Adolf Hitler's skull - THE WEEK

Adolf Hitler's skull - THE WEEK: "'The histories of Hitler's death may need to be rewritten,' said Uki Goni in Britain's The Guardian. Soviet intelligence preserved a bullet-punctured skull fragment dug up in the charred remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker as proof that the Nazi leader killed himself as the Soviet army entered Berlin at the end of World War II. But Uni versity of Connecticut bone specialist Nick Bellantoni says he has tested a DNA sample from the skull—and it belonged to a 30-something woman.

Cue the conspiracy theorists, said Tom Chivers in Britain's Telegraph. 'Rumors of Hitler’s survival have been widespread for years,' and Bellantoni's bombshell should give even the 'strangest theories' new life. Among them: Hitler fled Germany on a 'ghost convoy' to Argentina, or he fled to Antarctica in a U-boat. Here's where 'Hitler conspiracy theories lose touch with reality altogether'—some say he used secret rocket technology to fly to a Nazi base on the moon.

The people rushing to embrace the idea that Adolf Hitler didn't really kill himself in his bunker, said Duncan Riley in The Inquisitr, would delight 'the deluded mind of Josef Stalin, who didn’t accept that Hitler had died and dispatched a second mission in 1946 that looked for evidence to back up the suicide story.' But it's important to remember that 'this latest revelation doesn’t prove the story of Hitler’s suicide is false, all it proves is that the Red Army basically f---ed up' and never collected Hitler's skull fragment in the first place."

Ardi and the human family tree - THE WEEK looks more closely at the newest member of our family tree.....

Ardi and the human family tree - THE WEEK:

"Move over, “Lucy,” said Larry Dignan in ZDNet. The “fabled” 3.2 million-year-old fossil was “bumped” out of “science’s limelight” Thursday by Ardi—or Ardipithecus ramidus—an earlier human ancestor from Ethiopia’s Afar desert, dating back 4.4 million years. Ardi and her peers represent a middle stage in human evolution, which, surprisingly, was “more modern” than today’s apes and chimpanzees.

That’s important, because for a long time evolutionary biologists thought of chimps as “time machines,” said Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post, or a view into what our common ancestor with apes looked like. But Ardi would be a step back for both humans and chimps, a “sort of hybrid” hominid who mostly lived in trees but also walked upright—“if the scientists are correct,” that is. “Human origins is a field with high stakes and small bones.”

And the bones to this “new alleged missing link” were so fragmented and delicate, said Casey Luskin in the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views, that it took the team of scientists and “reconstructionists” 15 years to put Ardi together. So pardon my “initial reaction of skepticism” to their “Rosetta stone”–level claims.

There’s room for skepticism about whether Ardi was a biped, said Jamie Shreeve in National Geographic, but not about her importance to the field of human evolution. Assuming Ardi did walk on two legs, though, there’s a “provocative theory” as to why: sex.

In that scenario, males shifted from fighting each other for mates to a “‘food for sex’ contract” model in which they earned sex by bringing home food—and you need free hands to carry food.

FD: Note that the pelvis was not in good shape and now there are sceptics that think that Arti was not all that UP RIGHT in posture. Part of the arguement is in her feet! However, the teeth are very telling and put Arti on our limb of the tree of life.

Elderly Moving Against Obamacare - Leave my Medicare Alone!

Elderly Moving Against Obamacare:
By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

America's elderly are finally realizing that President Barack Obama's healthcare changes are largely financed by cuts in Medicare and are rallying against his proposals in increasing numbers.
The latest poll by Scott Rasmussen not only shows national opposition to Obamacare rising — now it is 41 percent to 56 percent against — but also shows the elderly moving against it even more strongly by 33-59 or almost 2-1."

Decision Tree for Solving the Toyota Floormat Problem until your car is recalled....or, you can just remove the driver's floormats.

Eye of a Needle Art Forms - Buzz Aldrin

Major Miniaturist Makes Art That Comes With Its Own Microscope - WSJ.com: "Mr. Wigan, a 52-year-old Briton, is dyslexic and did poorly in school. Even today, he can barely read or write. Yet, he creates some of the smallest sculptures in the world, relying on nothing more than a scalpel and a microscope to see what he's carving.
His entire piece of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon fits on the head of a pin. His Statue of Liberty is made from a speck of gold. A recent carving of the Obama family is mounted inside the eye of a needle. Mr. Wigan says he used an eyelash to insert the president into the right slot. Mr. Wigan has made about 160 of these sculptures."

X Ray and R Rated views of Arti

Story Highlights

•Researchers have unveiled a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a hominid female

•The fossil, nicknamed Ardi, may be the oldest hominid skeleton ever found

•It replaces Lucy, a much-publicized skeleton that dates back about 3 million years

•Scientists: Ardi suggests humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor

ardipithecus ramidus · Ardi ... Lucy move over...

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

An international research team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled remains from 36 males, females and young of an ancient prehuman species called Ardipithecus ramidus, unearthed in the Awash region of Ethiopia since 1994. The creatures take their scientific name from the word for root in the local Afar language.

"It is not a chimp and it is not human," said Dr. White. "It gives us a new perspective on our origins."

Already, the discoveries have experts reworking the human pedigree. "They are extraordinary fossils," said anthropologist Alan Walker at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn't part of the project. They undoubtedly will shape debates about human origins for years to come, as scholars argue whether these creatures should be counted among our most ancient direct ancestors or cataloged as an intriguing dead-end.

"There are going to be generations of dissertations based on this," said Carol Ward, an independent expert on ancient anatomy at the University of Missouri Columbia.

Documented in 11 research papers to be published Friday in the journal Science, the fossils offer a detailed look at a species of sturdy, small-brained creatures that dwelled in an ancient African glade of hackberry, fig and palm trees, by a river that long ago turned to stone. Despite their antiquity, their bodies were already starting to presage humanity, the scientists said.

Indeed, unlike apes and chimps, they had supple wrists, strong thumbs, flexible fingers and power-grip palms shaped to grasp objects like sticks and stones firmly. They were primed for tool use, even though it would be another two million years or so before our ancestors began to fashion the first stone blades, choppers and axes.

But they were still evolving the ability to walk upright, with a big toe better suited for grasping branches than stepping smartly along, an analysis of their anatomy shows. They made their home in the woods, not on the open savannah grasslands long considered the main arena of human development. Yet their upright posture, distinctive pelvis and other toes suggest they walked easily enough. Most importantly, they showed no sign they walked on their knuckles, as contemporary chimps and apes do.

"They are not what one would have predicted," said anthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University. Although the differences between humans, apes and chimps today are legion, we all shared a common ancestor six million years or so ago. These fossils suggest that creature–still undiscovered--resembled a chimp much less than researchers have always believed.

In fact, so many traits in chimps and apes today are missing in these early hominids that researchers now question the notion that modern chimps and apes embody vestiges of our primate past, retaining primitive traits once shared by our ancestors. "We all thought the ancestral animal would look more like a chimp," explained Yale University anthropologist Andrew Hill.

Instead, the new finds show that what seems most ancient about nonhuman primates today–such as canine fangs, long limbs with hooked fingers meant for swinging through trees and hands designed for knuckle-walking--may actually be the product of more recent development, the researchers said.

"It is the chimps and gorillas that have been evolving like crazy in terms of limbs and locomotion, not hominids," said Kent State University anthropologist Owen Lovejoy, a senior scientist on the research team. "We took a different tack. We went social."

The project began with the discovery of a single tooth. But it soon grew into arguably the most comprehensive effort in the field of hominid studies, involving 47 scientists world-wide, as scores of unusually fragile and shattered specimens emerged from the rock. The skull, for example, was in so many pieces it had to be reconstructed digitally, requiring hundreds of CAT scans and 1,000 hours of computer processing. The pelvis alone took six years to reconstruct.

"We took enormous flak" for spending so much time analyzing the fossils, said Dr. Lovejoy. "We wanted to get it right and people had to wait until it was right.'

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com