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Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally)
Omomyid writes "I wasn't actually aware that Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus but apparently he has (I remember the original flurry of interest back in the '90s when it was announced), but now Dr. White and others have assembled a nearly complete skeleton of the 4.4mya specimen and the descriptions being carried by the NY Times and the AP are intriguing. Ramidus is clearly differentiated from the other Great Apes and also more primitive than A. afarensis (Lucy), providing a nice linkage backwards to the last shared ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. According to the NY Times, a whole passel of papers will be published in tomorrow's Science magazine describing A. ramidus."
Update — 10/01 at 22:05 GMT by SS: Reader John Hawks provided a link to his detailed blog post about Ardipithecus, which contains a ton of additional details not covered in the above articles.
If you had read the article - you would know that there were pieces of a large number of individuals found.
You can assume carbon testing was done, it's routine.
There's also the issue of associated plant and animal material in the fossil layer - which tends to give credence to the find.
...carrier dead.....
why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
and why exactly monkeys?
Because both the fossil record and DNA say that chimps are humans' closest relatives, with 96% identical DNA.
intelligently and in other ways they're totally different
The intelligence is only a matter of degree, and in many (perhaps more) ways that matter more than intelligence they are the same as us.
Monkeys have come from somewhere too
Monkeys and apes (including us; we are an ape species) have the same anscestors, for reasons mentioned above.
I'm not trying to troll or anything
If you are, you're doing a poor job of it.
Free Martian Whores!
I have an FAQ up on my blog.
It gives some of the story behind the news, and delves into the anatomy and implications for hominin origins. I'll be updating it as the day goes on to add more information.
Birthers are a group of clueless, angry white people who firmly believe President Obama was born outside the US. Deathers are a group, nearly identical in membership, that believes President Obama wants to enact 'death panels' that will deny needed health care to seniors. Most birthers are deathers, and vice versa. They also tend to believe that they either need to secede from the union, or stage a military coup, as the country has now become a communist dictatorship. Hope that helps.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The human tailbone is most certainly vestigial. Vestigial does not mean useless; it means that it once had a given function (external tail in this case) but no longer performs that function, but does not mean that it doesn't perform a different function. In humans, our coccyx is usually comprised of 3-5 vertebrae, which are usually fused into two or three segments. Not all function in muscle attachment, as is unsurprising given the variability in the structure. People have been born with nine calcified bones in the coccyx (plus cartilaginous structures), and external tails complete with articulating vertebrae (five's the record as far as I know) have been reported in the medical literature. People have also been born without a coccyx at all, although like external tails this is rare. Removal of the coccyx is called a coccygectomy (say that to your five year old!) and can be done on the whole or just a part of the structure with little or no side effects.