What makes you, you, better yet what makes humans, humans? school

What makes you, you, better yet what makes humans, humans?



Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. Is there a grand creator, and if so, should there not be some spark that humans retain as a result of being part of that creator, like the DNA that we share with our parents. "High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark energy, the pervasive but unidentified stuff that shapes the universe and accelerates its expansion."

Paleoanthropologys' missing mass is the unfounded fossils that record when and how our the homo(human) genus emerged.
"New findings only remind scientists that answers to so many of their questions about early Homo probably lie buried in the million-year dark age."

It is known that primitive hominids walked upright across the plains of Africa at the time of the unfounded fossils, probably members of the genus Australopithecus.(scientific name Australopithecus afarensis) You remember the Species in which Lucy came from a.k.a the missing link. Lucy was the Hominid skeleton that was discovered (40%) that showed that it was possible that Hominids like Lucy with such features not that uncommon of the features humans presently now have in a more evolved form, could be the missing link between apes and humans. Still some scientists say that she was just a "knuckle dragging ape."



Let's go back about 1.9 millions years to another Homo, Homo Habilis, or the "handy man," it had a larger brain, a more human like face teeth and stature, then those of australopithecines. The Habilis are considered to be an important place as the first of the homo genus, which presumably led to erectus and sapien, but like lucy it's still being debated. The problem is that there hasn't been enough preserved "things" to look at.

Paleoanthropologist William H. Kimbel said, "The problem is that the fossil yield has thus far been low or poorly preserved, compared to the time periods on either side of this interval." However, a succession of recent discoveries has extended evidence of hominids reaching back from three million to beyond six million years ago, close to the estimated time of the divergence of the human and chimpanzee lineages.

[Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the most experienced hunters of hominid fossils, said that his teams and several others were "pushing hard" to explore sites in Ethiopia and Kenya that may produce evidence of earlier Homo origins. Prospects are uncertain. Some prominent sites of previous hominid discoveries are underlain with lava flows and other geological barriers to digging into the deeper past.]

At present, most paleoanthropologists think a solitary upper jaw represents the likeliest candidate for a Homo from that period. In 1996 a find by Dr. Kimbel and his team was made in the Hadar badlands of Ethiopia, and get this it was actually near the site of the much earlier Lucy skeleton and on a surface with a scattering of stone tools. The 2.3-million-year-old jaw that was found was assigned to the Genus of Homo.

Dr. Kimbel remains cautious. "The Hadar jaw could represent a population of early Homo that was specifically in the ancestry of habilis," he said. "Or it could represent a stem population from which ultimately descended all of the Homo species currently known from after two million years ago."

Professor of Biological Anthropology, Alan Walker, who teaches and studies hominid anatomry at Pennsylvania State University, agreed that the jaw was apparently "the earliest direct evidence" of Homo. It shows that the individual had the short face and squared-off palate

"At a basic level, one wants to know when and where transformations occurred so one can put them into their appropriate evolutionary context," Dr. Lieberman said.

He said that that could reveal the dietary and environmental causes of species change, leading eventually to modern humans with the ambition to find their origins.

Dr. Lieberman said that he and colleagues "are relentlessly optimistic that we have all the information we need to answer our big questions, but just haven't figured out the order in which to connect the dots."

But the real problem, he added, with resignation tempering optimism, "is that the fossil record doesn't have enough dots."








REFERENCES:

Lost in a Million-Year Gap, Solid Clues to Human Origins
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD(September 18, 2007)
4th Grade History

4th Grade Science
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