Keeping the faith, afarensis-style
From Free Republic: an article from Science News by Bruce Bower covers the recent flap about sexual dimorphism in early hominids. This is a pretty good introduction, if you haven't been following my discussion.
The article goes through the whole story, starting with Owen Lovejoy's bipedal origins model all the way to Plavcan and colleagues' response to the recent work of Philip Reno, Lovejoy and others suggesting a low sexual dimorphism for A. afarensis.
Here's a teaser:
Reports on new fossil finds of A. afarensis and even older hominid species are expected soon. Lovejoy plans to factor skeletal data from these discoveries into a larger examination of ancient sex differences.
Never too soon to blog...
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks