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 
That is the name of a fascinating post over at Archaeoporn.
One of the challenges I face, not being a university based blogger, is coming up with journal papers in a timely fashion to discuss interesting stories as they arise. Obtaining the papers requires an incredible amount of begging from those who have access to relevant journals. Sometimes, as now, when there are a large number of stories out there having to beg for a lot of articles can be offputting. Especially, because I know a lot of you have better things to do than constantly find and email me articles. Consequently, it can be quite a challenge to be a blogger about anthropology, evolution, and science and there are days when I wonder if I shouldn't just quit and leave it to those with the necessary resources. Then it happens. Someone publishes an interesting paper examining biological distance among early moderns or Orrorin tugenensis and I'm off hunting down the article.
As the Archaeoporn post points out individual subscriptions to things like the AJPA or the Journal of Human Evolution is extremely pricy. One option not mentioned, in an otherwise admirable discussion, is for the authors of papers to be allowed to distribute them via their websites. Some anthropologists do this, but not all (I have a list of those that do on my blogroll), which is a damn shame. Anyway, enough about me, go read Archaeoporn's post...
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Comments
A lot of journals now allow authors to put the final text on their pages. The other way of getting access to journals relatively cheaply is to join the society. I don't know about anthropology journals, but I get JEB and a couple of stats journals through membership of the relevant societies.
The big money for the journals come from the libraries, so they're happy to give the societies cheap access, as it's teh societies who run the journals.
Posted by: Bob O'H | March 22, 2008 2:21 AM
I have very much the same problem. I also moderate several e-mail lists, including my own Palanthsci, and a partly-scientific, partly writing-based blog. And I need access to lots of human-evolution-oriented journal articles, both for myself and for others. While it's true I can go to the local academic library and read the hard copies of the journals there, I can't distribute them. I don't have that kind of access, and so I have to rely on kindly anthropologists et. al. Usually, they are kind, but I can't get nearly everything I would like. And I can't afford the subscription rates to the societies. . . .
Anne G
Posted by: Anne Gilbert | March 22, 2008 3:52 PM
There's a few journals I'd like access to, but they're odd ones with low publication numbers and not carried by many universities. Without IIL from a U library, I'm out of luck.
Posted by: QrazyQat | March 22, 2008 7:06 PM
Anne - I can't afford memberships in societies either. On top of that the AJPA, for example, requires that two members sign your application. Other societies may have similar requirements... You might also check the links here.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | March 22, 2008 11:26 PM