So I was reading a fascinating story on the BBC website on the discovery of a WHOLE NEW HUMANOID SPECIES that lived in South Africa up to three million years ago. The new species, named homo naledi, may have even been the first in the genus homo. The first of us!
Reading about the discovery of the homo naledi skeletons themselves, I came across this unexpected detail. The scientists who literally went into the caves where the bones were found all had something in common:
Small women were chosen because the tunnel was so narrow. They crawled through darkness lit only by their head torches on a precarious 20 minute-long journey to find a chamber containing hundreds of bones.
Here they are:
I mention this because so many of the doofuses I write about on this blog simply assume that male bodies are physically superior to those of women — larger, able to lift heavier objects, and so forth — and so, in their minds, men must have done all the important work in human history (and prehistory), from hunting the proverbial mammoth to building the pyramids to mowing the lawn.
But not all jobs — even the very physical ones — require the brute strength of a big burly man. Especially if the burly men in question literally can’t fit in the tunnel.
I can’t remember where I read it (here, probably), but wasn’t it proven that it was another #GamerGater?
@SFHC It was an internet claim so it was inconclusive – I think on 8chan?
However, I did read that a Gator claimed to have done it because the panel was going down in flames – which of course only broadened my smile.
Does anyone else wonder if Roosh or one of his followers had something to do with the U of T threats?
I mean didn’t he post an article recently, right after his Canadian tour about it only being a matter of time before someone kills a feminist?
How important is it for him to be right and proove
Aghhh!
I hit post by mistake.
…and proove that feminism is dangerous for society, or something like that
Well, okay. This is certainly an interesting find, and hooray for these women anthropologists who worked so hard to bring this discovery to the public eye.
However, though, one thing: I’m afraid I can’t help but be *majorly* skeptical about the mainstream scientific community’s early conclusions about this being a likely early human *ancestor*-the features of the reconstructed model are a little too distinct for that theory to be quite 100% plausible(that, and there’s been several other finds that’ve been touted as such, too, only for none of them to have panned out); it seems much more believable, to me, at least, that this was more of a close evolutionary cousin instead.
@kat
@Alan Robertshaw
The interests of Rupert Murdoch and his former right-hand woman, Rebekah Wade Brooks, are one and the same, so of course he’s stuck up for her.
Rupert Murdoch owned News of the World when it hacked into phones. Once the scandal broke, he shut down the paper, putting almost 300 people out of work.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/02/rebekah-brooks-201202
He owns Fox News, and they lie all the time. Just one example:
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/23/fox_news_denial_is_pathological_race_guns_and_the_lies_the_network_tells_itself_partner/
He owns the Sun, which is virulently right wing. Liverpool residents boycott the paper because of its lies about Liverpool football fans. The Sun claimed that when fans at a football match in 1989 were crushed in an accident, Liverpool fans urinated on them and stole their wallets–a pack of lies.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/13/billy-bragg-never-buy-the-sun
And now Mr. Murdoch, noted climate change denier, owns National Geographic, which funds scientists.
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/10/rupert_murdoch_just_bought_national_geographic_heres_the_problem_everybody_should_be_talking_about/
I don’t see that Mr. Murdoch is a friend to anyone. He’s trying to get all of us–and possibly the planet we live on–killed.
Oh, not cool. I mean about the Rupert Murdoch buying National Geographic. I heard about it on a comedy radio show I was half-listening to (“we’ll keep it the same, just with more sexy pictures and less accuracy” or something) and I thought the news itself was fake. Sure, NG seems to have a colonialist mentality sometimes, but I enjoy the photos and science news when I run across it.
And re: original story – as a short woman myself who’d be way too wimpy to crawl through caves like that, I salute the people above!
@ Kat
Yeah, but he gave Rebekah the job in the first place. This was at a time when most women in Fleet Street got stuck writing the ‘women’s section’, if they were lucky.
He pretty much had to shut the NOTW down in view of public pressure. That’s how boycotts work.
The irony of the Sun is that most of the people who worked there (Littlejohn excluded) were pretty standard London metropolitan liberals (people in journalism shift between papers all the time, so they don’t necessarily share the view of the paper); the Sun’s editorial policy was dictated by the market; hence its popularity. As the public moved to be more tolerant on things like equal marriage, the paper moved with them.
I used to do the Sun and NOTW’s legal work and I really liked Rebekah.
@SFHC
Even more paleo-catnip for you
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/13/homo-naledi-new-light-orogins-of-species