Posted on 09/10/2015 7:07:51 AM PDT by Sopater
A few months after a team of excavators pulled more than 1,500 bones from a cave outside Johannesburg, South Africa, dozens of experts in the anatomy of human ancestors were brought to the city in spring 2014 to determine what had been found.
Caroline VanSickle, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and expert on the pelvis of Neanderthals and other hominids, was one of them. She and the team of scientists spent their days poring over the bones and fossil records in a workshop, and their nights swapping theories about the discovery over dinner and beers.
The researchers couldn’t agree on what species they thought the bones belonged to — some believed it was a member of humanity’s genus, Homo, while others said it had to be a more distant relative, Australopithecus. As the work continued, the scientists came to realize why there was no consensus.
“This is something totally different,” VanSickle said.
What the scientists found was a species of human ancestor that had never been identified before: Homo naledi, an upright-walking hominid believed to be like a cousin on our family tree.
Homo naledi had humanlike hands, teeth and feet, but its cone-shaped rib cage and wider pelvis were features of earlier ancestors, UW-Madison anthropology professor John Hawks said. It had a small brain but exhibited surprisingly advanced behavior, Hawks said.
He and VanSickle will join several other scientists in South Africa to announce the discovery Thursday, when the first academic papers about Homo naledi will be published.
(Excerpt) Read more at host.madison.com ...
“Caroline VanSickle, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and expert on the pelvis of Neanderthals and other hominids...”
Pelvis expert. Hope she keeps in clean.
sounds so much like the way certain racists used to describe blacks - as less than human. They are not.
This is likely just one more human race, living in isolation and other humans with careers to build...
So that’s why I didn’t do well in science. I don’t like beer.
Imagine being an expert in something that doesn’t exist.
Really nice that they took pictures of family special occasions so we knew what they looked like all these years later.
When I saw “Found with help from UW scientists, newly discovered species is ‘cousin’ of humanity,” my first thought was: “Oh they’ve finally discovered liberals.”
I will file this with my global warming files.
As Pliny the Elder said, there's always something new out of Africa.
How would you like THAT on your resume?......................
they said “like a cousin,” which I took to mean just what you said, that they did not want to imply that this specific creature was a specific ancestor to all living humans today. They just do not know enough about that early evolution of the hominids to be able to say that a specific individual skeleton was an ancestor.
that’s my father!
Source: Friedemann Schrenk and Stephanie Mu+ller, The Neanderthals (2005, Eng. trans. 2009).
That’s true. I have found several things over beer, some I didn’t mean to.
At any rate, liberals have discovered this story. At the site this comes from, a liberal wit commented that the photo was one of Scott Walker.
I lost a lot of respect for paleontologists years ago when reviewing a statistical science study on their interpretations of fossilized remains.
The study focused on the paleontologists themselves without them knowing.
A complete fossilized skeleton had been found buried, was painstakingly uncovered, photographed and annotated. The bones were numbered and the numbers were affixed by special tape.
A cross table of numbers was randomly generated. For example:
1 -—> 12
2 -—> 4
3 -—> 25
:
:
etc.
Then the bones were relabeled with the new numbers and laid out on a large table in sequence of the new numbering. In other words they were all scrambled according to the new order of the generated cross table.
Groups of Paleontologists were asked to come in to examine the bones. They were not told anything, they had no knowledge the bones had been scrambled around and no knowledge of the cross table.
What the Paleontologists conjured up as explanations and findings was in complete error.
So their ‘science’, like so many other ‘sciences’ such as economics, is a dismal effort.
On the other hand who you going to call when a bunch of prehistoric bones is found in some cave?
I question that reconstruction - it looks nothing like Helen Thomas.
I suppose if I posted “The Rent is Too Damned High!” that’d get pulled in a New York minute...
The page has a picture of the bones they found. There’s practically no skull there, much less a face.
These “reconstructions” done by “paleoartists” certainly are imaginative. Stress on “imagine”.
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