At the Wall Street Journal some interesting science and some extreme Christian stupidity.

A Christian fucktard at the Wall Street Journal wrote "Could you explain why there are no transitional fossils to be found. There should be millions of them lieing around. While you're at it, how did life come from non life?"

Millions of them lying around. We should be constantly tripping on the numerous fossils. What a fucking moron.

This is what I wrote for the stupid fucking asshole:

Mr. Regan, here in the 21st century we have something called "looking things up". Please google "Wikipedia transitional fossils" and "Wikipedia abiogenesis".

That's all I wrote. I wanted to write "Grow up and educate yourself you fucking moron" but that would make the Wall Street Journal cry.

For an article about science there were numerous anti-science comments. At least one Christian asshole provided a link to a Christian creationist website. I'm not making this up.

Unlike the New York Times where virtually everyone is normal, the Wall Street Journal is infested with Christian fucktards who like to advertise their stupidity.

Here is the Wall Street Journal science article about an extinct human species. It's very interesting.

Fossil jawbone of the early humans species called Denisovans, found in 1980 in the Baishiya Karst Cave.

Views of the virtual reconstruction of the fossil jawbone. The mandible is shown after digital removal of the adhering carbonate crust, and is so well preserved that it allows for a virtual reconstruction of the two sides.

The cave where the 160,000-year-old fossil was found. The deep cavern is a sacred site managed by a nearby temple.

Fossil Points to a Vanished Human Species in Himalayas

Fossil jaw discovered in highlands of Tibet shows the Denisovans lived at an altitude that would leave many people today starved for oxygen.

By Robert Lee Hotz

May 1, 2019

A fossil jaw found in the Himalayan highlands of Tibet belongs to a vanished human species called Denisovans, deepening the mystery of human evolution in Asia, scientists said Wednesday in a new study probing the roots of humankind.

Discovered by a local Buddhist monk, the fossil shows these archaic human relatives lived on the roof of the world in the rarefied air at almost 11,000 feet—an altitude that would leave many people today starved for oxygen. They settled at these frigid heights at least 160,000 years ago, more than 120,000 years before modern humankind arrived, said the scientists, who published their work on the fossil in the journal Nature.

While this early human species became extinct long ago, traces of their DNA survive in modern populations of Asia, the Pacific and Australia, several genome studies show. In fact, many people of Tibet today owe their unusual adaptation to such extreme high-altitude conditions, where there is 40% less oxygen in the air than at sea level, to a unique gene inherited from these primordial mountain dwellers.

“One of the most spectacular aspects of this discovery is the location,” said project co-leader Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “Nobody ever imagined that archaic humans would be able to dwell in such an environment.”

The discovery is the most recent to highlight the early history of human development in Asia, which has been long overshadowed by human-fossil finds in Africa and Europe. “It became the sleeping beauty of paleoanthropology,” Dr. Hublin said. “We are now turning to Asia again.”

Until the new find, the Denisovans were known only through a fossil fingertip, three teeth and a toe bone found in 2008 far from Tibet in a cave in the Russian Altai Mountains of Siberia.

In 2010, scientists successfully exhumed DNA from that finger bone and discovered a special variation of a blood-cell gene called ESPA-1 that affects the body’s response to falling oxygen levels, key to survival at extreme altitudes. Inherited by many Tibetan people, it is considered by some researchers to be the strongest instance of natural selection ever documented in a human population.

No DNA was recovered from the latest find, the researchers said. But they speculate that Denisovans likely lived at this extreme altitude long enough to develop that special genetic adaptation and then passed it on to more modern humans with whom they interbred.

It took almost 40 years for the fossil jaw to go from the hands of the Buddhist monk who first picked it up to publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

According to project co-leader Dongju Zhang at China’s Lanzhou University, the monk found the fossil in 1980 while visiting the Baishiya Karst Cave in Xiahe, Gansu, China. The deep cavern is a sacred site managed by a nearby temple. The steep approach to the cave entrance today is festooned with streamers of yellow, blue and red prayer flags.
“He grabbed something on the floor,” Dr. Zhang said. Recognizing something unusual about the primitive jawbone encrusted with mineral carbonate, “the monk gave it to the local living Buddha.” Known formally as the Sixth Gung-Thang Living Buddha, the religious leader in turn gave the jawbone to Lanzhou University.

Not until 2010 were university resources available to study the find.

Due to the unusual circumstances of the discovery, the researchers acknowledge they can’t prove that the jawbone came from the cave. But they were able to match the minerals on the jaw to deposits in the cave. Their recent excavation in the cave turned up stone tools and the bones of animals likely butchered for food dating to the same age as the fossil jaw.

“It blows my mind,” Dr. Hublin said.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Appeared in the May 2, 2019, print edition as 'Fossil Sheds New Light on Extinct Human Species.'