Slashdot Mirror
1.8 Million-Year-Old Skull Suggests Three Early Human Species Were One
ananyo writes "A 1.8 million-year-old human skull dramatically simplifies the textbook story of human evolution, suggesting what were thought to be three distinct species of early human (Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus) was just one. 'Skull 5', along with four other skulls from the same excavation site at Dmanisi, Georgia, also shows that early humans were as physically diverse as we are today (paper abstract)."
A nice example of the problems with using a point in time technique like taxonomy and applying it to an extended period of time. There's no single point where one species transforms into another, this is a very slow process. Any given sample, depending on where it is on the timeline, could belong to two different species. All the homo this and homo that is pretty much a waste of time, or so it seems to me.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Simpler is almost always better - and I for one am pleased to see our past more neatly explained. I worry about our willingness to complicate things in the name of science, sometimes.
Yeah, yeah, sure. We've become such an awful species now, compared to the enlightened past when slavery and genocide were considered a-ok.
God's own son wasn't especially white. The Bible makes it clear that he looked like a typical Galilean Jew; otherwise, he would have found it a lot harder to mix with crowds.
When it permits them to publish a paper.
No, I'm serious. When I was in school, the best lecturer in the department was almost canned because the department didn't want to give him tenure. Their excuse? (among other things) He didn't publish enough.
The pressure to publish is enormous, often to the detriment of real science.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I never knew before reading Slashdot how many "tech nerds" really hate science.
I wonder how many of them are angry because they couldn't cut it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think they look at the complete picture and make their best guess based on all the evidence that they have and the best models that they have. The species concept is also inherently fuzzy. I'm not a biologist, but I've been told it can be fairly hard to tell if two living organisms are of the same species or not. Obviously, we should not expect perfect certainty about individuals that died 2 million years ago.
Scientists never really know anything, because knowing something with full certainty is an absurd idea. When it comes to the distant past our best hope is to be able to paint a rough picture. Of course, advances in chemistry and physics may make it possible to analyze fossils at the molecular and atomic level and find out all sorts of amazing things about them that were previously thought impossible, but even then the whole detailed picture will always elude science.
Creationists love this, but the problem with biblical creationism and Islamic creationism is that if there was a global flood 4000 years ago there would still be a global flood today, because there is nowhere for the water to go. Also, the moon missions would have crashed into the firmament that holds the flood gates to the waters beyond when they orbited the moon since the moon is attached to the firmament. It's funny that there are grown men that hold on to early iron age beliefs about the cosmos...
Science has a tendency to correct it's self, creationism does not, you see that's the trap of religion, in order to be valid it must remain unchanged.
Because if you change it.... =)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."