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Anthropology

Lately, I have been asked about what I believed in, and if I had any religious views. I always say, "I believe in science. I believe in having experiments that can be recreated to find the truth of the natural world. I believe in gravity. I would like to believe things happen for a reason, or that there is a meant-to-be but I don't."

I am not having a good time right now, a series of really unfortunate things have happened, and in that mist of sadness, I do wonder if religion could possibly give me solace. I wonder if this is time to turn to God, as the pain and circumstance seems so outside of myself, and I am not big enough to deal with. I finally understand that "life is bitterness" as the Chinese says, because sometimes no matter how you try, you cannot control the outcome of what you worked so hard to achieve. Peace of mind does not come, the right decision is not easy, and even if you did your best you can be disappointed because we have no control of others, and we do not have control of nature. We might be able to destroy it, but we cannot stop it from appearing when it does.

So I wonder about god quite often. I wonder about going to Church for more than the music and atmosphere. I wonder that if I just let myself go, I can tell myself "this is what is meant to be," but I know better. I know that it didn't have to turn out this way. If humans had more control, foresight, the ability to think ahead, if they could go beyond their myopic emotion of that moment, how I would feel right now would be different. How my life would have turned out would be different, and what I looked forward to and planned would still be here, so I think maybe I should just allow myself to be anesthetized by the comfort of religion or belief, and let go of what I do believe in, maybe just for this moment, maybe for the rest of my life.

Then I came across this clip where Naturalist Sir David Attenborough discusses his lack of religious belief, how he believes in nature and I remember that's all I believe in too. Maybe that's how people feel when the find god, when the word is spoken, they find relief to be reminded of what they do believe in again when they have lost their way. Watching it, reminded me I am an atheist, I believe in science, and that used to help me through the day. Maybe tomorrow I can look at the sky and mountain and think of the science of how it all came to be, eel awe and wonder and solace simply because it's there, and I live in a time when I can understand them in ways that was not possible before.

From Independent Online..

"For scientists like Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University in the US, Selam is "a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history". The chief surprise is that her shoulder blades and arms still look like those of a gorilla. There is now hot debate over whether they are just useless evolutionary baggage or a sign that 3.3 million years ago Selam and her family were still swinging.

If they were, then the most popular theory of why humans stood up is challenged, says Desmond Morris, the zoologist who studies human behaviour. This theory says they did it because they had learned to use their hands for making tools and weapons but still needed to get around. "If Selam is significant and not an oddity, that means bipedalism came first. So there must have been a different reason for it."

But he warns against drawing too many conclusions. "People end up basing their idea of an entire species on a little girl's skeleton. There's a man in the Guinness World Records who is eight feet tall. If you found him, and only him, in three million years' time what would you think we had been?"....

"This is a stunning discovery," said Martin Meredith, author of The State of Africa, "but it does not change the picture of human evolution. What we're doing now is filling in the pieces." For him and many other observers, one of the most significant things about Selam is the identity of the man who discovered her. Desmond Morris agrees. "It is wonderful news," he said. "There is still a colonial and imperial flavour to anthropology - virtually all the discoveries are made by Europeans and Americans who go out to these remote places with the help of the locals, who also do the digging. So the fact that Selam was discovered by an African leading a team in his own backyard is brilliant."

Human Evolution: An exclusive interview with the man who discovered the oldest child in the world"

(This month's National Geographic was good as well. The article was a bit short, but it had some interesting facts that I hadn't read anywhere else.)

Anthropology

I really wanted the Homo floriensis to be real!!

But there are contrary findings by different scientists. This is the most fair and detailed article I have read so far...

So far the results are inconclusive.....

A Huge Fight over a Little Man

Selam is the newest find to help us on working out a hypothesis based on fossil record how we humans came to be. With the upper body that can climb trees, she also can walk on two feet. This is an amazing find. In fact she is an example of the "missing link," that anthropologists talks about.

What is the missing link? Mainly due to the lack of any proof, we don't know what happenned between being and ape and being a human, although scientists have been speculating for a long while. Selam is the first "real" example of a fossil that has all the characteristics of what is "believed" "could" be the way we came about. Which is "we" lived in trees and slowly developed bi-pedalism allowing our ancestors who walk further and further away from forest areas into savanna planes. This helped us continue to exist and spread around the globe, especially during the earth becoming increasingly dry.

Yahoo News on Anthropology