Re: Time Frame: Early Hominids

HARRY R. ERWIN (herwin@osf1.gmu.edu)
7 Apr 1995 01:56:26 GMT

The curious thing I noticed in doing parsimony analysis with hominid data
was that inclusion of stratigraphic and geographical data disguised the
character resemblences. Apparently the fossil record is sufficiently
crappy for hominids that a good deal of what we think we ->know<- about
time and geographic distribution just ain't so.

BTW, notice the report in New Scientist of evidence pushing the
colonization of Australia back to before 60000 BP. That's the earliest
evidence I know of for modern H. sapiens (i.e., the symbolic thinker and
artist). I wonder what was happening on the Sunda Shelf at that date...

--
Harry Erwin
Internet: herwin@gmu.edu
Doctoral student in computational neuroscience: "Glitches happen"