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Possible New Hominid Species Discovered, Thanks To Google Earth
mindbrane writes "The BBC is reporting on fossil finds 'uncovered in cave deposits near Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg.' The fossils of a mature female and juvenile male have '...small teeth, projecting nose, very advanced pelvis, and long legs ...' suggesting more modern forms. 'And yet its very long arms and small brain case might echo the much older Australopithecine group to which Professor Berger and colleagues have assigned it.' Aside from the debate as to classification, the find is noteworthy in that its discovery came about 'thanks to the "virtual globe" software Google Earth, which allowed the group to map and visualise the most promising fossil grounds in the World Heritage Site.' Further, the find in a cave bears the hallmarks of chance that often plays so large a part in fossilisation. 'Their bones were laid down with the remains of other dead animals, including a sabre-toothed cat, antelope, mice and rabbits. The fact that none of the bodies appear to have been scavenged indicates that all died suddenly and were entombed rapidly.'"
Only on Fox.
Dear Professor, I am intrigued by your findings and wish to learn more, how can I subscribe to your newsletter?
I bet the mice and rabbits were just whacky sidekicks, and the real protagonist was the Antelope who had a grumpy saber-tooth cat and a monkey as butler.
Ok, I'm reading that as an adult female, juvenile male, sabre-tooth cat, antelope, rabbits and mice were all in a cave and suddenly entombed. Although I suppose the "died suddenly" bit is looking a bit more obvious given that sabre-tooth cats are quite large in my mind.
thanks to the "virtual globe" software Google Earth, which allowed the group to map and visualise the most promising fossil grounds
These are scientists who busy themselves with "finding stuff at locations". Did they really not have access to map software that offered similar features long before Google Earth?
The researchers identified the fossils of at least 25 other species of animals, including saber-toothed cats, a wildcat, a brown hyena, a wild dog, antelopes, and a horse in the cave as well.
Also, I thought this was interesting:
"Before this discovery, you could pretty much fit the entire record of fossils that are candidates for the origin of the genus Homo from this time period onto a small table. But, with the discovery of Australopithecus sediba and the wealth of fossils we've recovered -- and are recovering* -- that has changed dramatically," Berger said.
Keep digging guys!!!
*bold mine
I'm imagening, as they used caves for living and spoiling a decent cave giving protection and housing was used as a "burial" or dumpster is unlikely, the cave was uninhabitable by humans for one or another reason. A likely scenario seems to be that the young and unknowingly couple ran off to have some funky frisky time, ended up in a cave inhabited by preditors and got owned. A predator yet unknown, but one that can eat animals from the size of a mouse up to a sabretooth tiger without biting marks.
As there are no biting marks or "scavenging", or disallowing inhabitation it must've been a might impressive beast eating those creatures without teeth. I propose a blob of ooze or slime which liquified, slowly and horribly, those creatures alive while holding them down with their tentacles of doom while floating in the air with lighteningbols-shooting eyes.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Millions of years ago, Africa was a continent teeming with life and different varieties of life. As the continents shifted and mountain ranges like the Himalayas rose to block crucial winds to Saharan Africa, the lucky species were able to get out and into Europe and Asia. The not so lucky ones dried up in the desert or learned to survive in the lean environment of the savanna. As European and Asian lifeforms grew more diverse, this giant continent became a sort of Lost World separated from the rest of the world by a large, and largely impassible, desert.
We like to talk about Drake's equation, but sometimes just looking at our planet reveals how unlikely intelligent life is, given how close we as a species came to never being.
The site was found by the team thanks to the "virtual globe" software Google Earth, which allowed the group to map and visualise the most promising fossil grounds in the World Heritage Site.
Sounds like they could've used a GIS or other software as well, it's not that they spotted something on Google Earth and went "Hey ma, look at this!"
The defining characteristic of science is that it needs to be able to make testable predictions.
And to test whether or not evolution is valid science, I suggest the following evolutionist-worldview based prediction: Half of creationists will categorize this fossil as fully human, the other half will classify it as fully ape.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I never cease to be amazed and geekily interested in the vast number of applications that people find with for Google maps & earth data.
That and the GPS are, for me, great examples of the gov/military and private enterprise really giving something back to the community.
Now if only we can have street maps & associated guidance software of the same quality as the commercial stuff.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is a good start, but it has a long way to go...
Either that or all the animals fell into a hole and became trapped over the course of a few years.
:(
Upon entering the cave it is pitch dark. Therefore, they all were eaten by a grue.
It never ceases to amaze me that people do not put together that free software is far superior to pay-for software. This type of data has always been available, for high cost, to those who were able to acquire it (ArcView for example) and be trained to use it. With the advent of Google Earth people can still access much of that ArcView stuff (with SHP2KML conversion) and use this information for a wide range of research.
Say what you want about Google's privacy scares but some of the shit they've put out is absolutely wonderful for those of us more interested in spending our money on what's important.
I saw the headline, and immediately thought that Google Earth had finally got around to photographing Falkirk
When this came out on the local news websites yesterday, a few claimed these finds where "a new species of ancient descendants of modern-day humans" (*), along with other bad logic/grammar. My first thought is that these might have been the love children of one one Julius Malema. Then again, it might just have been that the journalists have procreated....
(* = In the mean time edited and corrected, but at the moment still viewable on this British site. Or in Google's caches).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Maybe it was some sort of burial ritual? Just an idea.
Sounds like an offering to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster...
-- http://www.doczayus.com/
I never cease, but that's probably because I never start.
The story is basically "Some foobarologists used a computer a bit".
Coming up later, "Grahite solves the DNA conundrum!" And why not - I'm sure Watson & Crick owned at least one pencil between them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He said "cave bears".
Scientists have been using aerial photography for such purposes practically since the dawn of aviation (when it was noticed that things could be seen from the air that couldn't from the ground).
As a long time reader of Science Fiction, I am interested that no SF writer (to my knowledge) ever predicted GPS. They predicted many other things that we now have (and, of course, tons of stuff that we don't have and probably never will have). But nobody seems ever realized how useful it is to have a device that quietly, cheaply, and easily tells you exactly where you are. Possibly they never put it together with the other necessary component for most applications: cheap, fast, low power storage of a few hundred megabytes of map data,
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
See the story reported on the South African news (News24.com) regarding the finding:
http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Boy-9-found-new-hominid-species-20100408
There are a number of issues that have some scientists skeptical that the newly found Australopithecus Sediba is our ancestor. One is that Homo habilis is significantly older (by around half a million years), and is more human-like than Australopithecus Sediba. The other is that the anatomy simply does not fall into line with the other specimens. The length of the arms, etc, seem a step backwards. Perhaps it was a parallel branch that died out.
It's hard to argue this is the ancestor of Homo when it's occurring much later than the earliest members of the genus Homo by half a million years," said anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
National Geographic
Better known as 318230.
.' The fossils of a mature female and juvenile male have '...small teeth, projecting nose, very advanced pelvis, and long legs ...' suggesting more modern forms. 'And yet its very long arms and small brain case might echo the much older Australopithecine group to which Professor Berger and colleagues have assigned it.
Does this stuff suggest that neoteny can be viewed as a dividing line between older Australopithecine groups and modern hominids? "Neoteny... also called juvenilization, is the retention, by adults in a species, of traits previously seen only in juveniles..." and further from the Wikipedia article:
The idea that adult humans exhibit certain neotenous (juvenile) features, not evinced in the great apes, is about a century old. Louis Bolk made a long list of such traits,[3] and Stephen Jay Gould published a short list in Ontogeny and Phylogeny.[4] "Man, in his bodily development, is a primate foetus that has become sexually mature" (Bolk). The human capacity for long continued learning may be construed as a juvenile trait greatly extended. However, there are, of course, significant differences between juvenile chimpanzees and adult humans, most obviously in human abstract rational thought and language and, less obviously, in the human female sexual cycle.[5] Therefore, neoteny is just one aspect of the story of human evolution.
Another theory suggests that humans' neotenous characteristics were an evolutionary strategy that enabled Cro-Magnons (Homo sapiens) to gain predominance over H. neanderthalensis (and possibly H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis) by appealing to these species' nurturing instincts through paedomorphic cuteness to avoid territorial aggression. Noted anthropologist Björn Kurtén explores this concept in his paleofictional Dance of the Tiger (1980).
News: Possible New Hominid Species Discovered, Thanks To Google Earth
"New"? As in an extinct species that lived 1.8 to 2 million years ago? "Discovered" covers it in this instance and "new" confuses the issue. I was expecting a story about some isolated population of hominids.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
This quote from Matthew Berger, son of Professor Lee Berger, was posted on Good Morning Silicon Valley today.
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2010/04/quoted-matt-i-told-you-to-stop-playing-around-while-were-whoa.html
“I turned the rock over and I saw the clavicle sticking out — that’s the collar bone. I didn’t know what it was at first; I thought it was just an antelope. So I called my dad over and about five meters away he started swearing, and I was like ‘What did I do wrong?’ and he’s like, ‘Nothing, nothing — you found a hominid’.”
I'm reading Asimov's works and I'm always surprised that he never predicted:
1. The Internet - he had scientists creating an "Encyclopedia Galactica" when it was feared that all science knowledge would be lost. We just use Wikipedia!
2. Cellphones - Trimensional viewing is horribly inconvenient. Often the characters don't know where others are. Now we just give them a call
3. Ebooks - He predicted film strips which are inconvenient and need to be borrowed from a library. Nuff said.
He wrote some mind blowing stuff though...