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How Fast to Australia?

And other sci-tems. The superlative anthroblogger John Hawks taps us into the issue of whether the earliest colonization of Oz was a matter of accidental vegetation* or if they strapped bits of wood together and paddled, 60,000-plus years ago. Meanwhile, in Watson news: 

A couple of anthropologists on the Watson controversy: Hawks and Dienekes. Upshot, PC CYA non-science vs. potentially relevant inquiry. Here’s a Watson roundup.

Whoa, re all of that, it’d be interesting to see how this could play into that debate: Genetic vs. language diversity and the relationship between cognates and Y chromosomes.

In other sci-business:

Deep-voiced men reproduce more.

Bipedalism: on getting upright very early.

Hawks with a quick primer on the latest of Neanderthal gene sequencing; some of his beefs about that; whether ’Thals had language or not; whether they were modern humans; what is a modern human. Good read if you like that kind of thing though it gets a little technical for your average Neanderthal like me.

Yuks vs. Creationism.

Clickable table of elements. That’s cool. Last two h/t Dennehy the Evilutionary Biologist, whose response to being tagged in an animal meme is here.  Pointed-headed scientist tags with take you all kinds of places.  Here’s a couple of intellectual blogger tags.

OK, I’ve done my bit to advance the cause of science this morning.

* Sort of like what happens when you start watching TV and forget to stop, only this involves being swept out to sea. I’m not expert but it seems unlikely to me that this kind of accident would happen with sufficient regularity to allow population of distant island, unless these people were singularly accident-prone.  

( Disclosure: I am descended from people who strapped bits of wood together, or had others do it for them, and took their own good time getting to Australia at various times 100 to 150 years ago.  Primarily use of vegetation involved hops, barley, etc., sale of same.  Also, notably, propensity of some Crittenden forebears to cash out the going concern of the moment and veg out for a while on an ocean liner headed to Oz from Old Blighty or back.)   

Topics: anthronerdism, science, academia, Neanderthals, apes

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:50 am on Saturday, October 20, 2007

One Response to “How Fast to Australia?”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   October 20th, 2007 at 11:18 am

   Whenever you post one of these articles, I get mired for hours following all the links. I don’t advocate making pets of wild animals (but in this case it’s apparently already been done), but I find myself wanting one of these, if only for their pretty blue eyes.

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