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New Skeleton Finds May Revamp History of Human Evolution
brindafella links to a series of articles published yesterday in the journal Science "on Australopithecus sediba, explaining that skeletons found in the Malapa cave in the World Heritage listed 'Cradle of Civilisation' push back to 1.97 million years the oldest known tool-using, ape-like pre-humans." As is typical, the full Science articles are paywalled, but the abstracts are interesting. (If you're a university student — or, in some cases, an alumni club member — you may have full journal access and not even realize it.) NPR has a nice article on the find as well.
I thought civilization had to do with agriculture and an end to being total nomads, so one could build a city.
Tool use is great and all, but not civilation I would think.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Nono, you have it wrong. Evolution is wrong because of all the gaps that keep increasing. See, say you have fossil A and E. The creationist says, "Aha, there's no fossil between A and E! There's a gap there!" Then the evolutionist finds fossil C, which fits nicely between A and E. Now the creationist says, "Aha, now there's a gap between A and C, and between C and E! You've just created MORE gaps!" This is creatinionism logic at its finest.
As is typical, the full Science articles are paywalled
Indeed, the articles in question are behind the Science paywall. But it is like that because we've liked it that way for some time. This is changing as time goes on; now all NIH-funded (read: US government-funded) research must be published in a way that allows for free access. Science, Nature, and other high-impact journals have ways to comply with that when needed.
However, the journals do need to be able to make money to pay their staff and meet their business expenses. Maybe the model doesn't fit modern times, but it is what it is.
And we are talking about the journal Science, one of the most widely subscribed journals anywhere. You might not even need to go to your closest university to read it; there is a good chance your local public library has a subscription to it as well. You may even be able to get to it online if you're creative.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How is that supposed to be a "proof"? Scientists are less wrong today than they were yesterday. Creationists on the other hand are still exactly as wrong as the bronze age goat herders who came up with the creation fairy tale several thousand years ago.
That was what the scientists behind the discovery argued on Science Friday. Even Berger, who found it (and was implied to be saying it was a human ancestor) argued that it was more significant in opening up our idea of what morphology defines the genus Homo than in being a possible ancestor.
The Science Friday story (audio on the left side of the page) is definitely worth listening to. Quick version: sediba has some features, in the hands and elsewhere, that are associated with the genus Homo and our direct ancestors. But it also has very ape-like qualities that make it less likely to be a direct ancestor. It's also notable in that it was discovered as two very complete skeletons rather than fragments, as many transitional species are.
Cool story all around.
Loop where time becomes a.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I beg to differ. By my reckoning, this proves that the history of the earth now goes back at least 7000 years.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
New evidence = new theories.
As opposed to politics and religion, new evidence = character assassinate those who presented the evidence.
That and any correction is taken that all evidence is wrong. "Yes we now believe homo habilis coexisted with homo erectus instead of preceding it." = "Did you hear that? All their hominid data was wrong."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You're seriously trying to support the assertion "they" do this "every couple of years" because of "Nebraska man"? "Nebraska man" hit the papers in 1922. Once a century != "every couple of years".
Basic math fail.
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He has no idea. He's spouting crap. If he's seriously asserting that these transitional features were later reinvented by a later hominid, he's pretty damned ignorant of hominid evolution. He may be referring, I think, to, say, whales re-evolving morphological features present in ancient aquatic chordate ancestors, but the very fact that the distance between a whale and its fish ancestor is hundreds of millions of years and the distance between this hominid and modern humans is a few million tells you just how little this guy is thinking.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Basic history fail too. What is it about evolution, and human evolution in particular, that brings out the retarded fuckwits?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What's his take on this? Seriously..
I'm guessing he hasn't received his copy of Science yet.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Nebraska Man was debunked in 1927. What was the name of the museum, so we can avoid it or its de facto successor?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The death of the Out-of-Africa theory
New finds and research results prove the theory that said that human evolution happened exclusively in Africa.
So is the title wrong or the first sentence? It doesn't really improve from there unless you are a grammar nazi in search of a target rich environment.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
We're talking here about bipedalism, hands much closer to humans than the other apes, in other words a suite of morphological features. It's absurd to think that this some early dead end and the same large-scale features evolved again in another hominid line a few million years later.
I'm not saying these two specimens or even their particular lineage were ancestral to us, but clearly those adaptations are precisely what one would look for in pushing back in time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They found the missing link - it said "404 - File Not Found"
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.