SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
Early hominin skull fills in "a major gap" in the fossil record
A 3.8 million-year-old fossil skull is giving anthropologists their first look at an early Australopithecine, the hominin genus that eventually led to modern humans. The skull belongs to a member of a species called Australopithecus anamensis, which many anthropologists have considered the ancestor of the fossil hominin Lucy and the rest of her species, Australopithecus afarensis. But the find suggests that, as with most of these things, the story may be more complicated.
A. anamensis lived in Eastern Africa between 3.8 million and 4.2 million years ago. Like Lucy, they would have walked upright, but with a gait that we would probably pick out as a little odd. They probably would have still had upper arms adapted to the physical strains of climbing, especially as young children. At the moment, however, those are just assumptions—albeit very likely ones—based on what we know about other Australopiths. That's because, until now, anthropologists knew A. anamensis only from its teeth and jaws. In fact, skulls are hard to find at all in the fossil record before 3.5 million years ago.
That doesn't sound like much to go on, but the sizes and shapes of teeth changed noticeably between hominin species, so they're very handy for identification. In fact, paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Salassie and his colleagues identified their newly found skull as A. anamensis based on the size and shape of its canines, which had certain anatomical features that stood out from A. afarensis and other close relatives.
But now anthropologists have a complete skull to work with. Formally known as MRD, it's mostly intact after 3.8 million years buried in sandstone, sandwiched between two layers of volcanic debris. The find, from the Waranjo-Mille site in the Afar region of Ethiopia, reveals what A. anamensis looked like, the kind of diet it was adapted to eat, and how its brain had grown compared to apes and to other hominins.
The lower half of the hominin's long face juts forward beneath its wide, heavy cheekbones, then narrows above them. Those broad cheeks and narrow upper face give A. anamensis a clear family resemblance to Lucy and other, later Australopiths. Overall, it's a strong, heavy-looking face, built on a frame of bones robust enough to support powerful muscles for chewing tough plant foods. In the dry shrubland around the shores of the ancient lake where MRD lived and died, nearly everything edible would also have been tough enough to make chewing serious work.
But if A. anamensis had the face of a later Australopith, its cranium looks more like those of apes and older hominin species. Its skull narrows just behind the eye sockets, like earlier hominins and apes, and its brain case, at 365cc to 370cc, is smaller than that of A. afarensis. Clearly, hominins hadn't yet started developing our infamous big brains in A. anamensis' day.
The find "fills a major gap in the fossil record," as Haile-Salassie and his colleagues wrote. Because skulls are so scarce in the East African fossil record before 3.5 million years ago, anthropologists can't say much about the hominin species on the scene just before the emergence of A. afarensis—who, it's thought, led directly to us.
Although there are some clear directions in evolutionary changes, it's increasingly clear that throughout the Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), hominin species split into a profusion of new branches, trying out variations on the themes of bipedalism, strong chewing, and eventually larger brains. Some of those evolutionary experiments failed, some succeeded for awhile, and at least one succeeded long enough to ultimately lead to us.
Fossils unearthed in the last few decades have shown us that early hominins were a diverse group, and it was normal for multiple species to exist at the same time. In fact, we may be the first hominin species to ever not be sharing the planet with another one.
Anthropologists still aren't sure how all that hominin diversity fits together, or how all those species relate to each other—and to us. Trying to trace the path of our own lineage among all those sister and cousin species is much harder than it seemed a few decades ago, when we knew about fewer species and the whole story looked deceptively simple.
[...]
Perhaps more importantly for our understanding of our own origins, it also means that more than one hominin species was living in Africa 3.8 million years ago, just before the first members of Homo emerged. If A. anamensis was around at the same time as A. afarensis, then one species could be our ancestor just as easily as the other could. That implies that we can no longer take A. afarensis for granted as our ancestor. Stay tuned; that claim is likely to spark some debate.
Nature, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1513-8 (About DOIs).
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @07:58PM (1 child)
The original nigger slave owners, they all left, all the slaves, all the children, all the families, all the babies - they just left the house and went to work. So, if you are a black, no matter where you go, no matter who your parents are, the law still applies, the laws still operate.
They still come down looking at you, because you are black and they have, they have to enforce it. I mean, a lot of it is a myth. I'll give you a very good example, you can look at these things, you can look at these things that were done to blacks by white people, that black people were brought up with, and you don't even notice the difference. There is no difference whatsoever. They just did it.
So, what is in the minds of all of us, and you're talking about people who really have a sense of history, this idea that somehow we went through this, so we went through this thing where there was a system that was created for blacks, that is still here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @11:02PM
omg a real russian/chinese troll. soylentnews had hit the big time!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @08:27PM
Amber (23-year-old girlfriend), was accused of punching and stabbing her boyfriend of a month who was allegedly "fucking her black boyfriend".
As they were on their way out, the girlfriend allegedly pulled him by the face and pushed him down onto the pavement.
As he was about to get up, she reportedly punched him in the face.
"I'm not racist, but, he was black, he was just giving me the finger," she told CNN.
The woman then took off running away, and the man followed.
During the chase after the alleged attack, Amber said she saw the man's black cousin, who was driving and looking for him.
She was also caught on camera pulling over and punching her cousin in front of horrified onlookers in a parking lot.
The cousin was arrested, while Amber allegedly admitted to police that she hit her cousin.
She was charged with simple assault.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @08:41PM
"You have some time," says a new visitor, the middle-aged gentleman in a white suit. He is the supervisor, whose long brown hair and gray suit seem slightly out of place behind the polished table and round table.
"Where is this, then?" He asks, pointing to a chair in the corner. "I guess there was someone else in here."
"Not here, sir. It's not in any of the bathrooms."
"What about the showers?"
"There's no shower. They're built for the men alone --" She is talking on one ear, his voice almost a whisper. "If you're a man, you would use them."
The supervisor is smiling. "They have the same heating system for all of the men."
The man, whose head is shaved, looks the opposite way. "Do you take women?"
"No, I don't, just men."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @09:42PM (8 children)
I see the Trumptards have found their way to Soylent News.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday September 01 2019, @10:18PM (6 children)
Now that the Fox News watching dullards have been banned elsewhere, they're probably bored.
Unlimited free speech is awesome though.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday September 01 2019, @10:24PM (5 children)
I think it is spillover from the OpenAI story.
They are trying to prove Musk right. The algorithm will end civilization as we know it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday September 01 2019, @10:28PM (4 children)
It's getting pretty close to qualifying as spam.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @10:38PM
It's getting pretty close to qualifying as spamming, but we're trying to focus on getting a good enough sample size of real people that we can confirm whether or not we're actually getting genuine feedback from them through the survey.
A lot of people have been asking for this and we know how hard we'd be work just to make enough money to fund this, although when you consider we are doing this for our community, we're a lot less confident about achieving this goal. However, we'd like to think that at least we'll keep our promise of keeping all the data we collect for our content creators, even if we have to pay someone to take it all, and be sure we've got enough cash to do so.
Thanks very much for your support and we'll keep posting about what we're doing.
See you on the next page to learn more about the next step in the journey of our content creators.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Akemi Homura on Monday September 02 2019, @12:41AM (1 child)
The powers that be don't like the use of the Spam mod for anything that isn't actually "BUY V14GR4 here!" type messages, unfortunately. Which is a shame, since a good deal of what we've had lately doesn't even qualify as trolling.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday September 02 2019, @07:28AM
I am not interested in who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @11:07PM
the above obviously is trolling of the most obnoxious variety, but you can already tell the partisan hacks above would be modding actual opinions as spam since they are blaming "trumptards" for these obvious bot/ESL trolls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @10:43PM
Wow holy shit! You are so cleaver! I bet you got all ribbons in College! How's that student loan? Oh you want my taxes to pay for it? No thanks man, see I know you don't need my hommid brain, got this! You got this Homo Faggetis! #pride
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 02 2019, @03:10AM
That there actually were species boundaries is clear, but just contemplate the difference between a Pekingese dog and a St. Bernard. Small skeletal differences are not good for delineating boundaries, they're just good for getting your name in a paper. ...
Well, that's a bit of an overstatement. A Pekingese dog won't act the same way as a St. Bernard in many circumstances, and they don't like the same climate, etc. Those are useful differences, but they don't make species boundaries.
Now, to step back a little further from my initial comment, dogs aren't a really good example, as they are an unusually variable species. (Compare the variations of dogs with the variations of house cats.) Even so, my basic point holds. Archaeologists are too willing to identify any variation as a separate species. I'll grant that two animals that aren't alive at the same time can't interbreed and produce fertile offspring, but "aren't alive at the same time" isn't grounds for saying they're different species, even if their bones are a bit different.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @07:47PM (1 child)
"Anthropologists still aren't sure how all that hominin diversity fits together, or how all those species relate to each other—and to us. Trying to trace the path of our own lineage among all those sister and cousin species is much harder than it seemed a few decades ago, when we knew about fewer species and the whole story looked deceptively simple."
The way I read the article this just adds more gaps. Common descent predicted one thing and the evidence keeps on showing those predictions to be false. Maybe common descent itself is wrong. Or rather, trying to use the fossil record to prove or disprove common descent is not science because it's unfalsifiable since the fossil record does not really show us what we would expect to see if common descent were the case and so we have to make adjustments to accommodate the hypothesis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @08:12AM
In this sort of cladistics, every time you fill a gap, you create two new ones. This is the result of the (relatively) slow and steady nature of evolution across a population seen through snapshots in time of single specimen.