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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/05/09/homo-nadeli-recently-discovered-africa-were-walking-around-humans/101458990/ Homo sapiens – that’s us and our direct ancestors, and long thought to be pretty much the only show in town for hundreds of thousands of years – had a rival cousin as recently as 236,000 years ago, according to South African scientists. The species, Homo naledi, was discovered in caves near Johannesburg in 2013, and the researchers have now announced that some of the bones are less than a quarter of a million years old, which would mean that the primitive humans – who had much smaller brains than homo sapiens – were running around in Africa at the same time as our direct forebears. And not only that, but Homo naledi also appear to have engaged in the relatively advanced practice of burying their dead....... ............ “This is a humbling discovery for science,” said Berger, a paleoanthropologist. “It's reminding us that the fossil record can hide things … we can never assume that what we have tells the whole story.” ...............The discoveries have encouraged other scientists to rethink human evolution. Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, told the Washington Post that the discovery should prompt people to question the familiar image of a stooped chimp-like creature evolving into an upright, modern human. “We've had for so long this view that human evolution was a matter of inevitability represented by that march, that progress,” he told the paper. “But now that narrative of human evolution has become one of adaptability. There was a lot of evolution and extinction of populations and lineages that made it through some pretty tough times, and we're the beneficiary of that.”

Or it's political. For so long anthropology has defined tool creation as a primary characteristic of Homo OnMyWaytoSapiens, that they have to in some way downplay tool creation by species that they don't or don't want to consider human. They should make a movie about apes getting smart and becoming a problem.

While the weather this weekend was forbidding and outright ignorant (it rained incessantly Saturday and the temperatures barely made it to the 40's until Sunday afternoon), we had a good time and met some awesome people! Friday was decent until dinner time when those menacing black clouds came and drenched us but not before Alex and I got a pic with the cast from Mountain Monsters. The boys stepped out of the rain into our vendor tent to meet two of our actors and talk to us about our movie project. Takes more than crappy weather to ruin a good squatchy weekend!!