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 
A new edition of the Four Stone Hearth is up at Testimony of the Spade.
Part II of Ken Miller's response to Casey Luskin is up over at The Loom. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart. In case you missed it, Part I is here*. Perhaps Casey will learn to avoid picking fights on subjects he knows nothing about...
Nature is doing something interesting:
About a year ago, an Editorial in these pages urged scientists and their institutions to 'spread the word' and highlight reasons why scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact (see Nature 451, 108; 2008).
This week we are following our own prescription. Readers will find at http://www.nature.com/evolutiongems a freely accessible resource for biologists and others who wish to explain to students, friends or loved ones just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Entitled '15 evolutionary gems', the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the fossil record, from studies of natural and artificial habitats, and from research on molecular biological processes.In a year in which Darwin is being celebrated amid uncertainty and hostility about his ideas among citizens, being aware of the cumulatively incontrovertible evidence for those ideas is all the more important. We trust that this document will help.
The intedresting part is that each of the 15 main articles are open access and available to download. They are linked to in the pdf above.
Science Daily has an interesting article on research into the evolution of spiders:
New finds near the same location, in Gilboa, N.Y., caused the paleontologists to reinterpret their original findings. The new fossils included silk-spinning organs, called spigots, arranged on the edges of broad plates making up the undersides of the animals. The researchers identified parts of a long, jointed tail not found in any previously known spider, but common among some of the spiders' more primitive relatives."We think these 'tailed spiders' represent an entirely new kind of animal, not known before from living or fossil examples." Shear said. "They were more primitive than spiders in many ways, and may be spider ancestors." Besides having tails and spinning silk from broad plates, the animals also seem to lack poison glands.
The research is being reported in PNAS (if someone could send me a copy of the paper I would appreciate it).
Brian at Laelaps and I are on
Update 1: I forgot this. DNA tracks ancient Alaskan's descendants:
An ancient mariner who lived and died 10,000 years ago on an island west of Ketchikan probably doesn't have any close relatives left in Alaska.But some of them migrated south and their descendents can be found today in coastal Native American populations in California, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina.
The article gets really interesting after that...
Update 2: Here are two more interesting stories.
Yann Klimentidis links to an interesting paper about within-population cranial variation and climate.
While Dienekes links to an interesting study of Jomon craniofacial diversity.
* I had originally had the links switched, this has been corrected now.
Comments
The spider paper is on its way. Or will be once I've sorted out smtp servers.
Posted by: Bob O'H | January 3, 2009 2:51 PM
Since the demented gerbil that runs VISTA won't allow me to comment on Dienekes' site, I thought I'd try it here. That study of Jomon craniofacial diversity suggests that since the greatest diversity is found around Hokkaido, the northernmost part of the Japanese archipelago, and the southwest has the least diversity, that the Jomon ancestors must have arrived first in the north and expanded toward Honshu Island in the south. My observation is that while this is usually the interpretation for continents, I think it makes less sense for islands. Here, I tend to think the pattern of migration may well have been from the south to begin with. Then with successive waves, each new group pushed the previous group(s) toward the north. In the end there were more different folks in the north because of that reason, not because they started off in Hokkaido. That's because back in the late Pleistocene, they could have come to Honshu island from the mainland by boat, where the climate was not too bad. But up in the north, where it was connected to the mainland, there was this nasty glacier covering up everything. At least, that's the way it looks on the maps I've seen. And I don't think the people back then were well adapted to living on ice sheets. That's the Gainer hypothesis anyway.
Posted by: DianaGainer | January 3, 2009 3:29 PM
I wonder what Ken Miller thinks is going to be the future of creationism. . . .
Anne G
Posted by: Anne Gilbert | January 3, 2009 5:45 PM
DianaGainer. I'll copy it and post at Dienekes for you.
Posted by: terryt | January 4, 2009 6:04 PM