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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.
Why rush? After 4.4 million years, what's a decade or two?
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
The long delay can be attributed to the scientist actually doing his job. Catalog, research verify, then publish. Its the difference between reactionary pseudo science and actual work that produces results.
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
A religious upbringing, a lack of imagination, and a poor understanding of why abstract scientific endevours can be of practical use to mankind all help. That and having your head firmly planted up your posterior.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
That isn't at difficult to explain. The problem lies in the assumption that evolution is continuous, steady change over time and that fossilization events are spread evenly throughout history. In reality, neither of those is true. Sudden changes in environment the rate of evolution to increase as ecological niches are created and destroyed. Likewise, fossilization events are rare and not spaced evenly throughout history. All it requires to create a seamingly large gap in the fossil record is for there to be a dearth of fossilization events while at the same time a sudden change in environment.
The unifying characteristic of birthers and deathers is hopeless credulity.
Whatever the man on the Fox channel says becomes their reality. And he's convinced them someone else is forming a cult of personality. The parade of irony continues.
No they're not, Captain Clueless. The two (or three, as it were) have nothing to do with each other. Only the jackass who modded you "insightful" is more clueless.
All three are absolutely ridiculous assertions that have been debunked six ways from Sunday. Believing that death panels will kill your granny, or that the President of the United States was born in Kenya, are as ludicrous as believing the Earth is flat, or that we never landed on the moon.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There are, however, plenty of Americans of every race that have been awakened to the goings-on in the US government and joining in opposing them [...] But, go ahead and dismiss all this as racist tea-bagging. Now that it's not W running the show, I guess is okay that the wars (and funding for them) are continuing, that the illegal wiretapping is being even more vociferously defended, that federal agents can write their own warrants and continue to do so, and the widening income gap will continue to widen as the rich are bailed out and the middle class is left to pick up the tab.
All of a sudden, they're awakened to those issues! Funny how all those same goings ons were fine by them when there wasn't a black man in the white house.
It is a dam shame that the new boss is the same as the old boss, but it's a really HUGE coincidence that the same policies suddenly frighten some that didn't mind them before, and that the new boss is different in one very visible way. Huge coincidence.
You can't take the sky from me...
I thought he was socialist!
Or maybe that was yesterday...
He socialist communist nazi antichrist fascist muslim black-supremacist [insert bad thing here], and NO ONE who opposes him is racist. Not. One.
You can't take the sky from me...
If we'd applied the same criteria to these groups that we apply to other mammals, there actually wouldn't be two genuses here, there'd be one.
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The problem with framing it as "killing granny" is it has been shown time and time again that often truly outrageous amounts of money are spent on those elderly who are in already bad shape, all to gain maybe another year. While you might think it is fine to spend half a million to let grandma go from 90 to 91 the simple fact is we fall apart when we get really old. That isn't cruelty, that is just part of being human. We get old, our organs begin to fail, we fall apart.
The problem we face now that we frankly have never really had to face before in history is this-with modern technology you can keep someone going past when their body would have conked out, but at often a truly insane cost. So we as a people need to decide if things like aggressive cancer treatments for someone who is pushing 90 is really where we should be spending our limited resources. That isn't being cruel, or 'killing granny" which BTW happens everyday to those a lot younger than granny who don't have health insurance and literally 'can't afford to live', this is just common sense.
My mom spent nearly 40 years as a nurse and some of the horror stories of families who simply refused to face reality and let a loved one go even though they were well past the point of hope would break your heart and sometimes sicken your stomach. Ones like the 32 year old girl whose family demanded aggressive treatment for their daughter after her head hit a concrete divider at 65MPH+. My mom had to put towels around that poor woman's head because her brains were coming out of her ears, yet thanks to "modern technology" they kept her alive like that for nearly a month before her body finally followed her brain and died. I can't tell you how much that month cost, but I'm sure it was truly staggering. These are things that we as a people are gonna have to sit down and talk about, because modern tech can keep a human body going for a lot longer than nature would allow, and just because we can do so doesn't always mean we should do so, especially when there is absolutely no hope like in that girl's case.
So I honestly think all the hysteria and politics are getting in the way of an important conversation we as a people are long overdue in having. While I have no problem in helping pay for cancer treatment for some little girl or father of two with decades of life yet to live if they can be saved, spending crazy amounts of money on somebody pushing 90 or on those that are just so horribly mangled or messed up that short of act of God have no chance whatsoever seems like an obscene waste of resources that could better be spent on those that have a fighting chance. We have limited resources and despite our technology we just can't save everybody, and unfortunately our technology can give the appearance of hope where there is truly none to be had. We as a nation need to sit down and decide where these limited resources are spent. Again this isn't some evil plot to kill granny, this is just common sense.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.