* Astronomy

The skull, consisting of 16 pieces, was dug up last month after two years of excavation at a site in Xuchang in Henan province.
The pieces were fossilised because they were buried near the mouth of a spring whose water had a high calcium content.

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Archaeologists in China claim an ancient skull bridges the gap between Ape Man and Homo Sapiens.
The skull was found after two years of excavations in Xuchang and may be 100,000 years old.
There are 16 fragments which piece together to form an almost complete skull with protruding eyebrows and a small forehead.

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Sometime around 7 million years ago, the land in East Africa began to rise in earnest, and life on Earth took a drastic turn. A creature began to evolve into a form that would eventually take over the world.
Exactly how humans originated and evolved is an intrinsic intellectual question. But one thing has become fairly clear: Tectonics was ultimately responsible for the evolution of humankind.
Any discussion of the evolution of life starts with Charles Darwin, and human evolution is no exception. More than a century ago, Darwin saw a link between the African arid savannah and human evolution, an idea that later became popular as the savannah hypothesis. However, in his original theory of natural selection, Darwin downplayed the role of the physical environment as a mechanism for evolution, stating instead that natural selection could drive evolutionary changes in the absence of any change in the physical environment or climate.

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Scientists long have focused on how climate and vegetation allowed human ancestors to evolve in Africa. Now, University of Utah geologists are calling renewed attention to the idea that ground movements formed mountains and valleys, creating environments that favored the emergence of humanity.

"Tectonics [movement of Earth's crust] was ultimately responsible for the evolution of humankind" - Royhan and Nahid Gani of the university's Energy and Geoscience Institute write in the January, 2008, issue of Geotimes, published by the American Geological Institute.

They argue that the accelerated uplift of mountains and highlands stretching from Ethiopia to South Africa blocked much ocean moisture, converting lush tropical forests into an arid patchwork of woodlands and savannah grasslands that gradually favoured human ancestors who came down from the trees and started walking on two feet - an energy-efficient way to search larger areas for food in an arid environment.
In their Geotimes article, the Ganis - a husband-and-wife research team who met in college in their native Bangladesh - describe this 3,700-mile-long stretch of highlands and mountains as "the Wall of Africa." It parallels the famed East African Rift valley, where many fossils of human ancestors were found.

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