Eek! We ate Grandad!

So we were supposed to be the smart, cool ones, right? New theories circulating in fossil circles suggest that we hunted, killed, ate, and made jewelry out of the Neanderthals.

Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

For added colour to the evolution topic, see also here and here.

I bet there was a little interspecies breeding, nonetheless. You can see it sometimes.

Anyway, it may not have been all happy cannibalism and species war:

"We do need more evidence, but this could indicate modern humans and Neanderthals were living in the same area of Europe at the same time, that they were interacting, and that some of these interactions may have been hostile.

"This does not prove we systematically eradicated the Neanderthals or that we regularly ate their flesh. But it does add to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction."

Hey baby, let's devolve together

Lucy, half a million years ago. Go on, you'd have wanted to evolve with me, wouldn't you?

This is a variation on the high school prom picture site that was doing the rounds 6 months ago. It's quite fun. You upload a photo of yourself, and watch yourself devolve (using a somewhat primitive reimaging system but it's fun enough for your next five minutes) and find out how you looked up to 3.7 million years ago. Funnily enough, the 500,000 year old species that was used to inspire the above photo was found in Heidelberg, Germany, which is the native home of Oliver, my friend the species historian, whose specialism is the homos throughout time. His facebook profile image features him holding a skull of a pre-homo sapiens human from a Long Time Ago.

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin!