Old Man of Georgia
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Pirate modeA fabulously interesting hominin skull has been found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia. It's old in two different and significant ways: the individual lived 1.77 million years ago, and he was ancient at death, almost completely toothless. He'd also been toothless for several years before death, judging by the complete resorption of the tooth sockets.
It's a touchingly human thing, that so long ago our ancestors weren't entirely brutish, but did care for the infirm to some degree.
The National Geographic has some reconstructions of this old fellow.
Carl Zimmer has a roundup of this week's hominid frenzy in Nature.
Lordkipanidze D, Vekua A, Ferring R, Rightmire GP, Agusti J, Kiladze G, Mouskhelishvili A, Nioradze M, Ponce de Leon MS, Tappen M, Zollikofer CPE (2005) The earliest toothless hominin skull. Nature 434:717-718.
This is really intriguing and quite a bit of synchronicity for me. I was just reviewing the "Ultimate Survivor" special from the National Geographic channel, and they were arguing that Turkana (Nariokotome) Boy's survival through health problems argued for altruistic care for the sick in Homo erectus. The case wasn't especially well made, but this casts new light, of course.
Consarnit, I'm getting bunches of 404s everytime I try to look at Nature full-text or PDFs today. And I really really want this and the Toumai articles, like, yesterday. Hmmm . . . I teach over the border in a red state. Perhaps the antiscience apocalypse has begun and they're denying access to Nature.