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
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...
I received a copy of Evolution by Jean-Baptiste De Panafieu (Author), Patrick Gries (Photographer), and Linda Asher (Translator) quite some time ago. Due to circumstances beyond my control I was not able to get around to reviewing it until now....
Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn have come out with a revised edition of Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age and I am happy to report that I have received and avidly read a review copy....
How and Why Species Multiply:The Radiation of Darwin's Finches is the second volume in the Princeton Series in Evolutionary Biology and fully earns its place in that series....
One of the most frequent questions asked by creationists (of any stripe) is "Where are the transitional fossils?" They usually point, somewhat dismissively, at specimens such as Tiktaalik and ask for more. They claim that there should be thousands, if...
The rest of posterior basicranial growth in nonhuman primates occurs through posterior drift of the foramen magnum, which has been shown by fluorochrome dye labeling experiments to migrate caudally in nonhuman primates through resorption at its posterior end and deposition...
I think if I had it to do all over again I would be a storm chaser. I find tornadoes and thunderstorms fascinating, although I don't know the first thing about meteorology. The ultimate in bad weather, however are...
Anyone who has read my review of The First Fossil Hunters probably can tell what this book is about. To a lesser extent, they would be correct. I say lesser because this, complex, book is about much more than matching...
In his introduction to The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times., paleontologist Peter Dodson writes: As a child I greatly enjoyed Greek mythology (always in preference to its more derivative Roman counterpart). I might also mention that...
Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism edited by Andrew Petto and Laurie Godfrey is a revised version of Godfrey's Scientists Confront Creationism and largely follows the same format....
A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the "Hobbits" of Flores, Indonesia by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee is scheduled to come out in May, 2007. Through the miracle of internet blogging I have a...
You can never judge a book by its cover, according to the old saying. Handbook of Archaeological Methods, edited by Herbert Maschner and Christopher Chippindale, is a case in point. It is a truism in archaeology that you can not...
The Hopewell are, primarily, a middle woodland phenomena. They are famous mainly due to the elaborate mounds and earthworks which reach their peak in Ohio (see map below). They are also famous for some of their artifacts - such as...
Identifying the origins of domestication is a perennial topic among archaeologists and zooarchaeologists. Darwin even discussed it in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. As he discussed each domestic animal, he also tried to track down their...
Cultural anthropologists are a self reflective lot. You can go back to Malinowski's dairy or the works of Mead and Benedict to find tons of autobiographical information. In the are of archaeology, the autobiographical material is much thinner. Actually, it...
Archaeologists studying the culture history of the United States have it relatively easy - for the most part. Here in Missouri, for example, the culture history is fairly well mapped out from the Archaic to the Historic. Which is...