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
PNAS has an interesting paper on Mixtec cremations. I don't have a copy yet (so if someone could email me a copy I would be eternally grateful - leave a comment so others will know it has been sent). The...
Greg Laden has a write up of the 1.1-1.2 MYA find at Atapuerca. I mentioned this story last year and the find has finally been published. I will have more to say about this in a later post (there are...
Bioarchaeologists and paleoanthropologists draw on a wide variety of methods in order to analyze bone. The exact technique depends upon the problem being addressed. One technique, associated mainly with Christopher Ruff, that has been around since the late 1970's involves...
MSNBC has an interesting story about an infant skeleton found in a suitcase. The story is quite interesting and is a good example of what forensic anthropologists do. From MSNBC: State police said adult siblings cleaning out their elderly mother's...
This is equal parts funny (that people were taken in by it) and sad (because it doesn't say much about scientific literacy). The hoax revolves around a picture of a giant skeleton. The picture was part of a photo manipulation...
In Bones, Bodies, and Disease Calvin Wells frequently mentions examples of pathology from the animal kingdom. For example, in discussing osteoarthritis Wells mentions that the condition has been observed in dinosaurs, Miocene gavials, crocodiles, and Pleistocene cave bears, cave hyenas,...
Kambiz has already done a good job of dissecting some of the claims made concerning this story about recent research on bipedalism so this post is kind of redundant. Having said that, I have a few things to say on...
Really, check them out. I showed them to Mrs. Afarensis - hoping I could finagle a pair - at which point she sighed and said "you are such a geek" with a heavy emphasis on the word geek. I'm not...
My reaction on first hearing about this paper. Having gotten that out of the way, I sat down and read the paper - which was published in PNAS. The paper was written by Yoel Rak, Avishag Ginzburg, and Eli Geffen....
As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, Semicircular canals are fully formed by about age two. This makes them an interesting and useful object to study, but in depth studies did not become common until the creation...
Forgive the awkward title. There are a wide variety of misunderstandings about how paleoanthropologists practice their science. While I am reluctant to continue flogging dead stinky horses, a good example of a common misconception occurred over at UD. You may...
I'm currently trying to get through a rather lengthy book - which I will be reviewing in a later post - so in the meantime here is one from the archives... I wrote it back in April of 2005 and...
I recently received the September issue of the Mammoth Trumpet - published by the Center for the Study of the First Americans. In addition to an excellent article on clovis artifacts at the Topper Site and paleoamericans in Peru, the...
Back in June I wrote the first part of this post with the best of intentions. I had planned on writing the second part the next day... So to summarize, and refresh your memories, I started the post with an...