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Race, Gender and Inequality

'Why I Hate Blacks' Article

This is a copy of the controversial opinion piece by Kenneth Eng in Asian Week magazine:

Here is a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks, starting from the most obvious down to the least obvious:
• Blacks hate us. Every Asian who has ever come across them knows that they take almost every opportunity to hurl racist remarks at us.
In my experience, I would say about 90 percent of blacks I have met, regardless of age or environment, poke fun at the very sight of an Asian. Furthermore, their activity in the media proves their hatred: Rush Hour, Exit Wounds, Hot 97, etc.
• Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It's unbelievable that it took them that long to fight back.
On the other hand, we slaughtered the Russians in the Japanese-Russo War.
• Blacks are easy to coerce. This is proven by the fact that so many of them, including Reverend Al Sharpton, tend to be Christians.
Yet, at the same time, they spend much of their time whining about how much they hate "the whites that oppressed them."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Christianity the religion that the whites forced upon them?
• Blacks don't get it. I know it's a blunt and crass comment, but it's true. When I was in high school, I recall a class debate in which one half of the class was chosen to defend black slavery and the other half was chosen to defend liberation.
Disturbingly, blacks on the prior side viciously defended slavery as well as Christianity. They say if you don't study history, you're condemned to repeat it.
In high school, I only remember one black student ever attending any of my honors and AP courses. And that student was caught cheating.
It is rather troubling that they are treated as heroes, but then again, whites will do anything to defend them.

Top Ten Creepy Fossil Finds of 2006

Cryptozoo news

Cool list!

DNA Gatherers Hit Snag:

Tribes Don’t Trust Them

SOUTH NAKNEK, Alaska — The National Geographic Society’s multimillion-dollar research project to collect DNA from indigenous groups around the world in the hopes of reconstructing humanity’s ancient migrations has come to a standstill on its home turf in North America.

Billed as the “moon shot of anthropology,” the Genographic Project intends to collect 100,000 indigenous DNA samples. But for four months, the project has been on hold here as it scrambles to address questions raised by a group that oversees research involving Alaska natives.

At issue is whether scientists who need DNA from aboriginal populations to fashion a window on the past are underselling the risks to present-day donors. Geographic origin stories told by DNA can clash with long-held beliefs, threatening a world view some indigenous leaders see as vital to preserving their culture.

They argue that genetic ancestry information could also jeopardize land rights and other benefits that are based on the notion that their people have lived in a place since the beginning of time.

“What if it turns out you’re really Siberian and then, oops, your health care is gone?” said Dr. David Barrett, a co-chairman of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board, which is sponsored by the Indian Health Service, a federal agency. “Did anyone explain that to them?”

Such situations have not come up, and officials with the Genographic Project discount them as unlikely. Spencer Wells, the population geneticist who directs the project, says it is paternalistic to imply that indigenous groups need to be kept from the knowledge that genetics might offer.

“I don’t think humans at their core are ostriches,” Dr. Wells said. “Everyone has an interest in where they came from, and indigenous people have more of an interest in their ancestry because it is so important to them.”

But indigenous leaders point to centuries of broken promises to explain why they believe their fears are not far-fetched. Scientific evidence that American Indians or other aboriginal groups came from elsewhere, they say, could undermine their moral basis for sovereignty and chip away at their collective legal claims.

“It’s a benefit to science, probably,” said Dr. Mic LaRoque, the Alaska board’s other co-chairman and a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe of North Dakota. “But I’m not convinced it’s a benefit to the tribes.”


The pursuit of indigenous DNA is driven by a desire to shed light on questions for which the archeological evidence is scant. How did descendants of the hunter-gatherers who first left humanity’s birthplace in east Africa some 65,000 years ago come to inhabit every corner of the Earth? What routes did they take? Who got where, and when?

As early humans split off in different directions, distinct mutations accumulated in the DNA of each population. Like bread crumbs, these genetic markers, passed on intact for millennia, can reveal the trail of the original pioneers. All non-Africans share a mutation that arose in the ancestors of the first people to leave the continent, for instance. But the descendants of those who headed north and lingered in the Middle East carry a different marker from those who went southeast toward Asia.

Most of the world’s six billion people, however, are too far removed from wherever their ancestors originally put down roots to be useful to population geneticists. The Genographic Project is focusing on DNA from people still living in their ancestral homelands because they provide the crucial geographic link between genetic markers found today and routes traveled long ago.

In its first 18 months, the project’s scientists have had considerable success, persuading more than 18,000 people in off-the-grid places like the east African island of Pemba and the Tibesti Mountains of Chad to donate their DNA. When the North American team arrived in southwestern Alaska, they found volunteers offering cheek swabs and family histories for all sorts of reasons.

The council members of the Native Village of Georgetown, for instance, thought the project could bolster a sense of cultural pride.

Glenn Fredericks, president of the Georgetown tribe, was eager for proof of an ancient unity between his people and American Indians elsewhere that might create greater political power. “They practice the same stuff, the lower-48 natives, as we do,” Mr. Fredericks said. “Did we exchange people? It would be good to know.”

Others said the test would finally force an acknowledgment that they were here first, undermining those who see the government as having “given” them their land.

Still others were interested in the mechanics of migration: “Were the lands all combined? Did they get here by boat?” For many nonindigenous Americans who feel disconnected from their roots, the project has also struck a chord: nearly 150,000 have scraped cells from their cheek and sent them to the society with $100 to learn what scientists know so far about how and where their individual forebears lived beyond the mists of prehistory.

By giving the broader public a way to participate, though it is likely to generate little scientific payoff, the project has created an unusual set of stakeholders with a personal interest in its success. More details, the project explains in the ancestral sketches it gives individuals, will come only with more indigenous DNA.

“I think you have to be sensitive to these cultures,” said Jesse R. Sweeney, 32, a bankruptcy lawyer in Detroit who hopes the millennia-size gaps in his own ancestors’ story will eventually be filled in. “But hopefully they will change their mind and contribute to the research.”

Mr. Sweeney’s DNA places his maternal ancestors in the Middle East about 50,000 year ago. After that, they may have gone north. Or maybe south: “This is where the genetic clues get murky and your DNA trail goes cold,” read the conclusion to his test results on the project’s Web site. “By working together with indigenous peoples around the globe, we are learning more about these ancient migrations.”

The first large effort to collect indigenous DNA since federal financing was withdrawn from a similar proposal amid indigenous opposition in the mid-1990s, the Genographic Project has drawn quiet applause from many geneticists for resurrecting scientific ambitions that have grown more pressing. As indigenous groups intermarry and disperse at an ever-accelerating pace, many scientists believe the chance to capture human history is fast disappearing.

“Everyone else had given up,” said Mark Stoneking, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “If they get even a fraction of what they are trying for, it will be very useful.”

Unlike the earlier Human Genome Diversity Project, condemned by some groups as “biocolonialism” because scientists may have profited from genetic data that could have been used to develop drugs, the Genographic Project promises to patent nothing and to avoid collecting medical information. The project has designated half the proceeds from the sale of kits to the public for programs designed to preserve traditional cultures and language.

In May, project officials held a stormy meeting in New York with the indigenous rights group Cultural Survival while protestors carried signs reading “National Geographic Sucks Indigenous Blood.” Shortly after, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues recommended suspending the project.

On the ground, every region has its challenges. To make scientific progress, the project’s geneticists are finding they must first navigate an unfamiliar tangle of political, religious and personal misgivings.

Pierre Zalloua, the project director in the Middle East, faces suspicion that he is an emissary of an opposing camp trying to prove their lineages are not important. Himla Soodyall, the project’s South African director, finds herself trying to explain to people who worship their ancestors what more her research could add. In Australia, some aboriginal groups have refused to cooperate.

But among the 10 geneticists the society has given the task of collecting 10,000 samples each by the spring of 2010, Theodore G. Schurr, the project’s North American director, is in last place. Fewer than 100 vials of DNA occupy a small plastic box in his laboratory’s large freezer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an assistant professor of anthropology. And at the request of the Alaska review board, he has sent back the 50 or so samples that he collected in Alaska to be stored in a specimen bank under its care until he can satisfy their concerns.

American Indians, Dr. Schurr says, hold the answer to one of the more notable gaps in the prehistoric migration map. Although most scientists accept that the first Americans came across the Bering Strait land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska some 20,000 years ago, there is no proof of precisely where those travelers came from, and the route they took south once they arrived.

Comparing the DNA of large numbers of American Indians might reveal whether their ancestors were from a single founding population, and when they reached the Americas. And knowing the routes and timing of migrations within the Americas would provide a foundation for studying how people came to be so different so quickly.

But almost every federally recognized tribe in North America has declined or ignored Dr. Schurr’s invitation to take part. “What the scientists are trying to prove is that we’re the same as the Pilgrims except we came over several thousand years before,” said Maurice Foxx, chairman of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag. “Why should we give them that openly?”

Some American Indians trace their suspicions to the experience of the Havasupai Tribe, whose members gave DNA for a diabetes study that University of Arizona researchers later used to link the tribe’s ancestors to Asia. To tribe members raised to believe the Grand Canyon is humanity’s birthplace, the suggestion that their own DNA says otherwise was deeply disturbing.

When Dr. Schurr was finally invited to a handful of villages in Alaska, he eagerly accepted. But by the time he reached South Naknek, a tiny native village on the Alaska Peninsula, to report his analysis of the DNA he had taken on an earlier mission, the Alaska review board had complained to his university supervisors.

The consent form all volunteers must sign, the Alaska board said, should contain greater detail about the risks, including the fact that the DNA would be stored in a database linked to tribal information.

Dr. Schurr’s latest attempt at a revised form is to be reviewed this month by the board in Alaska and the by University of Pennsylvania board supervising the project.

In the meantime, his early results have surprised some of the Alaskans who gave him their DNA. In South Naknek, Lorianne Rawson, 42, found out her DNA contradicted what she had always believed. She was not descended from the Aleuts, her test results suggested, but from their one-time enemies, the Yup’ik Eskimos.

The link to the Yup’iks, Ms. Rawson said, only made her more curious. “We want them to do more research,” she added, offering Dr. Schurr more relatives to be tested.

But she will have to wait.

Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

the ability to digest milk in adulthood!

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant.

Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.

Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.

A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on.

The principal mutation, found among Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic groups of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago, according to genetic estimates, Dr. Tishkoff’s group is to report in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday. This fits well with archaeological evidence suggesting that pastoral peoples from the north reached northern Kenya about 4,500 years ago and southern Kenya and Tanzania 3,300 years ago.

Two other mutations were found, among the Beja people of northeastern Sudan and tribes of the same language family, Afro-Asiatic, in northern Kenya.

Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without them. The mutations have created “one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans,” the researchers write.

The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea, Dr. Tishkoff said.

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the new findings were “very exciting” because they “showed the speed with which a genetic mutation can be favored under conditions of strong natural selection, demonstrating the possible rate of evolutionary change in humans.”

The genetic data fitted in well, she said, with archaeological and linguistic evidence about the spread of pastoralism in Africa. The first clear evidence of cattle in Africa is from a site 8,000 years old in northwestern Sudan. Cattle there were domesticated independently from two other domestications, in the Near East and the Indus valley of India.

Both Nilo-Saharan speakers in Sudan and their Cushitic-speaking neighbors in the Red Sea hills probably domesticated cattle at the same time, since each has an independent vocabulary for cattle items, said Dr. Christopher Ehret, an expert on African languages and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Descendants of each group moved southward and would have met again in Kenya, Dr. Ehret said.

Dr. Tishkoff detected lactose tolerance among both Cushitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan groups in Kenya. Cushitic is a branch of Afro-Asiatic, the language family that includes Arabic, Hebrew and ancient Egyptian.

Dr. Jonathan Pritchard, a statistical geneticist at the University of Chicago and the co-author of the new article, said that there were many signals of natural selection in the human genome, but that it was usually hard to know what was being selected for. In this case Dr. Tishkoff had clearly defined the driving force, he said.

The mutations Dr. Tishkoff detected are not in the lactase gene itself but a nearby region of the DNA that controls the activation of the gene. The finding that different ethnic groups in East Africa have different mutations is one instance of their varied evolutionary history and their exposure to many different selective pressures, Dr. Tishkoff said.

“There is a lot of genetic variation between groups in Africa, reflecting the different environments in which they live, from deserts to tropics, and their exposure to very different selective forces,” she said.

People in different regions of the world have evolved independently since dispersing from the ancestral human population in northeast Africa 50,000 years ago, a process that has led to the emergence of different races. But much of this differentiation at the level of DNA may have led to the same physical result.

As Dr. Tishkoff has found in the case of lactose tolerance, evolution may use the different mutations available to it in each population to reach the same goal when each is subjected to the same selective pressure. “I think it’s reasonable to assume this will be a more general paradigm,” Dr. Pritchard said.

Human Origin Lab

The species talked about in this article are the one's talked about in our human origin lab! Find out more about the Genus-Paranthropus and Homo here!

An upright hominid that lived side by side with direct ancestors of modern humans more than a million years ago had a far more diverse diet than once believed, clouding the notion that it was driven to extinction by its picky eating habits as the African continent dried, says a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

The new study shows that Paranthropus robustus, once thought to be a "chewing machine" specializing in tough, low-quality vegetation, instead had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals, said CU-Boulder anthropology Assistant Professor Matt Sponheimer. The findings cast doubt on the idea that its extinction more than 1 million years ago was linked to its diet, he said.
Paranthropus was part of a line of close human relatives known as australopithecines that includes the famous Ethiopian fossil Lucy that lived over 3 million years ago. Lucy is regarded by many anthropologists as the matriarch of modern humans.
"One line of Lucy's children ultimately led to modern humans while the other was an evolutionary dead end," he said. "Since we have now shown Paranthropus was flexible in its eating habits over both short and long intervals, we probably need to look to other biological, cultural or social differences to explain its ultimate fate."

A paper on the subject appears in the Nov. 10 issue of Science. Co-authors include the University of Utah's Benjamin Passey and Thure Cerling, Texas A&M University's Darryl de Ruiter, Ohio State University's Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and Julia Lee-Thorp of the University of Bradford in Bradford, England.

Roughly 2.5 million years ago, the australopithecines are thought to have split into the genus Homo -- which produced modern Homo sapiens -- and the genus Paranthropus, Sponheimer said. Paranthropus stood about four feet tall and probably weighed less than 100 pounds, and its pelvis and leg structure indicate it was bipedal. Although the brain to body-size ratio in Paranthropus robustus is slightly larger than that of chimpanzees, "Paranthropus was not a mental giant," Sponheimer said.

The researchers used a technique called laser ablation to examine teeth from four individuals collected from the Swartkrans site in South Africa which contain isotopes of carbon absorbed from food during each hominid's lifetime. Since trees, shrubs and bushes produce a different carbon isotope signal than grasses and sedges, the team was able to determine that Paranthropus was often dramatically altering its diet over periods ranging from months to years.

"This is the first study to paint a portrait of an early hominid eating its way across a varied landscape," Sponheimer said. "None of us involved in the study dreamed Paranthropus would have had such a variable diet over thousands of years, much less in just a few months time."

Sponheimer speculated some Paranthropus individuals were moving back and forth between forested areas rich in fruits to a savanna and grassland landscape, perhaps along sedge-rich waterways. Since there also is evidence of year-to-year diet variation in the teeth, the team speculated the movements of Paranthropus may have been based to some degree on rainfall-related food variability, including the onset of droughts which can cause individuals to consume foods not normally preferred.

"We've never before been able to see dietary change within a single individual's lifetime," Sponheimer said. "It's like having a motion picture running over months and years instead of just having one still image."
Swartkrans is a renowned early hominid cave site containing remains of both Paranthropus robustus and early members of the genus Homo, he said. The cave is of high interest to archaeologists because it contains both bone and stone tools used by early hominids -- including bone digging sticks thought to have been used to obtain termites or tubers -- as well as one of the earliest known records of fire. The site contains animal bones burned at temperatures consistent with controlled fires.
While anthropologists are confident that the varied diet of early homo species -- including meats and a wide variety of plant species -- helped to propel the line into a successful run on Earth that continues today, the notion that an overly specialized diet doomed Paranthropus to extinction in a changing environment is now in doubt, he said.

So what ultimately led to the end of the line for Paranthropus? It could well have been direct competition with Homo -- which was becoming skilled in extensive bone and stone technology -- or it could have been a variety of other issues, including a slower reproductive rate for Paranthropus than for Homo, he said.
"One thing I do believe is that we need to seriously re-think the reason behind the ultimate fate of Paranthropus," said Sponheimer. "This 'who done it' or 'what done it' mystery is not likely to be resolved any time soon."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation in South Africa and the University of Colorado at Boulder Dean's Fund.

Female Remains In Graveyards Reflect War In Pre-Hispanic New Mexico

Raiding For Women?

An important new archaeological study from the December issue of Current Anthropology is the first to document interregional movement of women in the pre-Hispanic Southwest. Using an analysis of grave sites, the researchers found more female remains during periods of political influence, providing an interesting insight into the ways warfare may contribute the local archaeological record.

"Warfare is common in small- and intermediate-scale societies all over the world, now and in prehistory. Capturing women was often either a goal, or a by-product, of such conflict," says archaeologist Tim Kohler (Washington State University), who authored the study with Kathryn Kramer Turner (U.S. Forest Service).
Analyzing data on 1,353 human remains from grave sites, Kohler and Kramer Turner found unexpectedly high ratios of female-to-male remains in the majestic 11th-century ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and a related 13th-century site to the north called Aztec, which are among the most famous pre-Hispanic sites in North America.

The researchers note that many sites from the same time period in the Mesa Verde region in Southwest Colorado -- just north of the Aztec site -- contain fewer women than they should. This imbalance may be the result of non-coercive movement, such as women migrating toward elites or the recruitment of women as specialized producers of prized items, such as jewelry or pottery. However, the apparent excesses of women coincide with a period of high young adult mortality, which indicates violence.

"Given the mirror symmetry of their sex ratios in the 1200s and the elevated death rates among young people in both areas, we suggest that societies in the Totah (which encompasses the Aztec site) obtained these women from Northern San Juan societies to the northwest through raiding and abduction," write the authors.
Excavations near the site of Aztec also revealed that some women in the Aztec's region were not buried in the usual respectful manner. Many of the women's remains also bear marks of abuse.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics. For more information, see: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA

Timothy A. Kohler and Kathryn Kramer Turner. "Raiding for Women in the Pre-Hispanic Northern Pueblo Southwest?" Current Anthropology 47:6.

Applied Anthropology blog

Culture Matters

Much like the CHOCD blog, Culture Matters chronicles articles, studies, and other recent events that involve culture. They are concerned with applied anthropology in particular. The main contributors are Pal Nyiri and Jovan Maud. Pal believes that applied anthropology can be used "to build safeguards into systems in which the idea of “culture” is often hijacked, leading to flawed and even harmful interventions." Jovan notes that "the discipline is increasingly being applied in ‘non-traditional’ areas" such as product design and marketing. Both contributors and the blog are associated with Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia

A visitor to Culture Matters will find everything from Microsoft's take on anthropology to the Native Hawaiians' protests to stop the genetic alteration of the sacred taro plant.

'Lucy's baby' found in Ethiopia

BBC

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy". Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature.

They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor. Juvenile Australopithecus afarensis remains are vanishingly rare.
The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones.

"The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about Australopithecus afarensis and other early hominins, because the fossil evidence was not there," said dig leader Zeresenay Alemseged, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Delicate bones

The find consists of the whole skull, the entire torso and important parts of the upper and lower limbs. CT scans reveal unerupted teeth still in the jaw, a detail that makes scientists think the individual may have been about three years old when she died.

This puts afarensis in a special position to play a pivotal role in the story of what we are and where we come from Zeresenay Alemseged, Max Planck Institute. Remarkably, some quite delicate bones not normally preserved in the fossilisation process are also present, such as the hyoid, or tongue, bone. The hyoid bone reflects how the voice box is built and perhaps what sounds a species can produce.

Judging by how well it was preserved, the skeleton may have come from a body that was quickly buried by sediment in a flood, the researchers said. "In my opinion, afarensis is a very good transitional species for what was before four million years ago and what came after three million years," Dr Alemseged told BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh.

"[The species had] a mixture of ape-like and human-like features. This puts afarensis in a special position to play a pivotal role in the story of what we are and where we come from."

Climbing ability

This early ancestor possessed primitive teeth and a small brain but it stood upright and walked on two feet. There is considerable argument about whether the Dikika girl could also climb trees like an ape.
This climbing ability would require anatomical equipment like long arms, and the "Lucy" species had arms that dangled down to just above the knees. It also had gorilla-like shoulder blades which suggest it could have been skilled at swinging through trees.

But the question is whether such features indicate climbing ability or are just "evolutionary baggage".
The Dikika girl had an estimated brain size of 330 cubic centimetres when she died, which is not very different from that of a similarly aged chimpanzee. However, when compared to the adult afarensis values, it forms 63 - 88% of the adult brain size.

This is lower than that of an adult chimp, where by the age of three, over 90% of the brain is formed. This relatively slow brain growth in the Dikika girl appears to be slightly closer to that of humans.
Slow, gradual development in an extended childhood is regarded as a very human trait - probably to enable our higher functions to develop.

Professor Fred Spoor of University College London said the find would give scientists a "detailed insight into how our distant relatives grew up and behaved... at a time of human evolution when they looked a good deal more like bipedal chimpanzees than like us."

Dr Jonathan Wynn of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues at the University of South Florida dated the sediments surrounding the remains and came up with an age of 3.3 million years.
The "Lucy" skeleton, discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974 belongs to the same species as the Dikika girl. For more than 20 years it was the oldest human ancestor known to science.

Buchanan Argues For Immigration Moratorium To Preserve White Dominance

from think progress

In his new book, State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan argues for “an immediate moratorium on all immigration.” Why? To preserve the dominance of the white race in America. Buchanan explains on pg. 11:

America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
Indeed, Buchanan argues quite explicitly that only whites have the appropriate “genetic endowments” to keep America from collapsing. From pg. 164:

In 1994, Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times…volunteered this thought:
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted by a different people.”
Had Francis said this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievements of the West for Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bounds of tolerance. He was summarily fired.
Buchanan goes on to praise those who, implicitly or explicitly, talk about the genetic superiority of the white race, including John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves, Bell Curve authors Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, and Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (Campanis said that blacks “may not have the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.” He added that blacks were often poor swimmers “because they don’t have the buoyancy.”)
Buchanan calls Francis views on white racial superiority the “Great Taboo.” But refusing to acknowledge it, according to Buchanan, is “like not telling one’s doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you.”
Buchanan has been showered with attention from cable and network television to spread his book’s message.