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Anthropology, Evolution and Science
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
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The Declaration of Independence
Category: Bioarchaeology
The Journal of Anthropological Archaeology has an interesting paper that addresses the issue of what population provided the trophy skulls. The question has, in the past, been part and parcel of the debate as to what the trophy skulls were...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:28 PM • •
Category: Bioarchaeology
One of the more controversial stories in physical anthropology concerns the small bodied humans found on Palau. The finds were published back in March in PLoS. In that paper Berger et al argued that the material they found represents a...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 11:42 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Repatriation
Nature has an interesting news item called Online anthropology draws protest from aboriginal group:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 8:40 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Bioarchaeology
There is an interesting new paper out in PNAS that looks at enamel chemistry to try and reconstruct early diet. The study is by Humphrey, Dean, Jeffries, and Penn. The abstract is below the fold....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 12:16 AM • •
Category: Bioarchaeology
Razib mentioned this study of ancient DNA. Although the study is being billed as important because it allows us to gain an understanding of the biological history of the skeletons studied, the research will also allow us to gain some...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:28 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
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...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 7:33 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Insanity
Steve has taken time off from getting the new blog ready to bring us news of some credulous reporting on CNN. The reporting concerns some new woo called "Personology" which seeks to determine personality based on various measures of the...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:34 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Bioarchaeology
I originally blogged about this story in August of 2005 and reposted the story (twice actually) in May of 2006. Trinkaus has recently returned to the subject and analyzed some skeletal material from Sunghir and Tianyuan. I have tracked down...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:36 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Bioarchaeology
No, stop duct taping your windows, that doesn't mean what you think it means. Allow me to explain. My Scibling, Tara, recently did a wonderful four part series on what caused the plague. I bring this up because Science Daily...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 8:16 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Bioarchaeology
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases recently published an interesting article called On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach. The paper used data from 21 genetic regions in 26 geographically separated strains of the Treponema bacterium. Before looking at the...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 8:01 PM • 1 Comments •
