anthropoid
laelaps | May 12, 2010
In the Fayum desert of northern Egypt, not too far from the banks of the Nile, the vestiges of ancient forests are preserved in the sand-covered strata. The fossils are ghosts of a vanished oasis in which prehistoric cousins of modern elephants wallowed in lush wetlands and a host of ancient primates scrambled through the trees, and despite being known as one of the world's best fossil sites for over a century paleontologists are continuing to discovery new species from the desert rock. The trouble is that not all these new species are easily classified.
Approximately 37 million years ago,…
edyong | October 21, 2009Cast your mind back to June, when a stunning fossil animal called Darwinius (alternatively Ida or "The Link") was unveiled to the world to tremendous pomp and circumstance. Hyperbolic ads declared the day of Ida's discovery as the most important for 47 million years. A press release promised that she would "change everything", headlines proclaimed her a "missing link in evolution" and the scientists behind the discovery billed her as "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor".
And according to a new study, none of that is true. Mere months later, Erik Seiffert from Stony Brook…
laelaps | October 9, 2007Category: Anthropology
As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the "Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface" conference, which was primarily a celebration of the work of Cliff Jolly. I'm still a bit over my head when it comes to knowing the full "Who's Who" of evolutionary anthropology, but I do know that Cliff Jolly is most well known for his "seed-eaters" hypothesis of human origins, in which extant baboons (Papio sp.) are proposed to be better primates to study when considering primate origins and a seed-eating diet is put forward as one of the…