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 
Welcome to the second edition of The Fourstone Hearth! I received some excellent submissions. I have also exercised my privilege as host to include a few, worthy, items that were not submitted. Unfortunately, for the second carnival in a row we have no submissions from our linguistic collegues, so once again we only have three stones represented...
I am going to start with the field of archaeology.
Our first entry concerns the denial of tenure to one of the most controversial archaeologists of the 20th century. You either love this guy or hate him. His tenure committee thinks he may be a Nazi sympathizer, although he claims to be an "immortal archaeologist". McSweeney's has the details.
Brian Hoffman at Old Dirt-New Thoughts discusses Eagle Nest Taphonomy - California Style and ponders how to tell eagle middens from archaeological middens.
Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science has some Tales From the Crypt: What Teeth Can Tell Us About Life, Death and Prehistoric Human Behavior a fascinating discussion about what studying animal teeth can tell us about hunting strategies among hunter-gatherers in East Africa and California.
Duane at Abnormal Interests provides us with a Table of Contents for his excellent series on "Friday Pot Blogging" - a series that runs from the Early Bronze age to the Iron Age II.
Fotis Ifantidis at Archaeolog discusses The most personal personal ornament - a neolithic Greek tooth pendant - and illustrates the value of taken a second look through all your bags and boxes of artifacts.
Which brings us to cultural anthropology.
Salto Sobrius has an interesting post on The ICQ Gender Wars and concludes:
For women, ICQ seems to be a bit like going to a cocktail party where half of the male guests are insane sex offenders.
Paul Wren at Wanna Be An Anthropologist discusses a possible resolution to the long running land dispute between the Hopis and the Navajo.
K. Kris Hirst of Archaeology.About.Com has a post on Festivals and the Maya Plaza: Spectacle and Spectators. This post discusses a recent paper by Takeshi Inomata on Plazas and the importance of public performance to Mayan culture. A very interesting entry.
This brings us to physical anthropology.
PZ Myers at Pharyngula has an interesting post on ripping a paper on the relationship between intelligence, inequality and health in Africa...
lexis2praxis of Anthropology.net has an interesting post looking at The Evolution of Women in Anthropology, including a humorous take on one of the "Icons of Evolution". I have to agree with the conclusion:
There are a lot of discussions going on in our field about how science textbooks, particularly in the field of biology, reinforce patriarchal notions - associating the male body with the stereotypical role of aggressor and sexual predator, for example - through the use of precise language and visual depiction. It seems that anthropology should be at the cutting edge of questioning and confronting those stereotypes ...
Among non-human primates, the mother bears a lot of responsibility for raising the offspring. Young primates spend a lot of time clinging to, and be carried around by, their mothers. Kelly Hale asks Did afarensis babies impair a mother's ability to feed herself and did she thus rely on her mate for survival? This is probably the most interesting commentary on Dikika that I have read...
Speaking of fossils, if you are wondering why a lot of folks have been blogging about Neanderthals lately, Razib at Gene Expression talks about the the introgression of Neanderthal genes into the modern human genome. This is a big, big story! Remember the Trinkaus article?
Carl at Hot Cup of Joe provides some of the background on Neanderthals with Paleoanthropology: Multiregional versus Replacement.
In Bone is a dynamic tissue, remodeling with time and life Kambiz at Anthropology.net discusses the many things that can be learned from the microstructure of bone.
Finally, in a post discussing one of the more important issues facing anthropology, Rex at Savage Minds discusses Open Access Anthropology: what you can do. If you don't read any other post read this one...
The next edition of The Fourstone Hearth will be hosted by K. Kris Hirst at Archaeology.About.Com on November 22nd.
Comments
I'm impressed, this is a phenomenal turn out for our second issue. Thanks to all who participated and also to afarensis for all the hard work in compiling this.
Now, I'm gonna read some of these posts that slipped my radar.
Posted by: Kambiz Kamrani | November 8, 2006 2:36 PM
Looking Good! I'm glad to be a part of this carnival and looking forward to reading the rest of the posts over the next day or so! Good job!
Posted by: cfeagans | November 9, 2006 3:40 AM
Hey Afarensis, thanks for your work and for the very kind comment. Keep up the great work!
Posted by: Kelly Hale | November 9, 2006 5:04 AM
Thanks for your blog. I really think that if more ordinary people like us start talking about human origins then some of the more extreme positions will start to fall away. - An example of the bloody mindedness of many of the professionals is the idea that our ancient protean ancestors could plan to do utilitarian things like plan year after year to return to certain areas to strip natural concentrations of plants which annually bore fruit and otherwise hunt, gather, fish and scavange but could not do things like play games, laugh, mark themselves with ochre etc., Or the even sillier idea that other later ancestral beings - who lived at the same time as people who were using words, dipthongs, vowel sounds etc., still in use(and whose blood possibly also flows in our veins} who buried their dead didnt communicate with each other about 'life and death' as a complex dialectical issue? Or didnt 'play' music- even though they made musical instruments? I.e have a complex set of modes of behaviour - of which music and a culture of dealing with life and death were but two of many such modes?. My mind always goes back to GK Chesterton's essay 'The Professors and the Caveman' (I think it was called). So thanks for the blog which I have just come across and will keep looking in on.
Posted by: Dr Chris Hayman | April 13, 2007 9:40 PM