MOSCOW: An ancient Vishnu idol has been found during excavation in an old village in Russia's Volga region, raising questions about the prevalent view on the origin of ancient Russia.

The idol found in Staraya (old) Maina village dates back to VII-X century AD. Staraya Maina village in Ulyanovsk region was a highly populated city 1700 years ago, much older than Kiev, so far believed to be the mother of all Russian cities.

"We may consider it incredible, but we have ground to assert that Middle-Volga region was the original land of Ancient Rus. This is a hypothesis, but a hypothesis, which requires thorough research," Reader of Ulyanovsk State University's archaeology department Dr Alexander Kozhevin told state-run television Vesti .

Dr Kozhevin, who has been conducting excavation in Staraya Maina for last seven years, said that every single square metre of the surroundings of the ancient town situated on the banks of Samara, a tributary of Volga, is studded with antiques.

Prior to unearthing of the Vishnu idol, Dr Kozhevin has already found ancient coins, pendants, rings and fragments of weapons.

He believes that today's Staraya Maina, a town of eight thousand, was ten times more populated in the ancient times. It is from here that people started moving to the Don and Dneiper rivers around the time ancient Russy built the city of Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine.

An international conference is being organised later this year to study the legacy of the ancient village, which can radically change the history of ancient Russia.

                                                            --------                                                            

CHIMP GENOME SEQUENCE COMPLETED reported news@nature, Science the 31st Aug. 2005, Nature, vol 437, p69, 1 Sep 2005. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, a group of 67 scientists working from 23 scientific institutions in five countries, have published the first draft of the complete chimpanzee genome and have begun to make comparisons with the human genome. The differences found between chimps and man were "35 million single nucleotide substitutions (DNA letter changes), 5 million insertions and deletions, local rearrangements and a chromosome fusion."

Chimp Genome Special at Nature:
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/chimpgenome/index.html

ED. COM. Whilst most articles about the chimp genome are concentrating on how similar chimps and humans are, the millions of differences now known for sure actually indicate how unalike the two different groups are. Genes are like long sentences made up of many words. Just as it is possible to completely change the meaning of a sentence by changing a few letters, or inserting or removing a few words, a few small changes in DNA letters can completely change the way a gene works. In the last few years we have also learnt more about how genes are turned on and off. Small changes to the controlling genes that turn other genes on and off can result in very big differences in resulting structure and function. The first clue to how significant these types of differences are came in May 2004 when genome scientists closely compared one chromosome (no. 22) from the chimp with its human equivalent. Despite the wide spread claim that chimp and man have 98% similar DNA code letters, after looking at the effects on actual gene function made by the substitutions, insertions and deletions, they concluded equivalent chimp and human chromosomes were actually 83% different.  We predict that when the two genomes are fully analysed they will find just as much difference for the whole genome as they did for this one chromosome. (Ref. genome, genetics, information)     from creationresearch.net                                                             

------------

 Faith in Evolution

Evolution of everything living is not a verifiable fact. Evolution of human beings is most certainly not recreateable in a lab and hence isn't subject to testing and proving, therefore it is simply faith to accept the evolution of human beings. You claim there is evidence for evolution and yet it isn't possible to use that evidence to reconstruct the actual process so it's really not physical evidence, it's nothing more than circumstancial evidence. The factual basis for evolution just doesn't exist. There are a lot of facts that are used to make a circumstantial case for evolution but accepting that case is a matter of faith and that's all.                       from curevents.com/

(Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees, Galina Glazko et al, Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA)