-
There's a town of Jaquith in Mississippi, apparently. "Town" is kind of a strong word. Let's go with "intersection."
-
Lucy is 3.2M years old. Meet Ardi. She's 4.4M years old, also from Ethiopia, but much taller (four feet, rather than three) and much heavier (120 pounds, rather than 60). Most exciting, she walked upright, despite the lack of savannah, which is evidence against the theory that we took to standing upright in order to see predators lurking in the tall grasses. Ardi is much too developed to be our common ancestor with apes; the paucity of African fossils from 6-7M years ago has prevented such a specimen from yet being found.
Comments are closed.
http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en&q=Jaquith,+Mississippi
Waldo to Jaquith is about a 700 mile, 12 hour journey. Who knew?
Well the link was suppose to be from Waldo, Florida to Jaquith, Mississippi
“she walked upright, despite the lack of savannah, which is evidence against the theory…”
I find this to be an uncompelling interpretation of scant evidence. One of these hominids happened to die in the woods. That says nothing about how or where they evolved in the previous 50,000 years or so. I’ve heard of very complete skeletons of deer being found at the bottoms of long drops deep inside of caves but nobody is suggesting that deer evolved in caves. There is way more physical evidence of how deer evolved than of early hominids, but you get the idea.
Ardi is a neat specimen, but I have not seen anything yet about Ardi that poses a serious challenge to the conventional view of how early hominids split off from the primates that would later become apes, or how those hominids developed into modern humans.
Jack,
I don’t think that the “scant evidence” is that she died in the woods. There are features of the bones in the feet and hands that led scientists to believe that she both walked upright when on the ground, but quadrupedally in the trees.
I can’t access the Times article, but here’s one from NatGeo.
Also, she was surrounded by something like three dozen other (much less complete) specimens.
I suspect that I won’t ever be making the Waldo -> Jaquith trip. :)
There’s a Meri, Uganda. Also one in the Phillipines. Nothing near the US, though.
I wonder how they pronounce it. Once the original Jaquith was no longer around to correct people, I suspect it was corrupted to “JACK-with”.
About 35 miles from Clarksdale MS, where I spent the summers of ’63 and ’64 as a kid living with relatives. It was a very tumultuous time to be there, and educational without the need for book learnin’. Wish I could say it was also fun.