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
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....
Physorg.Com has an interesting story concerning two skeletons found in a viking ship burial discovered in Norway in the early 1900's (the ship burial dates to 843). Recent DNA and x-ray evidence indicates that one of individuals had cancer:...
Apparently, there was an earthquake this morning. The epicenter was about five miles east of Bellmont -a town in southern Illinois and measured 5.2 on the Richter scale. It rattled houses here in St. Louis. It occurred at around 4:30...
The BBC has an interesting story about the use intense x-rays at the ESRF in France to image the hidden second leg of a fossil Eupodophis descouensi:...
This is cool! The paper concerns a novel method of determining age based on accelerator mass spectrometry analysis of the carbon content of the lens crystallines. It is quite similar in methodology to the use of teeth to determine age....
Science Daily reports on an interesting new application of Radiocarbon dating: From the end of World War II and up until about 1960, the superpowers of the Cold War era, conducted nuclear tests, detonating bombs into the atmosphere. These detonations...
I am well aware that my book is far too small for the extent of the subjects it touches upon. It is a mere sketch; but so far as it goes, I have endeavoured to make it an accurate...
National Geographic has an interesting article about recent fossil finds that shed light on the ecological interaction between pandas and Gigantopithecus: Huang said he believes the ape lost out in a three-way struggle with giant pandas and early humans over...
I don't know how I missed this, but Science Daily has an interesting summary of research appearing in Current Biology. The Current Biology article is subscription only so I haven't read it. The research concerns the ability of elephants to...
First it was Science News Daily now Science Daily has joined the insanity. Probably just jealous that they are not as endearingly cute as the naked mole rat. Feh!...