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| Geek Chic is the Idea - LiveJournal.com ... |
Friday, April 04, 2008 --- 39 days ago http://rivendellrose.livejournal.com/565589.html
| Okay, I promised beam_oflight a post on "something anthropological" a while ago, and I really do have a mostly-written essay/post on the current controversy over Homo floresiensis, but... this is so much more cool, and a lot less confusingly controversial, so! Scientists have found new fossils putting human ancestors in Western Europe more than a million years ago . This is HUGE news, if the fossils aren't discredited, because up until now the earliest human-ancestor fossils in Western Europe dated to 800,000 years ago - big difference from over a million! The reason I say that this will be huge if the fossils aren't discredited is that dating techniques can get pretty fuzzy at times, and if there's any doubt about the provenance of the fossils we could be in for a rocky ride of people claiming that they got moved there from somewhere else. Biological anthropology is big on controversy like that. ;) So far, though, everything looks good - they were found in an area where later fossils are known, and the current ones were found in conjunction with stone flakes from the knapping of tools, and bones that show signs of having the meat cut from them by those tools. So they're not turning up "in a vacuum" so to speak, which is a very good sign! Point of interest - the fossil is so far being considered to belong to Homo antecessor ( Wiki article here ), known to have been in the same area from later fossils. This f ... |
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