In a rare fit of openaccessmindedness, Nature have left the content about Baby Lucy, the latest hominid (hominin? am bad anthropologist and never keep up with this renaming thing) find from Ethiopia. She’s dated at 3.3 million years, and is a 3 year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, mostly skull but with a rare amount of other skeletal material.
What I always love about the reporting of hominin finds–and other major palaeo discoveries–is that you’d think the bones had been pulled out of the ground just a couple of days ago, when in reality the team involved have been studying them for five years.
The hominin/hominid thing hasn’t reached consensus – I go with hominin because I think any group that has Pan and Gorilla in it without Homo is just silliness, but the mob who are all about grade being more meaningful than clade has stuck with hominid. What can I say? I’m a raving cladist.
Hi,
I thought I would pass on this message from Kambiz at anthropology.net in case you haven’t received it:
Hi everyone,
I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Kambiz, and I run Anthropology.net… I am in touch with some of you from time to time, but for the most part this is the first time I am contacting a lot of you.
I’m doing so because we all have blogs related to some division within Anthropology, and I want to propose a anthropology blog carnival. If you do not know what a blog carnival is, an excellent example is the Tangled Bank ( http://www.tangledbank.net/ ), which specializes in biology posts. A blog carnival operates as showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves as well as submitters. It facilitates networking and link exchange. It will generate significant amount of traffic, depending on the amount of participation, and it will expose your blog to new readers and more comments… think of it as a digital blog potluck, very informal but very impacting.
I have contacted you all to see if you are interested in participating. I do not mind starting it off and arranging and organizing each carnival. I would like a bi-weekly carnival frequency, and was wondering — for those of you interested in participating if you can help brain storm an name idea that encompasses all the factions within anthropology. The carnival will need a steady set of posts for sometime, to build readership… so we need some commitment.
I’m aiming to have the carnival up and running by the 25th of October, 2006… if all goes well.
I believe we will be successful, because we have a wide breadth of topics within anthropology and we cover them excellently between all our blogs. We all blog at different levels of expertise and can attract different sets of readers. We could potentially break up the carnival into socio-cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and bio-physical topics…
Does anyone have an questions or concerns? Any comments or criticisms on this idea? I don’t mind hosting the first carnival, but can I get several people to sign up for the next set of carnivals?
Thanks,
Kambiz
P.S. In case I missed some anthropology bloggers that maybe interested in participating, please forward them this email!