Australopithecus deyiremeda
May 28, 2015 11:01 AM   Subscribe

 
Fascinating photo gallery of the Woranso-Mille site in Ethiopia. Amazingly (to me, anyway), 90% of the fossils they find are just lying there on the ground.
posted by theodolite at 11:11 AM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


An interview with the Dr. on general subjects about being a curator answered my unspoken question that he's not related to former Emperor Haile-Selassie, but that Ethiopians use a patronymic system.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:24 AM on May 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


Two thoughts: WOW, that is amazing; and WOW that is a whole lot of very hard work.
posted by rtha at 11:58 AM on May 28, 2015


There's a great photo in that gallery from the field site of a guy, standing in a field of pebbles that stretches to the horizon, pointing at the one pebble that actually happens to be a hominid tooth. That is some impressive visual acuity and patience.
posted by echo target at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Dr. Ward said that the evidence gathered so far points to a much earlier explosion of hominid diversity. “It changes our view of human evolution in a fundamental way,” she said.

It is a bit unsettling that the scientific "view of human evolution" seems to be based on such scant evidence that it can change "in a fundamental way" through the discovery of a single fragment of bone or the partial remains of a single tool.
posted by three blind mice at 12:48 PM on May 28, 2015


At least it can change.
posted by Rumple at 12:53 PM on May 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


I love the guy with the Kalashnikov in the group photo holding the Cleveland Museum of Natural History poster.
posted by resurrexit at 12:59 PM on May 28, 2015


Oh man this female baboon and her mummified infant made me really sad: http://www.homininsatwork.com/woranso-mille-in-the-field-photo-gallery/zbvp4at4qydamml107qofol5mb61ga
posted by bigstace at 1:05 PM on May 28, 2015


It is a bit unsettling that the scientific "view of human evolution" seems to be based on such scant evidence that it can change "in a fundamental way" through the discovery of a single fragment of bone or the partial remains of a single tool.

Any solid physical evidence has to be accounted for, so it only takes one fragment that's not predicted by the current theory to require that theory to change. Though I suspect what an anthropologist means by a 'fundamental change' is much less dramatic than what laypeople might think. Think more like 'this species diverged from that one a hundred million years earlier than we thought', not 'turns out we evolved from lizards'.

Actually, I think it's great that people are willing to change the theory to fit the facts. It's a sign that they're looking for the true answers, not defending dogma. So often, in so many fields, it goes the other way.
posted by echo target at 1:23 PM on May 28, 2015 [9 favorites]


This might be an exciting find, but I'll withhold at least some of the excitement for now. Natural variations within the afarensis population seems to me a potentially more sound read of the new fossils. It's been years since I followed the field, though, so maybe there's a broader consensus in support of the "bushy tree" model today than I remember.

There's a great photo in that gallery from the field site of a guy, standing in a field of pebbles that stretches to the horizon, pointing at the one pebble that actually happens to be a hominid tooth. That is some impressive visual acuity and patience.

As a former archaeologist, I always found it amazing how my eyes adapted to be able to pick out the one piece of tiny ceramic in a sea of similar-colored rocks, or the one otolith in a bucket full of oyster shells. That ability sadly fades when you stop doing it... (Although I still walk with my eyes on the ground wherever I go, and I find all kinds of cool things that I'd likely have missed otherwise.)
posted by gemmy at 2:39 PM on May 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


It is a bit unsettling that the scientific "view of human evolution" seems to be based on such scant evidence that it can change "in a fundamental way" through the discovery of a single fragment of bone or the partial remains of a single tool.

I'm an evolutionary anthropologist. Comments given to the press are almost invariably exaggerated to make paleoanthropology sound cool and hopefully convince Congress to keep funding our research. I don't mean to undermine the importance of this new find -- it's great, and people are excited about it -- but it certainly doesn't upend our understanding of human evolution. Nobody is particularly shocked by this discovery. We already knew that hominins at different time periods lived contemporaneously, we just didn't have hard skeletal evidence of it this far back in time.

Even so, one of the best and most exciting things about studying human evolution is that we are still constantly making new discoveries. I love it! The science is constantly shifting based on new evidence. Which is, of course, how science should be done.
posted by baby beluga at 6:37 PM on May 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


It is a bit unsettling that the scientific "view of human evolution" seems to be based on such scant evidence that it can change "in a fundamental way" through the discovery of a single fragment of bone or the partial remains of a single tool.

This is the same guy who found Ardi. There were people at Kent State working on that, and people I knew around here who were academically interested in that kind of thing had a degree of interest in that girl's feet normally reserved for fetish websites, I swear to god. Probably not helped by the fact that the findings took an epic amount of time to get released, but... some people just find their work very exciting. This isn't fundamental like "did we evolve or were we created last Thursday". This is fundamental like, well, per the article, "The new species is the most conclusive evidence for the contemporaneous presence of more than one closely related early human ancestor species prior to 3 million years ago. "

For some people, tooth enamel and contemporaneous existence of related-but-different hominids is a bigger deal than others. You're thinking about this like we're all grade-schoolers just learning to add and we just discovered multiplication. That's one kind of fundamental. The actual mathematicians, on the other hand, are making their big discoveries about stuff like the spacing of consecutive prime numbers. That's a different kind of fundamental. Actually, I think it's arguable that the more the experts seem to think it's a really big deal, the smaller the chance that the rest of us will be as amazed. That's when the media gets silly and we get the God Particle kind of nonsense.
posted by Sequence at 7:20 PM on May 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


but it certainly doesn't upend our understanding of human evolution. Nobody is particularly shocked by this discovery. We already knew that hominins at different time periods lived contemporaneously, we just didn't have hard skeletal evidence of it this far back in time.

I'm not making any judgement about it; I was just quoting the article.

Dr. Ward said that the evidence gathered so far points to a much earlier explosion of hominid diversity. “It changes our view of human evolution in a fundamental way,” she said.

Again that one bone fragment, according to an expert in the field, "changes our view of human evolution in a fundamental way" suggests pretty strongly to me that "our views" (i.e., the views of experts) are based on spotty and incomplete evidence.
posted by three blind mice at 1:56 AM on May 29, 2015


"Spotty and incomplete evidence" is a fantastic way to describe the fossil record.

Always excited when we find out something likeep this!
posted by chaiminda at 3:11 AM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


The evidence is skeletal in more ways than one, but I have no problem with that, and as mentioned above the "fundamental" to an expert is often meaningless to a lay person (scientists may care that something is dated to 2 million years ago, from 3 million say, but to the lay person it remains "a hell-of-a long time ago").

I like Chris Addison's line in 'Civilization' where he, tongue-in-cheek, states that all archaeologists can really tell us is that all ancient people were skeletons that lived underground.
posted by Gratishades at 3:34 AM on May 29, 2015


I'm not making any judgement about it; I was just quoting the article.

Sure, and I was trying to recontextualize Dr. Ward's comments -- making the point that this find doesn't actually change anything particularly fundamental.

That said, the hominin fossil record is absolutely fragmentary; we're missing huge chunks of evidence -- meaningful postcranial remains for Homo habilis, for example -- but this often seems to be interpreted by laypeople (I am not accusing anyone here) as "we don't know anything" or "scientists are just making it all up." That's not true; we do know many things, but new fossil finds add to our knowledge, and the field as a whole shifts over time to accommodate new information. This is how science works.
posted by baby beluga at 5:59 AM on May 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


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