Did Homo sapiens Copy Tool Making Techniques From H. floresiensis? Do Bonobos Rate Food?
Category: Archaeology
Science is reporting on interesting research on the Ling Bua stone tools:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:37 AM • 1 Comments •
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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: Archaeology
Science is reporting on interesting research on the Ling Bua stone tools:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:37 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
Donald Johanson was on NPR last Friday. The appearance was to promote his latest book Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. Check it out......
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:39 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Forensic Anthropology
Facial reconstructions are frequently used in forensic anthropology. Occasionally, they crop up in bioarchaeology as well (I'm thinking of a British TV show - the name of which escapes me - that also did facial reconstructions in every episode). They...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:00 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Blogs of Note
I stumbled across a blog called The Prancing Papio today. It is the blog of a biological anthropology major at Queens College - CUNY. Check it out (especially the the post on the Ileret footprints for example). * * Did...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 8:12 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Know Your Anthropology Literature
Ecobotanical Contexts for African Hominids, by O'Brien and Peters, was published in a book edited by J. Desmond Clark entitled Cultural Beginnings: Approaches to Understanding Early Hominid Life-Ways in the African Savanna. O'Brien and Peters describe the work they are...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:26 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
1.5 Million year old footprints have been found at the Koobi Fora Field School: The footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 8:38 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
This is a cool story. Apparently South Africa is home to two really interesting museums. The first is: ...the Origins Centre, a museum on the University of Witwatersrand's central Johannesburg campus that uses science and art to trace man's development....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 3:35 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
National Geographic's Cooking Gave Humans Edge Over Apes? is a case in point. The article starts out like this: The simple, everyday act of cooking could have given humans an evolutionary edge over apes, researchers proposed at a scientific meeting...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:29 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Creationism
I always get a great deal of amusement when Luskin writes about paleoanthropology.His latest effort is no exception. Casey, you see, has been studying about Lucy and of fossils pertaining to human evolution for years, and even links to the...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 2:48 PM • 17 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
National Geographic has an interesting story on hair found in hyena coprolites. The coprolites were in strata that date to about 195,000-257,000 years ago....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:55 AM • 6 Comments •
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