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New Fossil Sheds Light On Lucy's Family Tree
I_am_sci_guy writes "A new fossil of an older, and presumably male, specimen of the same species as the famed Lucy indicates that A. afarensis may have walked and moved more like humans than was currently believed. The features of the unusually complete skeleton 'denote a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle,' according to anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team, who found the specimen they call 'Big Man' and published preliminary results online today at PNAS (abstract; full text requires subscription). The article includes plenty of viewpoints dissenting from the conclusion that A. afarensis walked, and possibly ran, like modern humans do."
/. not your personal army
Here's the thing, many eons ago the earth's sea level was way way higher than what it is now. So as it recedes we are finding fossils of 'people' that lived in the high country - the equivalent of modern day hillbillies. This is not a fair slice of everday life for that day and should not be taken as a typical 'man in the street'. We need fossils from downtown central to really get a flavour of life from way back then.
In a stunning announcement The Creation Institute of America has moved that these two have actually been misnamed and are in fact Adam and Eve or bitch as head creationist Mike Comburg said in their press release earlier today. They are now demanding that school districts teach both sides of the name argument.
Ummm... the full text of the PNAS article does NOT require a subscription. Just click the "Full Text (PDF)" link.
Or at least, I have access using no logins and accessing via a standard ISP in Thailand. :-/
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
If it helps you, I think Slashdot fucked something up today. Despite using the AJAX interface, and having my account preferences set to do so, Slashdot is reverting back to the (very) old behavior today. As in, clicking "Reply to This" to write this post took me off of the discussion page and into a new page rather than doing everything in-line. Additionally there is no "quote parent" button. If I turned off Javascript entirely I doubt I would notice a difference.
That threshold bar is JS driven and part of the new AJAX interface, so far as I know. I don't believe this is an intentional change but it'd be nice if Slashdot admin would have some little notice somewhere saying "yeah we know about this and are working on it" or something to that effect to avoid the confusion you're having.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
They find the male counterpart of Lucy, and nickname him "Big Man"? It would have been much more fun to name him "Ricky."
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It's true, though.
I have never seen a story with so many top-level comments modded -1. Arthropologists, stop bullshitting, it ain't working.
durhurrr... I can access from both work and home.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
From the nature write up it appears that this, along with older fossils, seems to push back bipedal Hominini to about 3.5 millions year. Almost 2 meters tall, a pelvis that seems modern, and a long tibia. I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked, the agreement on a bipedal Lucy and relatives seems pretty impressive, and meant that our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So I am supposed to read the results of "Big Man" over at PNAS? Why does this summary look like the contents of my spam folder?
"A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of; men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the Terriary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts." William W. Howells, Harvard, Mankind So Far p138
everybody, ctrl+f5! new versions of scripts/css, i guess.
Yes, but I make non sequiturs.
Man is a beast.
Yours,
Dr. Zachary P. Zaius
Minister of Science
Nope, that doesn't help.
(+1, Disagree)
Oops. I spoke too soon on that previous. PNAS offers free access to many developing countries, including Thailand. List here:
http://www.pnas.org/misc/faq.shtml#developing
Oh well... if anyone without access really wants to read the original paper, send me an email and I'll be happy to send you the PDF. Put something like "Slashdot - PNAS article PDF" in your subject line, please.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
And moderation is jacked as well, since yesterday. What used to be a simple process [choose the mod selection and it would be immediately applied] is now b0rked, choose the mod selectiopn and nothing happens, no update, no Apply button at the bottom of the page, nada.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
I guess they found Helo???
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
They find the male counterpart of Lucy
Even better, call him Linus :)
What does Mr. Torvalds have to do with Lucille Ball? Or maybe I just have peanuts for brains...
Dinosaurs still exist. They're just called birds now.
I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked, the agreement on a bipedal Lucy and relatives seems pretty impressive, and meant that our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur.
ou're about 62 million years off putting these or pretty much any other hominid species alongside real dinosaurs.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Wouldn't it be funny if none of them noticed because like most of us who've been here for a while, the only thing we ever really wanted to do with D2 was turn it off? :)
The metamoderation page (even with Javascript enabled) still only gives me posts from 2008 (!), no matter what I do with the threshold thingy. (Yes, every few months I turn on Javashit and try metamoderating, and every time it fails. It's been like that ever since they broke it some time a year or so ago.) I'd love to participate more, but I can't, because it just. doesn't. work. (Firefox 3.6, logged in or not, JS-enabled-or-not, metamod's borked for me.)
And moderation is jacked as well, since yesterday. What used to be a simple process [choose the mod selection and it would be immediately applied] is now b0rked, choose the mod selectiopn and nothing happens, no update, no Apply button at the bottom of the page, nada.
Yeah, this has been pissing me off. I thought maybe I had disabled something by accident through NoScript or something at first. But no, the problem is definitely on the /. side.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Science does not fall back on the invisible friend in the sky to explain what it does not currently understand. Scientists may not have all the answers, but at least they are looking for ways to find them. Hand waving and saying "God did it" is a dead end that can never expand human knowledge the way science can.
The article includes plenty of viewpoints dissenting from the conclusion that A. afarensis walked, and possibly ran, like modern humans do.
Is anyone else as deeply offended by this as me? I, as a modern human, haven never, ever, in my life run, and am offended that I am associated with these prehistoric brutes.
Oh the humanity!
I'm not sure if I'm the only one who feels this way, but it seems to me that Lucy is no more relevant to science than the chimp down at the local zoo. The only non-chimp aspect of her was the knee, which was found a whole mile and a half away from the rest of her and in a different rock layer, with nothing suggesting that it was actually her knee. They need to find something that says she actually was something other than pure chimp, rather than just speculating. As it is, it isn't enough to convince me Lucy was anything special
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
Perhaps the largest of those myths is "man made tools and tools made man": the idea that once tool-use, including fire, became part of proto-human life we were on a slippery evolutionary slope to big brains.
I've not heard it put that way, but I think the man/tool relationship holds, at least in part. There can be little doubt that using tools enhances survival, so those clever enough to use tools would have an edge over those not clever enough to do so. It also follows that those clever enough to improve on tools would have an edge over those that could not. Hmm... Has anyone done a study relating tool complexity and the structure of the hand (the opposability of thumbs, finger length, etc.)?
However another theory posits that our bipedal gait freed our forelimbs to carry food, enabling us to forrage and gather across a wider range. More gathered foodstuffs->an edge in survival->more bipedalism. The guy with the goods gets the girl.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes Jesus Christ walked the earth as an ape man to prove that creationism is wrong - and that it should be taught in the schools of the USA.
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Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
It screwed up for me, too. Ctrl-F5 didn’t help, and nothing in the D2 configuration settings seemed to help.
This is how I was able to finally fix it:
Help & Preferences
Discussions - Viewing
Turn off Enable Dynamic Discussions (D2)
Reload the page (or maybe it did automatically)
Discussions - Viewing (the D1 version – http://slashdot.org/my/comments)
Now, at the very bottom of the page, there is an option to reset all the settings to default. In desperation, I clicked it. It will revert to D2 (the default). Re-visiting the settings page by its URL and adjust all the settings to what they were before you reset it, and you should be back to normal.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.