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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: Paleopathology
Paleopathology, for all practical purposes, is the study of the diseases and traumas that affect humans in the past. Necessarily, it is restricted to the study of the skeleton which severely limits the scope of what diseases can be studied....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:26 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Anthropology
There are a number of interesting anthropology stories in the news. My picks below the fold....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 11:03 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
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:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 12:14 PM • 5 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 •
Category: Bioarchaeology
National Geographic Has an interesting story about the discovery of a large number of mass graves. The graves were found in Venice on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchi and belong to several centuries worth of plague victims....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:44 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Paleoanthropology
In my last post on the subject I pointed out that Megaladapis shows the same morphology in the lumbar vertebrae that Filler claims is an indicator of bipedalism....
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 4:21 PM • •
Category: Archaeology
National Geographic has an interesting story about a recently found massacre site:...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:56 PM • •
Category: Bioarchaeology
Archaeologists studying an Incan cemetary near Lima, Peru, have discovered over 500 skeletons. Seventy two of which came from a slightly later period in Incan history. According to National Geographic one of these skeletons was quite unique. Archaeologists first became...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 10:30 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Paleopathology
Via Coturnix comes link to a fascinating post on An illustrated history of trepanation at Neurophilosophy. Highly recommended, go read!...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 9:46 PM • •
Category: Archaeology
National Geographic has an interesting article about the discovery of a tomb in the Toltec capital city of Tula. According to the report the tomb contained the skeletons of 24 children. All the children were between the ages of 5-15...
Posted by afarensis, FCD at 1:42 PM • 3 Comments •
