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."

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Re:Offtopic, I know

[causality]

I know this will be modded offtopic, but I really need to know. Why has Slashdot done away with the D2 comment threshold bar entirely? There is literally no way to change threshold or get more than the standard 50( mostly collapsed )comments anymore.

Is this their not-so-subtle way of forcing everyone to register accounts? The site is basically 100% unusable for comment browsing as it is.

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.