Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell" meant to convince people that they do not need a savior. (...)

Broun spokeswoman Meredith Griffanti told the Athens Banner-Herald that Broun was recorded speaking off-the-record to a church group about his religious beliefs. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. (...)

(...) 6-7 million years ago: Start of the human lineage, following a split with the lineage containing chimpanzees and gorillas

2.6 mya: Onset of large-scale making and use of stone tool technology

2.5 mya: First human ancestors in our own genus, Homo

200,000 years ago: First modern humans, Homo sapiens

30,000: Cave paintings and rock paintings begin to emerge on multiple continents

Around 12,000: Onset of agriculture and human settlements. Up until this period, all human groups lived by hunting and gathering. (This transition was neither linear nor simple.)

Does one date, midway in the pack, snag the eye? 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged.

That's us.

But can we really affix a date to becoming human? Here's a question too complex for first-day-of-class lists. I've written elsewhere that I love my field because doing anthropology so often starts with agitated questions. "For how long have we been human?" surely counts as one of those.

The 200,000 date refers to the earliest known anatomically modern humans, skeletons found at places like Omo and Herto in Ethiopia. They represent people with slender body types, high foreheads, and reduced brow ridges compared to Neanderthals or earlier human ancestors.

But no one would argue that becoming human is about anatomy.

And who's to say that Neanderthals, though a different species, weren't human? They looked different from us — more robust, with thicker and strong bones and a different shape skull. But they made sophisticated tools and, at least in some places, thought symbolically and buried their dead. Neanderthals co-existed with us, and as we're just finding out, so did the Denisovan people living in Siberia tens of thousands of years ago.

So when did modern behavior emerge? Talk about fraught questions! (...)

There’s been a victory for sense and science in South Korea, as the government there has rejected calls to drop references to the evolution of birds from the national school curriculum.

As previously reported on Wired.co.uk, pressure group Society for Textbook Revise had managed to persuade textbook publishers to drop sections from their books that discussed the evolution of horses and the Jurassic-era early avian-like dinosaur Archaeopteryx.

Now, however, a special panel convened by the South Korean government has recommended that the publishers ignore the creationists’ arguments — which should mean that textbooks reintroduce the old segments before the start of the next school year.

The argument of the Society for Textbook Revise — an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research — rested on there being debate among evolutionary scientists over whether Archaeopteryx could fly, or glide, or merely had feathers for decoration. This disagreement was extrapolated to cast doubt on the whole evolutionary history of birds.

In response, South Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology set up a panel experts to assess the campaign’s claims. They disagreed that their Archaeopteryx objection was a valid argument, and said it should remain in the textbooks. The campaign group also claimed that a section on the evolution of the horse was too simplistic, which the panel agreed with — but they have merely recommended replacing it with a more thorough explanation, or a new section on the evolution of another animal like the whale.

Creationism is a growing issue in South Korea, which has experienced a surge in evangelical Christianity over the past few decades — over 20 percent of South Koreans claim some kind of Christian faith as of 2005, and a 2009 survey found 41 percent of those asked said they didn’t think there was sufficient evidence to support evolution as a theory.