Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind – and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.
Louise Leakey is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity's past in East Africa. In 2001, Leakey and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, the 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, at Lake Turkana – the same region where her father, Richard, discovered the "Turkana Boy" fossil, and near Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leakey, discovered the bones of Homo habilis.
In August 2007 Louise and Meave, both National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, dug up new H. habilis bones that may rewrite humanity's evolutionary timeline. We imagine that we evolved from apes in an orderly progression from ape to hominid to human, but the Leakeys' find suggests that different species of pre-humans actually lived side by side at the same time for almost half a million years.
Comment by: Steven Earl SALMONY (Dec-8-2008) Web site
WHAT IS GALILEO DOING TONIGHT?
I find it irresistible not to at least take a moment to wonder aloud about what Galileo is doing tonight. My hope would be that the great man is resting in peace and that his head is not spinning in his grave. How, now, can Galileo possibly find peace when so many top-rank scientists refuse to speak out clearly, loudly and often regarding whatsoever they believe to be true about the distinctly human-induced, global predicament presented to the family of humanity in our time by certain unbridled "overgrowth" activities of the human species from which global challenges visibly issue now and loom ominously on the far horizon?
Where are the thousands of scientists who have a responsibility to stand up with those who developed virtual mountains of good scientific research regarding overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species that are now overspreading and threatening to engulf the Earth.
Perhaps there is something in the great and everlasting work of many silent scientists that will give Galileo a moment of peace in our time.
What would the world we inhabit look like if scientists like Galileo adopted a code of silence, speaking only about scientific evidence which was politically convenient, economically expedient, religiously condoned and socially correct?
Comment by: Steven Earl SALMONY (Dec-3-2008) Web site
Dear Louise Leakey and David Alexander,
Are we suffering from the illness, amnesia, that is resulting in our forgetfulness with regard to the value of the Earth and its environs? Have we been mesmerized by a Tower of Babel?
Perhaps we are forever forgetting about Earth and its environment because too many people, especially the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mainstream media, are worshipping a "totem". At least to me, there appear to be many too many people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God's Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its frangible climate destabilized by unbridled overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species. Aside from the "Economic Colossus" nothing matters to them.
Today, it appears that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a "house of cards" and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the invention of dodgy financial instruments and unsustainable business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001 http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Comment by: PT (David Alexander) (Dec-2-2008) Web site
Perhaps a better understanding of our deep biological roots could remind us that we grow from earth and are dependent on the environment that allowed humanity to evolve.
Fossil Fuel
TED
PT (David Alexander)
