New Fossil Sheds Light On Lucy's Family Tree 89
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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If it helps you, I think Slashdot fucked something up today. Despite using the AJAX interface, and having my account
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Nope, that doesn't help.
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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.
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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 [slashdot.org])
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
In a stunning announcement (Score:1, Funny)
Re:In a stunning announcement (Score:5, Funny)
How do they expect to fit creationism into the curriculum? My kids are already doing four hours of astrology and alchemy per week, and next semester the oldest starts graphology.
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What, no tarot cards and divination? Ridiculous! What are they teaching in schools these days? No wonder everybody says public education is crap.
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Mine just had his herbalism and phrenology exams. The stress he was under was just immense...
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Except some herbs do have proven medical benefits. Aspirin, for example, is found in plants.
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Re:In a stunning announcement (Score:4, Informative)
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The Theory of relativity is a theory that is not testable, I wouldnt exactly say that isnt science.
It's testable in the sense it can be used to make predictions and those predictions can be compared to what actually happened and what other theories e.g. newtons "laws" say.
Hence why they are called Theories, not Proofs or Laws.
No physical theory can ever be conclusively proved (hence why we don't call them "laws" these days apart from a few that are called that for historical reasons) because there is always
Creationism is NOT science (Score:2, Insightful)
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Pure Creationism only falls back on that for the very start of things being created. Creationism fully allows and promotes true scientific study.
Comparatively, Evolutionism promotes and falls b
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Evolutionism promotes and falls back on the Big Bang and primordial goo for the very start of things being created.
That statement shows just how ignorant you are. Evolution and cosmology are two entirely different fields of science, and the term "primordial goo" is mostly used by the media and idiots who write books about creationism.
The rest of your post is just nonsense. Go get a real education.
SB
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You still know what I mean, and it's still valid. Evolution has many holes in it, and ultimately relies on the same basic unverifiable issues. Cosmology only applies for the
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I love how every time a story like this comes out somebody immediately, unprovoked, starts bashing Creationists. Is it because of insecurity or do you think it's cool?
It's been 150 years since the Origin of Species. The main thrust behind that book only gathers more evidence. 150 years later, the Origin of Species still stands as a testament to science and rational thought, much like Newton's Principia.
The mentally ill simply cannot help themselves. It's not their fault that they aren't as intelligent as
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Couldn't be Adam and Eve. Dick Clark said he knew Adam and Eve, and these two look nothing like them. Abe Vigota agrees.
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"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
No subscription required (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... the full text of the PNAS article does NOT require a subscription. Just click the "Full Text (PDF) [pnas.org]" link.
Or at least, I have access using no logins and accessing via a standard ISP in Thailand. :-/
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I'm not at a university. And, I can access PNAS from both work and school and download at will. Maybe the National Academy of Sciences hates Canada? ;)
work and home (Score:2)
durhurrr... I can access from both work and home.
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I prefer MySQL to Access.
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Not working here in the UK (from work); I'm presented with a login screen.
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Hmmmm... that's really strange. Has anyone else been successful in accessing the full text? I poked around the PNAS site and didn't see anything about certain countries having access and others not. There is never a login page for me, though if I click on the subscribe link, it tells me the instructions to subscribe as if I'm not a subscriber (which I'm not).
Maybe the King of Thailand made a deal for Thailand to have access to early edition papers? I have no idea what's going on, but I have no problems acce
Oops. Free access for developing countries (Score:4, Informative)
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 [pnas.org]
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.
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Didn't know that. Kudos to PNAS (not that they need it).
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There is also a ridicoulsy long article (1/2 the mag) in this months National Geographic.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/middle-awash/shreeve-text [nationalgeographic.com]
They blew the nickname (Score:5, Funny)
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Or Schroeder? Either way I feel sorry for him.
...and I pronounce Linux as Linux (Score:4, Funny)
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...
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Biped (Score:5, Funny)
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In that case it also meant they could time-travel more than 60 million years into the past...
Ostrich == dinosaur (Score:3, Informative)
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TFA says 5'6" max. That's nowhere near 2 metres.
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Well, not metric metres...
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our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur
You're about 62 million years off putting these or pretty much any other hominid species alongside real dinosaurs. Seriously, it might sound cool but it makes no sense, and the public believing stuff just because it sounds cool has lead to a lot of trouble in this field.
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our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur
You're about 62 million years off putting these or pretty much any other hominid species alongside real dinosaurs. Seriously, it might sound cool but it makes no sense, and the public believing stuff just because it sounds cool has lead to a lot of trouble in this field.
YHBT, HAND.
p.s. wtf is up with slashdot comment boxes? Where's my "quote parent" button? Why change the design?
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Quote parent button? I've never seen a quote parent button on Slashdot.
Wooooooooossssh (Score:2)
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.
Re:Biped (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked,
/. seems even more borken today than usual, but I'll try responding to this anyway (I'm assuming the dino joke was a joke...)
It's been pretty clear for quite a while now that upright bipedalism was an early feature in human evolution, where "quite a while" means "at least 20 years". But as the persistence of Creationism after a century of obvious falsity suggests, humans are deeply wedded to myths about our origins, and within the paleoanthropological community as well as popular culture there has been a big effort to build myths around human evolution.
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. Upright bipedalism in this myth is necessary to free our hands to work with and carry tools.
This myth is comforting to the weak-minded because it seems to suggest that evolution "toward" modern humans was a quasi-purposive process driven by the reproductive benefits of improved tool-making and tool-use [*].
Early bipedalism blows this myth out of the water. If proto-humans were upright bipedal creatures so early on, those traits clearly had nothing much to do with tool use, and the certain fact that the evolution of our large, opera-writing, space-ship-building brains is nothing but the consequence of a huge series of unrelated accidents.
We happened to have a body plan that resulted in us being able to do something more useful than tell dirty jokes after run-away sexual selection blew our brain out into its current magnificent proportions. Once that entirely accidental potential was realized, about 50,000 years ago, there has likely been some evolutionary pressure toward more effective tool use and whatnot, up until the last 200 years, anyway.
But the process that got us here wasn't some million-year ramp we climbed. It was a fun-house ride that dumped us out at the end with a brain that could reflect on itself, and eventually ask how it got here, and learn by carefully examining the world what the answers were... all while some insane nutjobs were screaming nonsense and threatening violence if we instead didn't listen to their fantasic gibberish.
Early upright bipedalism challenges all the myths, and people hate that.
[*] Yeah, there's a joke in there, and since your brain was evolved specifically to entertain and be entertained by members of the opposite sex, it's one that pretty much everyone here is aware of since our brains were all the result of the same process.
Goods Gets the Girls (Score:2)
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 improv
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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. Upright bipedalism in this myth is necessary to free our hands to work with and carry tools.
We happened to have a body plan that resulted in us being able to do something more useful than tell dirty jokes after run-away sexual selection blew our brain out into its current magnificent proportions. Once t
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Looking at the small sampling of fossils I find it hard to accept that they can draw so many conclusions.
Yes, you could definitely say that it is hominidae, most likely a Australopithecus but to infer that it is bipedal with a human-like gait is a stretch.
'pithecus was around for a few million years and a great deal of evolutionary changes were occurring over that span of time. In the late Pleistocene look at how much 'homo changed with the extinction of habilis, neanderthalensis, floresiensis and denisova.
PNAS? (Score:2, Funny)
It was only a matter of time... (Score:2)
I guess they found Helo???
Am I the only one? (Score:2, Funny)
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!
Anyone else dissatisfied with science? (Score:1)