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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
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...