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.
Yup - a whale meets or exceeds all these criteria, sort of.
I actually thought of just that passage!
If you think he's funny you must have missed the whales = fish debacle. That one definitely wins the WTHeck Award for today from me.
well played!
s'okay - this thread needs to be archived in-toto for the amusement value alone
St. Augustine makes an excellent point, one which the Creos here and elsewhere really need ot consider.
Case in point: I was led to accept the existence of a deity last June. The "conversion" process was quite personal, and not valid as proof for use to convince anyone else: It suffices that it was sufficient to convince *me*. The process left me with little firm understanding of the specifics of this deity. And EVERY SINGLE TIME one of our "special" friends here spouts genesis-literalism, my interest in pursuing understanding of deity *in their direction* wanes ever further.
In this manner, by "defending" their God with absurdities and fallacy, they work *against* one of their creed's principal tenets.
On the "Intelligent design legislation in New York reborn" thread, taxesareforever said
You mean "past" president. [Henry M. Morris] has gone to heaven.
To which I replied:
Maybe, maybe not.
My opinion would be quite the opposite, since he did more than almost anyone else (with the possible exception of Jack Chick) to alienate people from Christ.
They really do hurt their own cause.
[courtesy ping to taxesareforever]
Thank you. I was afraid of lobbing over the crowd's heads.
Would have been nice if you would have added my last post which you have not answered which was:
"So you believe there is a hell?"
Not hardly. In my misspent youth, I performed all the experiments in my Edmunds chemistry set. I moved on to model rocketry and then electricity/electronics. It became clear that reality works pretty much the way science says it does.
Growing up on the semi-rural coast of Florida, there's a large variety of critters. I kept tropical chiclids, snakes, and lizards. I fished and hunted.
My brother and I would help grandpa with slaughter and cleaning chickens, hogs, and the occasional beef.
I don't have any illusions about biology.
And like the physics of chemistry, aerodynamics, and electricity, biological science described what I already knew first hand.
I'm familiar with how it works, and ready to say BS on bad science.
Since you're one who mistakes philosophy for science it would be no surprise.
Ya know, Fester, the funny thing is I was a committed Southern Baptist (before it became brain dead literal fundamentalism) all that time.
Call it compartmentalization or whatever, but I could accept reality (the here and now) and religion (the spiritual later) as both being true at the same time.
Unlike you, I never felt the need to reject one to accept the other. And I was (and am) quite clear on the distinction between "philosophy" and science.
As I recall, the microwave expirement was suggested to demonstrate that the speed of light is constant.
Nope. A certain poster claimed the "unenlightened, ignorant, religious, superstitious masses" couldn't measure the speed of light. And then whined about having to take the scientists word for it.
Of course, when that certain poster was shown how, he spent the rest of the thread twisting, turning, squirming and asking bringing up silly objections on fundamental laws of physics. And most likely never attempted to cure his willful ignorance by performing the experiment.
Now did he? and why not?
Exactly how do you propose measuring the speed of light at the time of the big bang?
At the instant of the cosmic egg, there's no way of telling. Everything was in an ultra-extreme energy state, no matter, no particles, no distance, no clocks. There were no photons to go from "here" to "there".
All the laws and theories of physics have no meaning in such conditions.
Only after a small fraction (10-32) of a second into the hyper-inflation will photons start forming - and a flat space-time to measure it in. So c could have been wildly different in the first few moments of the universe, but it wouldn't mean anything, there was almost no matter to form stars yet.
Once you actually have light and distance, you can calculate the distance to various stars by triangulation and observe the redshift in the spectral lines. They should all agree with the Hubble expansion -and they do. If the SoL had changed in the past, then there's no way the measurements could agree.
Next we have millisecond pulsars. These fellows are rotating stars that have collapsed into a small spinning ball of matter that flashes (pulses) energy according to their spin rate.
But if the SoL had slowed at any point either in time or travel, we shouldn't be able to detect any pulses, they would be all "smeared" together.
And since pulsars are extremely stable we can measure their rotation rate and compare it with measurement 10 years later. If c had changed in the interval then the measurements would be different, but they're not.
Then there's SN1987a, a blue supergiant star that was observed exploding on Feb 24, 1987. The observation was confirmed by neutrino detectors in Japan, Ohio and Russia. Gamma ray emission from Co-57 and Co-56 isotopes formed in the supernova show precisely the same energy levels as Cobalt does on earth.
But the fascinating thing is that this object has a ring of gas about 0.7 light years away, and sure enough, nine months later, the ring was fully illuminated.
The Hubble spacecraft observed the first edge brighten (the top of the ring is inclined towards the earth) and then by measuring the time until the furthermost edge was illuminated tells us the ring is 1.37 light years in diameter, or just shy of our previous estimate. With that and the angular displacement across the ring, basic trigonometry shows that SN1987a is 170,000 light years away.
You'll note that any reasonable variation in c will still give the same result, 170,000 ly. Reasonable meaning a third or even a half increase in the velocity.
Creationists that want to postulate a SoL many orders of magnitude greater than the accepted rate have to explain how that the gas ring would be that much larger; yet still get the results we're observing. You'd have to conclude one of:
I think you keeping bringing it up because you want some of my chocolate.
Nah. Since going on Atkins, I've lost my craving for sweets. -- Although I'll take a small square with coffee if you're being generous.
I cannot answer for Virginia-American.
I do not find hell, as described in the Christian tradition, to be rational or to fit in with the description of God.
please archive #390. good post.
That was not the question. The question is "do you believe in hell"? If you don't believe in the hell of the Bible, what hell do you believe in?
Regarding the hare... The hare chews the cud by passing its food twice. After the first pass, the hare eats and chews its fecal pellets (Book of Bible Problems, Geradius D. Bouw, Ph.D, 1997, pg. 49-50)
that is all the answer I can give you, so that is all the answer you are going to get.
apparently so, by some.
prehistoric zoophile porn!
400
Prime
so there.
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