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Afarensis

Anthropology, Evolution and Science

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afarcomp3.jpg 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


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Paleopathology:

Cancer in Norway and the Concrete Pyramid Theory Resurfaces

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:...

Syphilis: The View from 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...

Mass Grave of Plague Victims Found

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....

Bad Backs Redux

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....

Ancient Massacre

National Geographic has an interesting story about a recently found massacre site:...

Earliest Known American Gunshot Victim Found

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...

Everything You Wanted to Know About Trepanation

Via Coturnix comes link to a fascinating post on An illustrated history of trepanation at Neurophilosophy. Highly recommended, go read!...

Child Sacrifice Among the Toltec

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...

What Killed Otzi?

A lot of ink has been spilled on the cause of death of Otzi the Iceman. Previous research indicated he died from wounds suffered during some kind of violent encounter. New research indicates a more exact cause of death. From...

Manly Men in Sandals: What Really Killed the Gladiators?

I ask because BBC News has an interesting article concerning the first authenticated gladiators graveyard. The site was discovered about five years ago in Ephesus, Turkey. Pathologists have spent the last few years examining the skeletons - of which the...

Headless Bodies May Aid in Understanding the Peopling of the Pacific

According to Yahoo News a Lapita cemetery on the island of Vanuatu may help anthropologists unravel how the Pacific was first populated. The find is pretty unique in that:...

On the Uses and Misuses of Cranial Deformation

A wide variety of cultures practiced cranial deformation. In it's most extreme form, skulls that have been the subject of cranial deformation have been mistaken for space aliens by believers in UFO's. Archaeologists have uncovered an interesting site in Peru...

The Egnor Challenge: Tooth Decay and Human Origins

Bioarchaeologists frequently study the distribution of dental caries in populations in order to try and understand subsistence, diet, and status. Rarely, however, does one hear about the study of dental caries aiding paleoanthropology. A recent study mentioned on Science Daily...

Neanderthal Cannibalism

The article on neanderthal cannibalism has finally been published. My first thought is that it has been somewhat overhyped. The cannibalism only forms a small part of the article (see below). It is, however, an interesting paper even without the...

Saturday Paleopathology Blogging: Scaphocephaly

This is another post in my occasional series on paleopathology....

Taung and the Eagles: A Follow Up

The research I wrote about here and here has finally been published in the AJPA. There is a little more to it than I thought. Bergers' piece is a companion piece to an indepth study of primate remains found beneath...

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