Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

819. Evolution: An Asian Origin for Human Ancestors? Researchers agree that our immediate ancestors, the upright walking apes, arose in Africa. But the discovery of a new primate that lived about 37 million years ago in the ancient swamplands of Myanmar bolsters the idea that the deep primate family tree that gave rise to humans is rooted in Asia. If true, the discovery suggests that the ancestors of all monkeys, apes, and humans—known as the anthropoids—arose in Asia and made the arduous journey to the island continent of Africa almost 40 million years ago. Until 18 years ago, fossils of every suspected early anthropoid were found in Egypt and dated to about 30 million years ago. Then, starting in the 1990s, researchers began discovering the remains of petite primates that lived 37 million to 45 million years ago in China, Myanmar, and other Asian nations. This suggested that anthropoids may have actually arisen in Asia and then migrated to Africa a few million years later. The Out-of-Asia scenario may have been complex.

Hello 3 - Jambe et fibre optique : petit co Hôpital La Musse, Saint Sébastien de Morsent (Eure) - Samedi 1er août 2009 Plaidoyer pour fibrer la France par emprunt d'Etat (on a des idées fixes ou en en a pas...) Comme je vous l'ai raconté dans mon premier post Hello, cela a pris 7 heures, voir un peu plus, entre le premier coup de fil donné par mon fils aux autorités sanitaires, et mon arrivée sur une table d'opération. "7 heures, m'a dit mon chirurgien, c'est beaucoup pour une jambe qui n'est plus irriguée normalement". Effectivement, j'ai dû subir l'amputation suite à cet anévrisme poplié.Je lui ai demandé à son avis, qu'elle aurait été la durée limite pour "rattraper" la jambe. Il m'a répondu 3 heures. Supposons maintenant que le territoire national ait été couvert par un réseau de télécommunications à TRES haut débit (100 mégas symétriques, voir, ne mégotons pas, 1 giga). Donc mon problème de jambe survient. Que faire ? Pourquoi le Japon le fait et pas nous ? Quelle est la stratégie des Japonais avec leur réseau optique ? Note 1.

BBC Nature - Bonobo videos, news and facts When will computer hardware match the human brain Journal of Evolution and Technology. 1998. Vol. 1 When will computer hardware match the human brain? (Received Dec. 1997) Hans Moravec ABSTRACT This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. Brains, Eyes and Machines Computers have far to go to match human strengths, and our estimates will depend on analogy and extrapolation. There are considerations other than sheer scale. More computer power is needed to reach human performance, but how much? The retina is a transparent, paper-thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eyeball on which the eye's lens projects an image of the world. It takes robot vision programs about 100 computer instructions to derive single edge or motion detections from comparable video images. 100 million instructions are needed to do a million detections, and 1,000 MIPS to repeat them ten times per second to match the retina. MIPS and Megabytes. to mimic their behavior.

Fluctuating environment may have driven human evolution A series of rapid environmental changes in East Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University. "The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years," said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years." According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn State, the current leading hypothesis suggests that evolutionary changes among humans during the period the team investigated were related to a long, steady environmental change or even one big change in climate. "There is a view this time in Africa was the 'Great Drying,' when the environment slowly dried out over 3 million years," she said.

La nanotechnologie moleculaire, par Frederic Levy. Jusqu’à présent, toutes les méthodes de fabrication manipulent les atomes en très grande masse. Même la fabrication ultra fine des puces informatiques traite les atomes de façon statistique. Car les atomes sont extraordinairement petits par rapport à notre échelle. Par exemple, dans l’épaisseur de cette feuille de papier –je l’ai mesuré, elle fait environ un dixième de millimètre d’épaisseur–, il est possible d’empiler environ 400.000 atomes de métal. Il y a donc beaucoup de place à cette échelle ! En fait, pour en fournir une image plus concrète, Feynman avait donné l’exemple suivant : en utilisant un cercle d’une superficie de 1000 atomes par point d’impression, il serait possible d’imprimer toutes les pages de l’Encyclopedia Brittanica sur la tête d’une épingle. Le but de la nanotechnologie moléculaire, et des recherches en cours actuellement, est d’arriver à ce contrôle précis et individuel des atomes. Etat de la recherche actuelle, Voies explorées Applications Fabrication Construction

Journal of Human Evolution - Molar size and diet in the Strepsirrhini: Implications for size-adjustment in studies of primate dental adaptation Abstract Among the Strepsirrhini, molar size does not exhibit a consistent dietary signal when body mass is used to size-adjust molar dimensions. This observation is also true for anthropoid primates, but when postcanine size is expressed relative to the size of the facial skeleton in this clade, folivorous anthropoids tend to have relatively larger postcanine teeth than anthropoids in other dietary categories. The contrast in the results generated by these two independent size variables appears to be related to systematic differences in facial size in the Anthropoidea, particularly between short-faced colobines and long-faced cercopithecines. Keywords Anthropoids; Dietary adaptation; Postcanine; Strepsirrhine; Teeth Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.

La 3ème Révolution d'Homo Sapiens... L'Inte Le passé c'est bien, mais le futur c'est mieux. Pourquoi ? Parce que c'est là où nous allons passer notre vie (je crois que cet adage est de ma pomme ? Mais si quelqu'un d'autre en réclame la paternité, pas de problèmes de mon côté). Depuis la nuit des temps, Homo Sapiens est une créature "bricolée" par Dame Nature (ou Dieu le Père ?). Je pense que les 30 prochaines années vont être - comment dire - assez sportives... Prenons un peu de hauteur, voulez-vous ? Il me semble qu'aujourd'hui tout est en place pour que les Homo Sapiens démarrent une 3ème grande Révolution... Il y a 7 millions d'années environ, nous avions un ancêtre commun avec les primates (le fameux chaînon manquant, que l'on a toujours pas trouvé). Voilà pour le très loin... Revenons en Afrique de l'Est du côté des gorges de l'Olduvaï. Nos ancêtre ont conquis la Terre, et depuis... Depuis cette conquête, nous avons fait 2 grandes Révolutions. Pourquoi y a-t-il eu ces Révolutions ? Les nanotechnologies. Les Robots Humanoïdes.

Homo antecessor Homo antecessor is an extinct human species (or subspecies) dating from 800,000 to 1.2 million years ago, that was discovered by Eudald Carbonell, Juan Luis Arsuaga and J. M. Bermúdez de Castro. H. antecessor is one of the earliest known human species in Europe. Various archaeologists and anthropologists have debated how H. antecessor relates to other Homo species in Europe, with suggestions that it was an evolutionary link between H. ergaster and H. heidelbergensis, although Richard Klein thinks that it was instead a separate species that evolved from H. ergaster.[1] Some scientists consider H. antecessor to be the same species as H. heidelbergensis, who inhabited Europe from 250,000 to 600,000 years ago in the Pleistocene. The best-preserved fossil is a maxilla that belonged to a ten-year-old individual found in Spain. Footprints presumed to be from H. antecessor dating to more than 800,000 years ago have been found at Happisburgh on the coast of Norfolk, England.[4][5][6][7]

L'Intelligence artificielle va-t-elle dépasser l'intelligence h Les progrès technologiques ont indéniablement été plus rapides ces soixante dernières années que durant tout le développement humain. Or, l'intelligence artificielle se développe à une telle vitesse que d'aucuns se demandent si elle ne finira pas par dépasser l'intelligence humaine. Et dès lors, ce serait la fin théorique de la domination du genre humain. Les soixante dernières années ont sans aucun doute été les plus prolifiques dans le domaine scientifique et technologique. Vernor Vinge, professeur d’informatique et de mathématique à l’université de San Diego surtout connu pour avoir popularisé le concept de singularité technologique, a ainsi déclaré que « l’intelligence artificielle dépassera l’intelligence humaine peu après 2020. Ainsi, les théories post-singularité fleurissent sur le web. Dès lors qu’une IA sera un peu plus intelligente que nous, elle sera capable d’apprendre toujours plus vite que nous ne le pourrons jamais.

Journal of Human Evolution - Long range inland–coastal networks during the Late Magdalenian: Evidence for individual acquisition of marine resources at Andernach-Martinsberg, German Central Rhineland Abstract Recent re-examination of the osseous material assemblage from Andernach-Martinsberg, Central Rhineland, has resulted in the identification of an implement manufactured from cetacean bone (probably whale). Argued to be the proximal half of a foreshaft, this artefact is not only one of few such projectile elements to be identified in Magdalenian deposits in northern Europe, but also demonstrates that the exploitation of marine raw materials for use in manufacturing projectile elements is not restricted to southern France, instead extending to at least inland Germany. Keywords Whale bone; Osseous technology; Foreshaft; Interaction networks; Magdalenian

Our ancestors dined on grass 3.5 million years ago - life - 12 November 2012 Our ancestors began eating grass half a million years earlier than thought, soon after they started leaving the trees. Early hominins, living 3 to 3.5 million years ago, got over half their nutrition from grasses, unlike their predecessors, who preferred fruit and insects. This is the earliest evidence of eating savannah plants, says Julia Lee-Thorp at the University of Oxford. She found high levels of carbon-13 in the bones of Australopithecus bahrelghazali, which lived on savannahs near Lake Chad in Africa. This is typical of animals that eat a lot of grasses and sedges. Previously, the oldest evidence of grass-eating was from 2.8 million years ago. A. bahrelghazali may have eaten roots and tubers, rather than tough grass blades. The question is whether hominins moved onto savannahs permanently, or went between woodland and savannah when it suited them, says Rick Potts at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain BOSTON—Humans are the most successful primates on the planet, but our bodies wouldn’t win many awards for good design. That was the consensus of a panel of anthropologists who described in often-painful (and sometimes personal) detail just how poor a job evolution has done sculpting the human form here Friday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes ScienceNOW). Using props and examples from the fossil record, the scientists showed how the very adaptations that have made humans so successful—such as upright walking and our big, complex brains—have been the result of constant remodeling of an ancient ape body plan that was originally used for life in the trees. “This anatomy isn’t what you’d design from scratch," said anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University. "Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips." Starting with the foot, DeSilva held up a cast with 26 bones and said: "You wouldn’t design it out of 26 moving parts." The point of citing all these problems?

Writer Elaine Morgan's glowing tribute from Sir David Attenborough She won an award for her Western Mail column and has been praised for her work on anthropology. Now Elaine Morgan, one of Wales’ most gifted writers, has won acclaim from Sir David Attenborough – among others – in a special documentary about her life. The documentary, being aired on BBC Wales tonight, profiles Elaine and speaks to the people and colleagues she has influenced through her long and varied career. Elaine, from Hopkinstown, near Pontypridd, won two Baftas – as well as being awarded an OBE for her contribution to Welsh literature. She is best known for her books The Descent Of Woman, The Aquatic Ape, The Scars Of Evolution, The Descent Of The Child, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and The Naked Darwinist. Naturalist and broadcaster Sir David was one of many well-known and respected people to praise Elaine in the programme, Great Welsh Writers. He said: “I imagine her sitting at a desk, looking at the middle distance and conjuring up thoughts. See some of Elaine's columns below: