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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."
Lucy was a nigger.
PNAS
It is never a happy occasion to realize that a not-for-profit group, no matter how destitute or successful, is undeserving of charitable donations. And just last week I had such an unhappy realization. I wanted to donate a sizable sum of money to the OpenBSD Foundation for development of the OpeBSD operating system and other related projects.
My uncle, an old Unix graybeard from the Seventies, devoted his retirement and considerable savings to teaching inner-city youth about computers and programming. He recently passed away and left instructions in his will that I donate money, in the amount of US $100,000, to the most meritorious Free, Unix-like operating system as according to my own research into the matter.
I immediately looked at OpenBSD and began to review its technical merits, of which there are many. Despite lacking serious symmetric multi-processing support and drivers for recent graphics hardware, OpenBSD security and code-auditing are second to none. One only has to take a look at the bevy of routers that ship with OpenBSD to know how many people successfully depend on it everyday.
The OpenBSD Foundation is also behind several software packages widely adopted in other operating systems, such as OpenBGPD, OpenCVS, OpenNTPD, and OpenSSH. OpenSSH, for instance, is what allows clueless Mac users to remotely log into their systems safely, blissfully unaware of hackers.
After looking at the technical merits of OpenBSD and related projects, I owed it to the memory of my uncle to check out the history of the people behind it all. But that's when I ran into some interesting decisions regarding OpenBSD advocacy and funding made my OpenBSD's lead developer, Theo de Raadt.
In 2003, Mr. de Raadt trash-talked the United States military and its various aid projects for the Iraqi people. But at the time, OpenBSD was receiving a multi-million dollar grant from the United States Department of Defense. After the interview was published the DOD cancelled funding, which left several OpenBSD projects in limbo for quite some time thereafter.
This is just one of the more public instances of Mr. de Raadt sharing unpopular personal opinions while acting as OpenBSD's public advocate and costing the project considerable time and money. And, unfortunately, there are others.
Another time, Mr. de Raadt visited his native South Africa to receive a donation from a wealthy politician but unexpectedly refused it at the podium, instead making a speech in which he equated the use of non-Free graphics drivers with Apartheid. Mr. de Raadt left without the check but later claimed to have won an important moral victory.
Mr. de Raadt himself is at the root of the problem, but here I can't really separate the man from the project; Theo de Raadt is OpenBSD. So donating toward OpenBSD's goals means handing over money to this crackpot activist, if he would even accept it. That's too bad because OpenBSD would be further ahead without these sorts of megalomaniacal antics.
Digging even further back in time, it's clear that this pattern of behavior is nothing new. Theo de Raadt was one of the incipient developers of NetBSD, but harass[ed] and abuse[d] both users and developers of NetBSD. His colleagues subsequently locked him out of the project, de Raadt forked OpenBSD, and the rest is history.
After reviewing these facts, it is clear that I will fail to honor my uncle's memory and all of the hard work he did in life by donating to OpenBSD. If I wanted to dishonor him, maybe. And I find it highly likely that Theo de Raadt
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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.
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.
What the fuck do anthropologists know about physics of walking mechanics? We really gotta reign in these "soft scientists".
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
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
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?
Fragments found within the pelvis indicate the cause of death was probably having a long, trumpet-like device shoved up its ass - big end first.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Man is a beast.
Yours,
Dr. Zachary P. Zaius
Minister of Science
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
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.
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.