Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Hobbit update
They’re defaming my ancestors.
A recent issue of Science (19 May, Vol. 312, pages 983-984) dishes on the controversy of Indonesia’s Homo floresiensis, the one-meter-tall humans who “made stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants 18,000 years ago.” Anatomist Susan Larson of Stony Brook University reported at a recent meeting that H. floresiensis seems to be descended from Homo erectus, while paleoanthropologist Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum (Chicago) “argue[s] that the single skull is that of a mondern human suffering from microcephaly.”
Microcephaly. Teensy head syndrome. (Next time you want to insult someone with language that escapes them, call them microcephalic.) I’d give you a link, but in my opinion, there’s nothing more disturbing than images of malformed babies.
“More surprises are still to come,” reports Elizabeth Culotta. “[William] Jungers said in his talk that LB1 [the H. floresiensis skeleton] includes an essentially complete foot, something not identified previously, and hinted that the foot is extremely large. Indonesia’s hobbits, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures, may have trekked about on big hairy feet.”
Now that is more like it.
In other science news, Elizabeth Pennisi reports that human and chimp lineages may have split only 6 million years ago. More controversial still is the claim that “early hominids interbred with their chimp cousins.”
Hey, I’ve got news for you. They still do.
And this couple, too:
Any other candidates for chimp-human interbreeding?
D.
Dwarf elephants? That’s creepy.
I think in the second pic you’ve got two chimps.
Dammit, Gabriele, quit finding all my errors!
I was immediately drawn to Laura’s hands – quite chimp-like. Could almost imagine her hanging from a tree by those fingers. Or at least peeling a banana.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Erin, that is disturbing. I love it!
Disturbing indeed. And, Darla? Wait until you see the breasts on that chimp.
I was immediately drawn to Laura’s hands – quite chimp-like. Could almost imagine her hanging from a tree by those fingers. Or at least peeling a banana.
Or grabbing money out of tax payers’ purses.