Posted on 03/24/2006 11:47:46 AM PST by The_Victor
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - A hominid skull discovered in Ethiopia could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race, a scientist said on Friday.
The cranium, found near the city of Gawis, 500 km (300 miles) southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, is estimated to be 200,000 to 500,000 years old.
The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.
It was discovered two months ago in a small gully at the Gawis river drainage basin in Ethiopia's Afar region, southeast of the capital.
Sileshi said significant archaeological collections of stone tools and numerous fossil animals were also found at Gawis.
"(It) opens a window into an intriguing and important period in the development of modern humans," Sileshi said.
Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a hot bed for archaeological discoveries.
Hadar, located near Gawis, is where in 1974 U.S. scientist Donald Johnson found the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy," described by scientists as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the world.
Lucy is Ethiopia's world-acclaimed archaeological find. The discovery of the almost complete hominid skeleton was a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity.
On the shores of what was formerly a lake in 1967, two Homo sapien skulls dating back 195,000 years were unearthed. The discovery pushed back the known date of mankind, suggesting that modern man and his older precursor existed side by side.
Sileshi said while different from a modern human, the braincase, upper face and jaw of the cranium have unmistakeable anatomical evidence that belong to human ancestry.
"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," he added.
" just like a Whale is not an animal, but a fish."
A whale is an animal. So is a fish. A whale is not a fish.
Bones of the cranium:
Frontal
Parietal
Occipital
Temporal
Sphenoid
Maxilla
Nasal
Zygomatic
Mandible
Ethmoid
Lacrimal
Palatine
Vomer
Inferior nasal concha
Ear:
Maleus
Incus
Stapes
Perhaps Fester is suggesting that he and "every other person" in Ethiopia are lacking many of the bones that you listed.
Cue Nelson Muntz.
= )
- Try Zinjanthropos.
- Zinjanthropus. It was spelled wrong, being in a creationist post.
- Try Zinjanthropus.
My colleagues have all asked good questions, but a more important one would be 'Have you tried Hare Krishna'?
When tools are found in the immediate vicinity of bipedal hominids it is a fairly clear sign the bones are those of people. Or do Jane and Koko communities abound throughout the planet?
Can you show us the gills on a whale?
By the way, you still haven't gotten around to telling us how many legs a locust has, whether a hare chews its cud, whether bats and birds are the same, and where the evidence for a world-wide flood is.
But they do such a bang-up job!
Now there is some real proof.
LOL!
Give Fester his due. It wouldn't surprise me if his cranium was indeed eight bones.
Bones of the cranium:
Occipital
Parietal (2)
Frontal
Temporal (2)
Sphenoid
Ethmoid
Does this "missing link" have all of these, just like my skull and those of everyone else who lives in Ethiopia?
Probably not. You see, determination is based on quite a number of different attributes of the skulls. Just because you would find it impossible to recognize their placement in the series does not mean that scientists would.
incorrect. most mutations are irrelevant, neither positive nor negative in consequence, indeed imperceptable in the phenotype of the mutant organism.
heritable mutations add up over generations, leading to differentiation inside a population. many of these substantially mutated subgroups are selected against by environmental and other factors, but some are not.
such accumulated mutation through multiple generations sometimes eventually leads to divergent descendant strains - this is called speciation through imperfect replication and (natural) selection, aka "the theory of evolution".
The two pectoral fins on a fish are a clear indication that fish are our bipedalar ancestors. Just think how many millions of years it took for that unintelligently undesigned process to work itself out!
"just like my skull and those of everyone else who lives in Ethiopia?"
When did you move to Ethiopia? And when did their skulls have different numbers of bones than everybody else?
not really new - just an abbreviated version of the old "loss of data/mutation only damages" fallacy.
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