Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called Transitions:The Evolution of Life His previous blog can be found here.
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"Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul..." Mark Twain
"Ideology is a poor substitute for rational thought..." Afarensis
"It isn't faith that makes good science...it's curiosity" Prof. Jacob Barnhardt, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"This man wishes to be accorded the same privilege as a sponge. He wishes to think!" Clarence Darrow, Inherit the Wind
"...I become fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason..." Klaatu, The Day the Earth Stood Still
"I want you to grab life by its little bunny ears and get in its face..." The Simpsons
"This is between me and the vegetable..." Seymour Krelborn, The Little Shop of Horrors
"There are bad laws and cruel laws and the people who enforce them are both bad and cruel..." Thea, Isle of the Dead
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." Jean- Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation, misinformation and suppression of contradictory data, and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views." Franz Weidenreich, Morphology of Solo Man
"Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconcious, impersonal material process with unique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he is responsible. He is not the creature of uncontrollable and undeterminable forces, but his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny." George Gaylord Simpson, Life of the Past
Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he's smarter than you he's got a science degree!
Yeah he's the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he's smarter than you he's got a science degree! Unknown
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Frederich Nietzsche
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.... Capt. Richard C. Pratt, Founder Carlisle Indian Industrial School
There have been several Op-Eds creating some off-the-wall arguments about Americans, American culture, and DNA among other things. There are a number of common threads binding these Op-Eds together. Starting with the total lack of knowledge about genetics, culture, and for that matter American history.
A story on Science News Daily is cause for alarm, hysterical panic, and other paranoia:
The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" - crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.
There is an interesting new paper out in PNAS that looks at enamel chemistry to try and reconstruct early diet. The study is by Humphrey, Dean, Jeffries, and Penn. The abstract is below the fold.
Know Your Primate grew out of posts I wrote specifically for the Friday Ark back on my old blog. The point was to write short, informative posts about whatever species struck my fancy (and at that point was not limited to primates). Once I moved to ScienceBlogs those kind of posts went by the wayside. Then in July, 2006 I decided to resurrect the idea with a specific focus on primates. In the time since I have focused on a wide variety of primates but, with one or two exceptions, have avoided the extant apes. This is largely due to the explosion of knowledge about them in the past 10-15 years, which makes it hard to write a short post in the format I have chosen for this series. Bearing that limitation in mind, here is this weeks primate.
This is really interesting. Scientists at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa are dissecting a pygmy right whale, you can read all about it at their blog. One interesting bit concerns a common creationist claim about whales:
While I toil away in the blogmines, working on my take of the recent cladistic analysis of hominids I thought I would mention a few stories that I found to be interesting.
When I first heard about this book I knew I would have to review it. The question of who owns the items archaeologists dig up has been the subject of a long, and frequently bitter, debate. Here in the United States the debate centers around NAGPRA and the repatriation of human remains and artifacts. In other areas of the world the debate concerns cultural knowledge (think ethnopharmacology) and even genetics. Indigenous peoples are pitted against archaeologists, and in turn, the archaeologists are pitted against museums. The debate doesn't end there though, consider the case of the Elgin Marbles which pits the nations of Greece and Britain against each other. As we will see below, the debate gets a very complicated very quickly, especially when nationalism gets involved.
I myself have always been moderately conservative on the issue. In general I think there is something to be said for repatriation of human remains and artifacts to the cultures that produced them, although I think we should exercise some caution and forethought. Consequently, I found Who Owns Antiquity? to be somewhat congenial to my point of view.
There are a couple of interesting news items relating to forensic anthropology. First, this short piece on Beth Murray and forensic anthropology in high schools.
Cichlids are an example of what Mary Jane West-Eberhard calls a "multidirectional radiation" - that is an adaptive radiation that produces a large amount of diversity and specialization of related forms. There are at least 1,500 species of haplochromine cichlids. Within Lake Victoria there are at least 120 species that display a wide variety of behavioral and morphological specializations.
Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
