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
While I toil away in the blogmines, working on my take of the recent cladistic analysis of hominids I thought I would mention a few stories that I found to be interesting....
Cichlids are an example of what Mary Jane West-Eberhard calls a "multidirectional radiation" - that is an adaptive radiation that produces a large amount of diversity and specialization of related forms. There are at least 1,500 species of haplochromine cichlids....
The BBC has an interesting, but sad, story called Botswana Bushmen refused borehole: The government of Botswana is refusing to allow Kalahari Bushmen access to a water borehole. In 2006, the Bushmen won a landmark legal victory against the government...
A new study in the Journal of Human Evolution examines the relationship between brain size and life history. I don't have access, but Physorg.com also has the story....
As I mentioned back in January the Laetoli footprint trackways are in some danger due to erosion from heavier than normal rainfall. According to Nature a solution has been chosen: The world's oldest human footprints are to have a museum...
I have been somewhat busy and have just read the Richmond and Jungers paper on Orrorin tugenensis, along with some of what has been written in the blogosphere about it. Unfortunately, I have to disagree with one post on 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...
The other day when I said blogging would be light I had the best of intentions, but like when Bill Dembski shouts"Waterloo" reality has conspired against me. The intertubewebnet thingy has thrown some interesting stories up into the cybersphere....
Normally, at this point I would give the classification of the primate, but in this case that is not really possible as Afropithecus turkanensis is incertae sedis. This simply means that the exact relationship of Afropithecus has not been worked...
Palau is fast becoming an anthropological paradise. In addition to being one of the places Margaret Mead did fieldwork, we now have news that a large collection of skeletons have been found. Currently, the fragmentary remains of 25 individuals have...
One of my readers (thanks Sabine) tracked the article down, so I have had a chance to read it. All I can say is "Wow!" There is certainly a lot of questionable material in it, to the point that I...
According to Yahoo News a new paper is being published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that will argue that Homo floresiensis was a member of Homo sapiens that suffered from severe iodine deficiency. According to Yahoo News the...
That is the question raised by the discovery of a new species of Teilhardina (you can go here to learn more about Teilhardina). The new species, Teilhardina magnoliana, was discovered in Mississippi and is written up in PNAS (unfortunately, it...
A new article in PNAS discusses the use of a new dating technique that has been used to come up with a new date for Sahelanthropus tchadensis and a specimen of Australopithecus bahrelghazali. The new method dates Sahelanthropus tchadensis to...