday as police in riot gear holding helmets could be seen standing in a line nearby. “Face your guilt and turn back!” one banner read, while others accused Austria’s right-wing ruling party – the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) – of splitting the nation with its coronavirus policies.

Protesters could also be heard shouting, “The government must go!” while one young child was caught on camera handing flowers to riot police.

In November, the Austrian government signalled its intentions to make vaccination against Covid-19 mandatory, and Parliament is scheduled to vote on the issue next week. If the mandatory vaccination plans are passed, Austrians could face repeated fines of thousands of euros for remaining unvaccinated.

Austria has implemented some of the strictest Covid-19 response measures in the world – which equally have been met with some of the largest protests. Measures have included lockdowns only for the unvaccinated and a ban on those who have yet to receive the vaccine from entering restaurants and stores.

If lawmakers back the latest government plan, Austria will become the first nation in the EU to make vaccination against Covid-19 obligatory.

DNA test to be added to Covid screening

People most at risk from coronavirus can be identified with a simple genetic check,

health officials say

© Janek Skarzynski / AFP

The Polish Health Ministry is planning to introduce a new type of screening for coronavirus after a gene was discovered that determines the likelihood of a patient suffering from severe or fatal Covid-19.

People most at risk of suffering the severest effects or even dying of coronavirus can be identified using a genetic test, health officials in Poland revealed this week. The study that resulted in the discovery was supported by the country’s Ministry of Health and Medical Research Agency, and involved around 1,500 patients with Covid-19. Researchers from the Medical University of Bialystok identified a gene in chromosome 3 that significantly influences how badly the virus will affect an individual.

“After more than a year and a half of work, it was possible to identify a gene responsible for a predisposition to becoming seriously ill [with Covid],” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said at a press conference on Thursday.

The findings will now be applied to help identify patients at increased risk from the virus when or even before they contract the infection. The Health Ministry plans to develop and launch a “relatively simple” and quick genetic test that can be performed alongside PCR screening within a few months. 

It could also be implemented around the world to help people with apparent genetic preconditions, Polish officials said.

“This is a step towards personalized medicine, which is the medicine of the future – when, knowing our genome, we will know what harm to expect when it comes to our health,” Joanna Zajkowska, a professor at the University of Bialystok, told Polish Radio.

If at least one version of the gene is present in the chromosome, a patient is more than twice as likely to suffer the worst effects of Covid-19 or die, according to the study of genetic individual susceptibility led by Marcin Moniuszko and Miroslaw Kwasniewski. The gene is the fourth-most-important factor responsible for acute disease, and is said to be an even more important risk factor than comorbidity. It comes after age, obesity and gender (men are believed to suffer from Covid worse than women), according to the study.

The gene is present in around every 10th person in Europe, while in India the rate is almost three times higher, with some 27% of the population being genetically prone to severe Covid. In Poland, where the death rate from the virus is higher than the EU average, around 14% of the population carry the gene.

“From the beginning of the pandemic, we have been trying to understand why, even among people of similar age, some are infected asymptomatically while others fight for their lives,” said a spokesman for the university. “Thanks to the research, we are getting closer to understanding this phenomenon.”

People with type A-positive blood are at higher risk of respiratory failure from Covid

The Polish study is not the first to suggest correlation between certain genetic factors and patients’ reactions to Covid-19. A genome-wide analysis of Italians and Spaniards in 2020 studied blood types and a chromosome 3 gene cluster in association with respiratory failure caused by coronavirus. Extreme susceptibility to severe illness was found in persons with certain DNA markers, while the study also showed that people with type A-positive blood are at higher risk of respiratory failure from Covid.

Other research from Germany also detected correlation between a gene cluster on the same chromosome and the risk of severe infection. A mutation which helps fight off RNA viruses, inherited by some people from our Neanderthal ancestors, has been found.

Denisovans, Mysterious Human Relatives, Looked Just Like Us in At Least 1 Way

Rediscovery of missing finger bone shows slender fingertips

unlike knobby Neanderthal finger bones

Some human groups have more than five per cent Denisovan DNA

Emily Chung · CBC News 

Denisovans were originally identified from DNA in a bone from the base of the pinky finger of a young girl, shown above. Now the rest of that bone has been rediscovered, showing the entire bone is similar to that of modern humans and different from the fingertip of Neanderthals, which are more closely related to Denisovans.

They may have had huge, brutish-looking teeth, but Denisovans — ancient cousins of humans and Neanderthals — had slender, delicate fingertips like ours, a new study shows.

After rediscovering a missing piece of one of only five Denisovan fossils ever discovered, researchers from France, Russia and Canada digitally reconnected the two halves from the tip of the pinky finger from a Denisovan girl. 

The reconstruction showed it was indistinguishable from a human fingertip and different from the knobbed or clubbed fingertip bones of Neanderthals, they reported Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The finding is a small piece of the puzzle in figuring out who the mysterious Denisovans were, given that only five small fossils of the hominin species have ever been found.

"Until now, all we knew was how their teeth looked," said Bence Viola, a University of Toronto anthropologist who co-authored the paper. "All these little pieces allow us to build a picture of who the Denisovans were."

The image above shows the bone from the tip of the pinky finger from, left to right, a Neanderthal, modern human and Denisovan. (Bennett et al./Science Advances, licensed under CC BY NC)

The new finding suggests researchers looking for Denisovan fossils might have to be more open-minded about what to look for, and that some fossils previously identified as modern humans may, in fact, be Denisovans, said Eva-Maria Geigl, an anthropologist at the Institut Jacques Monod at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the University of Paris who also co-authored the report.

More closely related to Neanderthals

Denisovans were first identified in 2010 as a new species of hominin using DNA extracted from the bottom half of the finger bone. Genetic analysis showed Denisovans were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans, but Denisovans interbred widely with modern humans, and some human groups have more than five per cent Denisovan DNA.

Re-writing Early History of Mankind - Again

Neanderthals - Incest, Interbreeding and Possibly Pedophilia

Complex Human DNA Trail Provides Some Interesting Surprises - Neanderthals & humans interbred 100,000 years ago

However, scientists know little about what they looked like, other than the fact they had massive molars similar to those of a more ancient hominin, Homo erectus.

Viola was a postdoctoral researcher at the lab Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig that analyzed the DNA from the bone from the base of the fingertip. What the researchers didn't know at the time was that after the bone was excavated from Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008, it was cut in half.

The finger bone was excavated at Denisova Cave in 2008. (Bence Viola)

They only learned a couple of years ago that the other half had been sent to a different lab in the U.S. for analysis.

That half was subsequently photographed and measured by Geigl, who noticed that it had been cut. After she analyzed it genetically, she realized that it had exactly the same DNA as the bone that identified the Denisovans as a new species, and therefore must be part of the same bone.

But because the DNA analysis had already been published by the German researchers, and she was asked to return the bone to the U.S., she set the project aside.

2 halves reunited

Some years later, she said, she spoke to the Viola and the German researchers about the bone, which they didn't know about.

"It was a shock to us that somebody had the other half," Viola said in a phone interview from Kyrgyzstan, where he was doing field work.

Geigl offered to show the bone to them and suggested they find some way to publish the information.

"It's pity that nobody knows the no one knows that I'm the only one who has the pictures of this bone in my computer," she recalled telling them.

Viola was keen to see the photos, but quite surprised when he received them.

"This looks very different than what I expected," he recalled, writing in response.

The Denisovans had large, unusual teeth unlike those of humans or Neanderthals. (Bence Viola/University of Toronto)

Based on their huge teeth and a small fragment of skull, he had the impression Denisovans were even heftier and therefore less human-like than Neanderthals: "All of those are very large and robust. They come from huge individuals."

Geigl said the fact the bone looked more human than Neanderthal wasn't really a surprise for her. "Evolution is not something linear. Some features evolve faster than others."

The new finding suggests the knobs on the ends of Neanderthals' fingertips evolved relatively late.

Knobs on the fingertips suggest devolution, not evolution.

Viola combined the images of the two halves to reconstruct of the entire finger. That allowed the researchers to see that based on the growth of the bone, the girl it belonged to was likely a couple of years older than previously thought — about 14 or 15.

Matthew Tocheri, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Human Origins at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., and was not involved in the study, said he thought the results were "kind of neat."

Like Geigl, he thought the similarity to humans was not that surprising. He noted modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans are all closely related, and, in fact, many Neanderthal and human features are indistinguishable. The fingertips just happen to be one difference.

Similarly, many Denisovans characteristics will likely be very human-like, and we don't yet know their "distinguishing" features, he said.

Tocheri said it was nice to have a bone that could be compared in modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals. But he added, "That's one bone out of over 200 elements to the skeleton. So we've got another 199 or so to go."

Wealthy Will Create ‘Superhuman Race’ in This Century: Stephen Hawking

Interesting, utterly intolerable idea which just adds to the probability

that Jesus will return soon

...And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do

will be impossible for them. "Come, let Us go down..."  Gen 11:6b,7a

'Brief Answers to the Big Questions' is a collection of articles and essays revealing the final thoughts of the late Stephen Hawking. © Reuters / Lucas Jackson

A collection of newly published essays written by Stephen Hawking before his death reveal the iconic physicist believed wealthy people could create a new race of “superhumans” by editing their children’s DNA.

The collection of articles and essays, which has appeared in part in the Sunday Times, will be published in their entirety as a book called: ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’, due to be released on October 16.  

Hawking, who died in March, writes that he is sure breakthroughs in genetic engineering will allow people to create a superhuman race within this century. He also predicted that while laws will try to prevent it, the rich and greedy will be unable to resist the temptation.

“I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression,” he wrote.

“Laws will probably be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics, such as memory, resistance to disease and length of life.”

Hawking added that the emergence of a superior race will soon lead to implications for “unimproved humans” who he presumed will eventually “die out or become unimportant.”

He also warned that “once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete.” His dire prediction continued that those being outpaced in the human development race will either die out or become unimportant, leaving “a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate.”

Hawking’s predictions stem from gene-editing technology that already exists. The Crispr-Cas9, invented six years ago, is a DNA-editing system that allows scientists to modify bad genes or add new ones, and it has been used to treat children that were predisposed to serious illnesses such as an otherwise incurable cancer.

First Modern Brits were Black, Groundbreaking DNA Test on 10,000-year-old Fossil Reveals

Don't you just love irony?

© Justin Tallis / AFP

A pioneering genetic analysis of the UK’s oldest complete skeleton, which is around 10,000 years old, has revealed that the first modern Britons had a “dark to black” complexion.

The National History Museum carried out cutting-edge genetic sequencing and facial recognition technology on the ‘Cheddar Man,’ the skeleton found near Gough’s Cave in the Cheddar Gorge, and found that the first British settlers had dark skin, dark curly hair and possibly blue eyes.

The research on the Mesolithic fossil undermines the commonly held assumption that a people’s geographical origin is a determinant of skin color and physique.

“It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all,” said Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project.

Most white people currently living in Britain are believed to have 10 percent of the skeleton’s DNA.

“The combination of quite dark skin and blue eyes is something that we don’t imagine is typical, but that was the real appearance of these people, something that’s quite rare today,” said Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum.

Before the Cheddar Man’s lineage, there were around nine colonies of hunters, but it is understood that they were all wiped out by harsh temperatures. The Cheddar Man’s 12,000-man fort, however, thrived in the climate. They lived in tents and hunted boar and deer using hunting dogs, and bows and arrows.

Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed with Booth and called into question the link between Britishness and whiteness.

“The historical perspective that you get just tells you that things change, things are in flux, and what may seem as a cemented truth that people who feel British should have white skin, through time is not at all something that is an immutable truth,” he said.

The Cheddar Man was already known to have been around five foot five inches tall, around 10 stone in weight, with good teeth. He died in his early 20s.

The research is in stark contrast to a previous reconstruction of the Cheddar Man by the University of Manchester in 1998, which thought the British ancestor to be white-skinned. Director of the study, Robert Stoddard, is remarkably reported to have said that the Cheddar Man probably “looked pretty much like any modern inhabitant of a Somerset pub.”

The original model- composed without any access to genetic testing- also pictured the Cheddar Man to have straighter and lighter hair compared to the latest one.

“It may be that we may have to rethink some of our notions of what it is to be British, what we expect a Briton to look like at this time,” Dr Rick Schulting, associate professor of archaeology at Oxford University, told the Daily Mail.

Genetically, the Cheddar Man belonged to the “Western Hunter-Gatherers”, Mesolithic individuals from Spain, Hungary and Luxemburg.

His ancestors, however, are thought to have originated in Africa before moving to the Middle East and then Europe.

The European population has genes which are associated with reduced pigmentation, but the Cheddar Man was found to have “ancestral” versions of the genes, hence the new claim to “dark to black” skin tone.

‘The Darwinian View is False’: Ph.D. Biologist Dismantles Evolution in New Book

By Garrett Haley

An accomplished molecular biologist with more than two decades of research experience has come out with a new book in which he describes crippling weaknesses in the theory of evolution and argues instead that life must have been invented by God.

Dr. Douglas Axe is a credentialed scientist who earned a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology and held a number of research positions at the University of Cambridge. The author of numerous scientific papers, Axe currently serves as director of Biologic Institute—a non-profit organization committed to researching biology and the origin of life.



Axe says he first became interested in evolution while working on his Ph.D. in California, so at Cambridge he extensively studied DNA and proteins.

“[My strategy was] to look at the constraints on gene sequences and protein sequences and see if the constraints were loose enough that evolution could work or if they were too tight so that evolution couldn’t work,” Axe said in a recent interview with the Discovery Institute.

While conducting his research at Cambridge, Axe began to doubt the validity of Darwin’s ideas.

“I was consistently starting to find that [the constraints on gene and protein sequences] were too tight—that the target that had to be hit for something to work as an enzyme was too small for accidental changes, accidental mutations,” he said.

Axe decided that Darwin’s natural selection observations were valid and scientifically sound. However, based on his research, he concluded that evolutionary processes are unable to create new species and life forms.

“That’s where Darwin went wrong,” Axe stated. “He assumed that inventions could [take place] a little bit at a time.”

Charles Darwin

“It’s easy to fall for the idea that on a scale of eons and on a scale of billions and trillions of organisms, things can happen that are very, very counterintuitive,” he explained. “Well, it turns out, if you do the math, billions of years is not nearly long enough and trillions and trillions of organisms is not nearly enough for the sort of magic to happen that would have to happen for inventions to happen by accident. It’s just not enough.”

To further explain his findings, Axe, who now describes himself as “a Darwin-doubter,” has written a book that describes the pitfalls of evolutionary thinking. The book, “Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed,” was published this summer.

He hopes the book will dismantle the idea that doubting evolution equals ignorance.

“The orthodox position in the academies is that Darwinism is true and everyone who denies it is putting their head in the sand,” he said in an interview with “The Mountain Times.” “It’s not easy to dislodge that, but my plan is to get a huge number of people who are very bright and very capable of articulating their point of view, who get this.”

Contrary to what many think, Axe says, science clearly points to a Creator.

“The technical science shows that design is true, that design is the true understanding of life, and that the accidental view—the Darwinian view—is false,” Axe stated in a Discovery Institute presentation. “Our intuitions say the same thing, and I think it’s remarkable that the two agree so well.”

Has Science Discovered God?

Einstein didn’t believe it was possible.

Stephen Hawking said it might be the 

greatest scientific discovery of all time.

What discovery has baffled the greatest scientific minds of the past century, and why has it caused them to rethink the origin of our universe? New, more powerful, telescopes have revealed mysteries about our universe that have raised new questions about the origin of life.

Has science discovered God?

But wait a minute! Hasn’t science proven we don’t need God to explain the universe? Lightning, earthquakes and even babies used to be explained as acts of God. But now we know better. What is it about this discovery that is so fundamentally different, and why has it stunned the scientific world?

This discovery and what molecular biologists have learned about the sophisticated coding within DNA have many scientists now admitting that the universe appears to be part of a grand design.

One cosmologist put it this way: “Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument.”

Surprisingly, many scientists who are talking about God have no religious belief whatsoever.

So, what are these stunning discoveries that have scientists suddenly speaking of God? Three revolutionary discoveries from the fields of astronomy and molecular biology stand out:

1. The universe had a beginning

2. The universe is just right for life

3. DNA coding reveals intelligence

The statements leading scientists have made about these discoveries may shock you. Let’s take a look.

One-Time Beginning

Since the dawn of civilization man has gazed in awe at the stars, wondering what they are and how they got there. Although on a clear night the unaided human eye can see about 6,000 stars, Hubble and other powerful telescopes indicate there are trillions of them clustered in over 100 billion galaxies. Our sun is like one grain of sand amidst the world’s beaches.


Pictures from the Hubble telescope

However, prior to the 20th century, the majority of scientists believed our own Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe, and that only about 100 million stars existed.

Most scientists believed that our universe never had a beginning. They believed mass, space and energy had always existed.

But in the early 20th century, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe is expanding. Rewinding the process mathematically, he calculated that everything in the universe, including matter, energy, space and even time itself, actually had a beginning.

Shockwaves rang loudly throughout the scientific community. Many scientists, including Einstein, reacted negatively. In what Einstein later called “the biggest blunder of my life,” he fudged the equations to avoid the implication of a beginning.

Perhaps the most vocal adversary of a beginning to the universe was British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who sarcastically nicknamed the creation event a “big bang.” He stubbornly held to his steady state theory that the universe has always existed. So did Einstein and other scientists until the evidence for a beginning became overwhelming. The “elephant in the room” implication of a beginning is that something or Someone beyond scientific investigation must have started it all.

Finally, in 1992, COBE satellite experiments proved that the universe really did have a one-time beginning in an incredible flash of light and energy. Although some scientists called it the moment of creation, most preferred referring to it as the “big bang.”

Astronomer Robert Jastrow tries to help us imagine how it all began. “The picture suggests the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb. The instant in which the cosmic bomb exploded marked the birth of the Universe.”


Everything from Nothing

Science is unable to tell us what or who caused the universe to begin. But some believe it clearly points to a Creator. “British theorist, Edward Milne, wrote a mathematical treatise on relativity which concluded by saying,

‘As to the first cause of the Universe, in the context of expansion, 

that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him.’” 

Another British scientist, Edmund Whittaker attributed the beginning of our universe to 

“Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness.” 

Many scientists were struck by the parallel of a one-time creation event from nothing with the biblical creation account in Genesis 1:1. Prior to this discovery, many scientists regarded the biblical account of creation from nothing as unscientific.

Although he called himself an agnostic, Jastrow was compelled by the evidence to admit,

“Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to

 a biblical view of the origin of the world.” 

Another agnostic, George Smoot, the Nobel Prize winning scientist in charge of the COBE experiment, also admits to the parallel.

“There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event 

and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”

Scientists who used to scoff at the Bible as a book of fairy tales, are now admitting that the biblical concept of creation from nothing has been right all along.



Cosmologists, who specialize in the study of the universe and its origins, soon realized that a chance cosmic explosion could never bring about life any more than a nuclear bomb would—unless it was precisely engineered to do so. And that meant a designer must have planned it. They began using words like, “Super-intellect,” “Creator,” and even “Supreme Being” to describe this designer. Let’s look at why.


Finely-Tuned for Life

Physicists calculated that for life to exist, gravity and the other forces of nature needed to be just right or our universe couldn’t exist. Had the expansion rate been slightly weaker, gravity would have pulled all matter back into a “big crunch.”

We’re not talking about merely a one or two percent reduction in the universe’s expansion rate. Stephen Hawking writes, 

“If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller 

by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, 

the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached its present size.” 

On the flip side, if the expansion rate had been a mere fraction greater than it was, galaxies, stars and planets could never have formed, and we wouldn’t be here.

And for life to exist, the conditions in our solar system and planet also need to be just right. For example, we all realize that without an atmosphere of oxygen, none of us would be able to breathe. And without oxygen, water couldn’t exist. Without water there would be no rainfall for our crops. Other elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, sodium, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus are also essential for life.



But that alone is not all that is needed for life to exist. The size, temperature, relative proximity, and chemical makeup of our planet, sun, and moon also need to be just right. And there are dozens of other conditions that needed to be exquisitely fine-tuned or we wouldn’t be here to think about it.

Scientists who believe in God may have expected such fine-tuning, but atheists and agnostics were unable to explain the remarkable “coincidences.” Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, an agnostic, writes, 

“The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been 

very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Accident or Miracle?

But couldn’t this fine-tuning be attributed to chance? After all, odds-makers know that even long shots can eventually win at the racetrack. And, against heavy odds, lotteries are eventually won by someone. So, what are the odds against human life existing by chance from a random explosion in cosmic history?

For human life to be possible from a big bang defies the laws of probability. One astronomer calculates the odds at less than 1 chance in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. It would be far easier for a blind-folded person—in one try— to discover one specially marked grain of sand out of all the beaches of the world.

Another example of how unlikely it would be for a random big bang to produce life is one person winning over a thousand consecutive mega-million dollar lotteries after purchasing only a single ticket for each.

What would be your reaction to such news? Impossible—unless it was fixed by someone behind the scenes, which is what everyone would think. And that is what many scientists are concluding—Someone behind the scenes designed and created the universe.

This new understanding of how miraculous human life is in our universe led the agnostic astronomer George Greenstein to ask,

“Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon

the scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being?”

However, as an agnostic, Greenstein maintains his faith in science, rather than a Creator, to ultimately explain our origins.

Jastrow explains why some scientists are reluctant to accept a transcendent Creator,

There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe…This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.

It is understandable why scientists like Greenstein and Hawking seek other explanations rather than attribute our finely-tuned universe to a Creator. Hawking speculates that other unseen (and unprovable) universes may exist, increasing the odds that one of them (ours) is perfectly fine-tuned for life. However, since his proposal is speculative, and outside of verification, it can hardly be called “scientific.” Although he is also an agnostic, British astrophysicist Paul Davies dismisses Hawking’s idea as too speculative. He writes,

“Such a belief must rest on faith rather than observation.” 

Although Hawking continues leading the charge to explore purely scientific explanations for our origins, other scientists, including many agnostics, have acknowledged what appears to be overwhelming evidence for a Creator. Hoyle wrote,

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect 

has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, 

and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Although Einstein wasn’t religious, and didn’t believe in a personal God, he called the genius behind the universe 

“an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic 

thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

Atheist Christopher Hitchens, who spent much of his life writing and debating against God, was most perplexed by the fact that life couldn’t exist if things were different by just “one degree or one hair.” 

Davies acknowledges,

There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. 

It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe….

 The impression of design is overwhelming. 

DNA: The Language of Life

Astronomy is not the only area where science has seen evidence for design. Molecular biologists have discovered intricately complex design in the microscopic world of DNA. In the past century, scientists learned that a tiny molecule called DNA is the “brains” behind each cell in our bodies as well as every other living thing. Yet the more they discover about DNA, the more amazed they are at the brilliance behind it.



Scientists who believe the material world is all that exists (materialists), like Richard Dawkins, argue DNA evolved by natural selection without a Creator. Yet even most ardent evolutionists admit that the origin of DNA’s intricate complexity is unexplainable.

DNA’s intricate complexity caused its co-discoverer, Francis Crick, to believe that it could never have originated on earth naturally. Crick, an evolutionist who believed life is too complex to have originated on earth, and must have come from outer space, wrote,

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to almost be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.

The coding behind DNA reveals such intelligence that it staggers the imagination. A mere pinhead of DNA contains information equivalent to a stack of paperback books that would encircle the earth 5,000 times. And DNA operates like a language with its own extremely complex software code. Microsoft founder Bill Gates says that the software of DNA is 

“far, far more complex than any software we have ever developed.”

Dawkins and other materialists believe that all this complexity originated through natural selection. Yet, as Crick remarked, natural selection could never have produced the first molecule. Many scientists believe that the coding within the DNA molecule points to an intelligence far exceeding what could have occurred by natural causes.

In the early 21st century, leading atheist Antony Flew’s atheism came to an abrupt end when he studied the intelligence behind DNA. Flew explains what changed his opinion.

What I think the DNA material has done is to show that intelligence must have been 

involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. 

The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me 

like the work of intelligence…. It now seems to me that the finding 

of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials

 for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

Although Flew was not a Christian, he admitted that the “software” behind DNA is far too complex to have originated without a “designer.” The discovery of the incredible intelligence behind DNA has, in this former leading atheist’s words, “provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”



Fingerprints of a Creator

Are scientists now convinced that a Creator has left his “fingerprints” on the universe?

Although many scientists are still bent on squeezing God out of the universe, most recognize the religious implications of these new discoveries. In his book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, who doesn’t believe in a personal God, attempts to explain why the universe doesn’t need God. Yet when faced with the evidence, even Hawking, has also admitted, 

“There must be religious overtones. 

But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it.”

As an agnostic, Jastrow had no Christian agenda behind his conclusions. However, he freely acknowledges the compelling case for a Creator. Jastrow writes of the shock and despair experienced by scientists who thought they had squeezed God out of their world.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, 

the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance;

 he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, 

he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. 

A Personal Creator?

If there is a superintelligent Creator, the question arises, what is he like? Is he just some Force like in Star Wars, or is he a personal Being like us? Since we are personal and relational beings, wouldn’t the one who created us also be personal and relational?

Many scientists like Arthur L. Schawlow, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, believe that these new discoveries provide compelling evidence for a personal God. He writes, 

“It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, 

one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious…. 

I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life.” 

If God is personal and since he has given us the ability to communicate, 

wouldn’t we expect him to communicate with us and let us know why we are here?

What kind of God Who created humans with the ability to communicate with each other at a very high level, would not have the ability to communicate with them Himself? 

As we have seen, science is unable to answer questions about God and the purpose for life. However, since the Bible was right about creation from nothing, might it also be trustworthy regarding God, life and purpose?

Two thousand years ago a man set foot on our planet who claimed to have the answer to life. Although his time on earth was brief, his impact changed the world, and is still felt today. His name is Jesus Christ.

The eyewitnesses to Jesus Christ tell us that he continually demonstrated creative power over nature’s laws. They tell us he was wise, humble and compassionate. He healed the lame, deaf and blind. He stopped raging storms instantly, created food for the hungry on the spot, turned water into wine at a wedding, and even raised the dead. And they claimed after his brutal execution, he rose from the dead.

They also tell us that Jesus Christ is the one who flung the stars into space, fine-tuned our universe and created DNA. Could he be the one of whom Einstein unknowingly referred to as the “superintelligence” behind the universe? Could Jesus Christ be the one of whom Hoyle unknowingly referred to as having

“monkeyed with physics, chemistry and biology?”

Has the mystery of who was behind the big bang and the intelligence of DNA been revealed in the following account from the New Testament?

Now Christ is the visible expression of the invisible God. 

He existed before creation began, for it was through him that everything was made, 

whether spiritual or material, seen or unseen. Through him, and for him, 

also, were created power and dominion, ownership and authority. 

In fact, every single thing was created through, and for him….

Life from nothing began through him, and life from the dead began through him, 

and he is, therefore, justly called the Lord of all. 

Jesus spoke with authority about God’s love for us and the reason he created us. He said he has a plan for our lives, and that plan centers on a relationship with himself. But for that relationship to be possible, Jesus had to die on the cross for our sins. And it was necessary for him to rise from the dead so that we too could have life after death.

If Jesus was the Creator, he certainly would have the power over life and death. And those closest to him claim they saw him alive after he died and was buried for three days.