'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.

Fossils Suggest Chaotic Recovery from Mass Extinction

live science

by Andrea Thompson
Insect bite marks in ancient leaf fossils are shedding new light on how nature bounced back after an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs and much of life on Earth 65 million years ago.

Plant and insect biodiversity is strongly linked today: Where there are many types of plants, there are many insects to eat them. But after the mass extinction, the devastated plant and insect populations might not have been so in sync, according to a new study. "The recovery from a mass extinction was more interesting and chaotic than we thought," said study leader Peter Wilf, a paleontologist at Pennsylvania State University.

Clearing the slate
The demise of the dinosaurs after this event, known as the K-T extinction, later brought about a restructuring of the animal world and the rise of mammals. But it initially marked the end of the biologically rich Cretaceous period and the beginning of the more anemic Paleocene epoch. Most Paleocene fossil sites show both low numbers of plants and insects.

But scientists have discovered two sites in the western United States that show remarkable biodiversity—one in plants, and one in insects. Paleontologists looked at leaf fossils for signs of the bite marks left by different species of insects
At one site, near Denver, the fossils showed that "the plant diversity was really high—like a modern rainforest," Wilf said. "It was a big shock."

Wilf and his colleagues suspect that the plants were able to flourish because the ancient climate at the site was warm and wet. But the leaves unexpectedly showed few signs of insect predators. Wilf thinks the leaves were too hardy for insects to gnaw on. "It probably wasn't a good place for them to get started again," he said.

A new leaf...
But what really surprised paleontologists were the fossils at another site in Mexican Hat, Montana that showed just the opposite relationship. The leaf fossils found there were more typical of those discovered at other Paleocene sites. But the insect bites left on them indicated a teeming insect population.

Wilf and his team haven't found any other sites that show evidence of such a robust insect population. "We don't know where [the insects] went or where they came from," he said. Wilf believes these unusual fossil records show biodiversity recovery is more interesting than previously thought. "This may be a general pattern in the fossil record; it's certainly an interesting pattern in the fossil record," he said. "It's something that people can look for."

Skeleton Sheds Light on Ape-Man Species

My Way

By MALCOLM RITTER

NEW YORK (AP) - In a discovery sure to fuel an old debate about our evolutionary history, scientists have found a remarkably complete skeleton of a 3-year-old female from the ape-man species represented by "Lucy."

The remains found in Africa are 3.3 million years old, making this the oldest known skeleton of such a youthful human ancestor.

"It's a pretty unbelievable discovery... It's sensational," said Will Harcourt-Smith, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who wasn't involved in the find. "It provides you with a wealth of information."

For one thing, it gives new evidence for a contentious feud about whether this species, which walked upright, also climbed and moved through trees easily.

The species is Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. The most famous afarensis is Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, a creature that lived about 100,000 years after the newfound specimen.

The new find is reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany; Fred Spoor, professor of evolutionary anatomy at University College London, and others.

The skeleton was discovered in 2000 in northeastern Ethiopia. Scientists have spent five painstaking years removing the bones from sandstone, and the job will take years more to complete.

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.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime find," said Spoor.

The skeleton has been nicknamed "Selam," which means "peace" in several Ethiopian languages.

Most scientists believe afarensis stood upright and walked on two feet, but they argue about whether it had ape-like agility in trees.

That climbing ability would require anatomical equipment like long arms, and afarensis had arms that dangled down to just above the knees. The question is whether such features indicate climbing ability or just evolutionary baggage. The loss of that ability would suggest crossing a threshold toward a more human existence.

Spoor said so far, analysis of the new fossil hasn't settled the argument but does seem to indicate some climbing ability.

While the lower body is very human-like, he said, the upper body is ape-like:

_The shoulder blades resemble those of a gorilla rather than a modern human.

_The neck seems short and thick like a great ape's, rather than the more slender version humans have to keep the head stable while running.

_The organ of balance in the inner ear is more ape-like than human.

_The fingers are very curved, which could indicate climbing ability, "but I'm cautious about that," Spoor said. Curved fingers have been noted for afarensis before, but their significance is in dispute.

A big question is what the foot bones will show when their sandstone casing is removed, he said. Will there be a grasping big toe like the opposable thumb of a human hand? Such a chimp-like feature would argue for climbing ability, he said.

Yet, to resolve the debate, scientists may have to find a way to inspect vanishingly small details of such old bones, to get clues to how those bones were used in life, he said.

Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who didn't participate in the discovery, said in an interview that the fossil provides strong evidence of climbing ability. But he also agreed that it won't settle the debate among scientists, which he said "makes the Middle East look like a picnic."

Overall, he wrote in a Nature commentary, the discovery provides "a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history."

The fossil revealed just the second hyoid bone to be recovered from any human ancestor. This tiny bone, which attaches to the tongue muscles, is very chimp-like in the new specimen, Spoor said.

While that doesn't directly reveal anything about language, it does suggest that whatever sounds the creature made "would appeal more to a chimpanzee mother than a human mother," Spoor said.

The fossil find includes the complete skull, including an impression of the brain and the lower jaw, all the vertebrae from the neck to just below the torso, all the ribs, both shoulder blades and both collarbones, the right elbow and part of a hand, both knees and much of both shin and thigh bones. One foot is almost complete, providing the first time scientists have found an afarensis foot with the bones still positioned as they were in life, Spoor said.

The work was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, the Leakey Foundation and the Planck institute.

Schwarzenegger regrets 'very hot' remark

Boston Globe

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press Writer

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apologized Friday for saying in a closed-door meeting that the mixture of Hispanic and black blood gives Puerto Ricans and Cubans "very hot" personalities.

The Republican governor said he cringed when he read his own words in the Los Angeles Times story on Friday and added that the comments, referring to a GOP legislator, were not "meant to be in any negative way." Some critics were outraged, but even some Democrats said his remarks appeared to be more playful than disparaging. "Anyone out there that feels offended by those comments, I just want to say I'm sorry, I apologize," Schwarzenegger told reporters outside a seaside hotel in Santa Monica.

The statements about Hispanics and blacks were captured on a six-minute tape made during a March 3 speechwriting session between Schwarzenegger and his advisers. On it, Schwarzenegger and chief of staff Susan Kennedy speak affectionately of state Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia and speculate about her nationality. "I mean Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot," the governor says on the recording. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."

Schwarzenegger, in a tight re-election race, has displayed a more restrained, statesmanlike demeanor while all but retiring his trademark Hollywood swagger. But the newly disclosed remarks challenge that carefully managed image and provide a reminder of his history of off-the-cuff — and sometimes off-color — remarks. He once called California legislators "girlie men" and talked of kicking nurses' "butts," the kind of comments he has sought to avoid during his re-election year.

Garcia, who is Puerto Rican, appeared with Schwarzenegger on Friday and said she was not offended by the governor's comments. Garcia earlier told the Times that she often calls herself a "hot-blooded Latina."
Schwarzenegger also said he called leaders from ethnic groups, who he said were not upset.