Ancestors of Homo Sapiens Hunted by Birds

CFTM writes "The associate press writer, Alexandra Zavis, reports that 'A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.' The article raises some really fascinating questions, particularly when one begins to think about the evolutionary impact that this may have had on humans." From the article: "The Ohio State study determined that eagles would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back talons, then hover while their prey died before returning to tear at the skull. Examination of thousands of monkey remains produced a pattern of damage done by birds, including holes and ragged cuts in the shallow bones behind the eye sockets. Berger went back to the Taung skull, and found traces of the ragged cuts behind the eye sockets. He said none of the researchers who had for decades been debating how the child died had noticed the eye socket damage before."

Comments

Thousand Years of Conditioning

[reporter]

You can indeed see the effect of a thousand years of conditioning on the island of Japan. For 2000 years, the Japanese people have lived on a resource-poor island. When resources are scarce, everyone in the village is forced to share and to cooperate. Only through cooperation as a group can everyone expect to survive.

If a person does not cooperate with the group and stakes his own territory, then he risks his own survival. By himself, he will have a hard time in finding the necessary food and hospitable living space on a tiny island constantly ravaged by tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes.

What is the result of these 2000 years of group think? It has produced a nation where the group has more value than the individual. Such thinking is perfect for mass production, where each worker must be a cooperating cog in the great wheel of industrial manufacturing. Toyota is hard to beat for this very reason.

Hahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Immaculate_Misconception: I only remember it because the level of idiocy that you displayed had me laughing so hard that tears came to my eyes, I actually called someone to share the humor of it, he thought you were an idiot also.

That's a pretty funny image.

I imagine you sitting in your parent's- no grandmother's- basement, with some kind of headset apparatus on your acne pocked melon, snorting with laughter. Your potato fingers stab at an oversized keypad and suddenly your only friend in the world, Gnuyn your pen pal from Cambodia, answers the phone and you grunt to him in your exclusive made-up pet language that he should check out fark.com and read my post.

Of course he has no idea what you are talking about. He never has. But he clucks into the receiver slavishly because your mom keeps sending him ten dollar bills every christmas so he has to be nice to you.

You chuckle some more, careful not to spill your capri sun, and then finger type a post bookended by some dazzling html that makes it stand out from all the others with its bold color. You are so proud of yourself that you don't bother to read any other comments, you simply 'ctl f' your login over and over again to keep track of all the felating responses to your superior humor. Gnuyn laughs nervously. You take that as a compliment.

You reread your posts until you become aroused and have to start typing one-handed. You come close to climaxing when you find someone who spelled "you are" as "your." Deep down you wish you had someone else to call that would actually listen to your nonsense- and you know it's nonsense. If you posted anything close to a rational thought no one would respond to you- you know, you've tried. So you blather on. You pray that someone will reply in the same way most of us pray we had two dicks. Perhaps we can borrow yours? Since you've never bothered to use it?

You briefly wonder what it would be like to be with a woman. A second later you regain control and resume stabbing your alienware keyboard with your stubby cheeto fingers and use your shoulder to push your glasses back into place above your fat dimpled sweaty nose.

I imagine your grandmother pounding on the basement door, yelling at you that you should come to bed. You release your two inch mushroom in a panic and fling your "love" sock into a dark corner. You pathetically try to pull up your sweatpants while bleating, "five more minutes, Nana!"

You rifle off one more razor sharp post and then cry yourself to sleep. You dream of Optimus Prime giving you a back rub while you ride He-man's cat around your high school gym to terrorize the cool kids. You have one thumb in your mouth and the other in your anus.

Just another beautiful day in the life of Immaculate Misconception.

I will pray for you. I know you will be offended by that, but I will do it anyway. You need a friend.

Things change...

[like-it-or-not]

This was like, what, over a million years ago?
Get over it!

Re:Birds of Prey or Carrion Birds?

[freedom_india]

Calling OSX secure is like calling the 2nd fattest girl in the bar "skinny".

What the hell are you ranting about? Calling OS X secure is like calling the 110-pound girl "slim".

BEFORE you put up shit like this, try to USE the OS first, understand what it provides you, and learn it well.

Sheesh ! There must be a law that states Win XP users should not be allowed to prance around displaying their stupidity and jealousy about people who use the superior OS.

Re:Birds of Prey or Carrion Birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

...I have never seen one "wash it's arse" unless you count licking. If that is what you have to do to "wash" I would rather have a dirty arse.

I just let my girlfriend take care of it for me.

Re:Birds of Prey or Carrion Birds?

[HiThere]

OS X may be secure (I've been operating on that assumption...and the grandparent is the first contradiction I've encountered), but I purely hate it's user interface. I use both it and KDE, and I vastly perfer KDE. I'll even choose Gnome over the Mac. (Mind you, I'm not talking about Finder 7.5 and earlier...which I thought superb, especially in contrast with MSWind. I didn't use the versions between 7.5 and 10.0, so I can't talk about them, and I haven't yet tried Tiger, though on BRIEF trial it seems about the same as 10.3.)