I do apologize, somehow almost all of this post got ate by the software. I have no idea what happened. At any rate, here is the rest of the post… PalArch’s Journal of vertebrate Paleontology has a large article – 121 pages – devoted to human evolution in southeast Asia. Of particular interest are the skeletons and skulls found on Flores (in the 1950’s) dating to about 3,000+ years ago. I haven’t read the paper in it’s entirety, so I won’t comment further in this post. I will have more to say on it when I am done reading it.
Thanks Badger3k for bringing this to my attention…
Davescot has a post up claiming that Zimmer “hears the sounds of taxonomy exploding”. This claim is based on Davescot’s faulty understanding of Zimmer’s article in PLOS Computational Biology. I’ll leave Zimmer to address this claim, since he is an articulate and eloquent writer, fully capable of shredding Davescot’s bogus claims. I would like to address one of the comments left at UD.
I would like to welcome our new Scibling Aardvarchaeology to the ScienceBlogs collective. Aardvarchaeology is a worthy addition to SB. Who knows, maybe one of these days us anthro type bloggers will outnumber those pesky neuroscientists here at SB…
Order: Primates
Family: Galagonidae
Genus: Galago
Species: Galago senegalensis
Bet you thought I had forgotten about the Galagos and Lorises! Today we have the Senegal Bushbaby.
The Hopewell are, primarily, a middle woodland phenomena. They are famous mainly due to the elaborate mounds and earthworks which reach their peak in Ohio (see map below). They are also famous for some of their artifacts – such as this bird of prey:
The Hopewell are the subject of a new book, edited by Douglas Charles and Jane Buikstra, called Recreating Hopewell. The book represents state of the art thinking on the Hopewell and are the proceedings of the conference “Perspectives on Middle Woodland at the Millennium” held in 2000.
Like the others, I have been asked to submit some of my best science writing for a book. So I thought I would ask you, the reader, what are the best science posts on my blog? Are there any that stand out? Don’t limit yourselves to anthropology, I do tend to stray into paleontology, biology and genetics (among other fields) from time to time.
This is one from the archives. Although there are a number of resources that answer the question presented below, I decided to give my own response (the more resources the merrier).
Creationism/ID is something of a hobby of mine. I try to keep track of current arguments and have had several “discussions” with proponents of creationism/ID. One of the arguments that occasionally crops up is “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” For example, one of the people speaking in favor of the Minority Report of the Kansas BOE used that argument.
The article on neanderthal cannibalism has finally been published. My first thought is that it has been somewhat overhyped. The cannibalism only forms a small part of the article (see below). It is, however, an interesting paper even without the cannibalism aspects.
I meant to publish the following picture yesterday in connection with a few remarks I made about Carl Sagan. Unfortunately, we were having issues posting pictures so here it is:
"You may not be willing to admit that you resemble an ape; if your thousandth ancestor is more like an ape than you are, you may, if you wish, call it a coincidence. But if that thousandth ancestor's forebears become progressively more simian as you trace back the geneological lines, you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape." Earnest Hooten
"But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." Charles Darwin: The Autobiography
Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution, and Science 