ossil

Check your tile countertop for fossils. A consumptive Homo erectus—or at least a piece of him—might be trapped there. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

While cutting coveted travertine into tiles, a saw operator in Turkey sliced through a fossilized skull and gave the pieces to his supervisor. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz The fragments from the 500,000-year-old rock sat on a shelf behind the supervisor's desk until a local geologist visiting the fossil-rich site claimed them.

"The workers didn't know what it was," says John Kappelman of the University of Texas at Austin, who studied the fossil. "The first saw cut took off a bit of the top of the [skull] and the second saw cut went through the middle of the eye orbit."

The partial skull is the first H. erectus fossil found in Turkey, Kappelman and colleagues report online and in an upcoming American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

A wildly successful species that predated modern humans, H. erectus walked out of Africa all the way to China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Georgia starting about 2 million years ago, other fossils show. Whether the tall tool users ever arrived in Europe remains controversial, but the new find suggests they at least got close.

Kappelman says the skull's heavy brow ridge and sharply sloped forehead mark it as H. erectus.

Moreover, he says the inside of the skull displays telltale signs of tuberculosis, which in rare cases infects the lining of the brain. If confirmed, the find would push back the origin of the disease in hominins—the anthropological term describing human and near-human predecessors—back hundreds of thousands of years.

Until now, the oldest direct evidence of tuberculosis came from a 5,400-year-old Egyptian mummy. In 2005, genetic analysis of several strains suggested the disease originated about 3 million years ago in East Africa, the cradle of early human evolution.

The Turkish travertine traveler physically buttresses the claims of an early origin of the disease, Kappelman says.

When Kappelman initially examined the fossil, he missed the signs of tuberculosis—a stippling of tiny pits around the eye orbit. But when he showed the fossil to paleopathologist Michael Schultz of the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, Schultz recognized the pattern.

It matched what Schultz had seen in the skull of a 19th-century Austrian man who died from tuberculosis of the meninges, the membranes sheathing the brain. When the disease invades this covering, its characteristic tubercles, or grains, press tiny pits into the front of the skull, near the eyes.

"The imagery of that [Austrian] case is an exact match for what we have," says Kappelman.

The diagnosis arrives millennia too late for the adult male H. erectus, but it's just in time to set off a scientific controversy.

Two other paleopathologists, Pia Bennike of the University of Copenhagen and George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, are skeptical of the claim. They want to see more of the ancient individual—such as his spine—to confirm that he indeed carried tuberculosis.

Kappelman hopes to find more of the early man in the quarry's scrap heap. He might make a few trips to Home Depot too. "Back in the tile section, they have travertine from Turkey," he says. "Honestly, it's a case where the rest of this thing might be in somebody's kitchen."

research

http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca
In 2000, British Petroleum shortened its name to BP and adopted the slogan “Beyond Petroleum,” complete with a new yellow and green earthy logo. Then Chevron rolled out their new slogan, “Human Energy,” and broadcast commercials promising to become part of the solution to the world’s energy and pollution problems. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca Now, the greening of oil companies’ public image has reached one of the environmentalist movement’s favorite punching bags: ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil representatives announced they will stop funding nine think tanks and interest groups that have repeatedly denied that global warming is a serious threat. One group axed was the George C. Marshall Institute, which churns out books and lengthy reports challenging the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, particularly targeting the conclusion that a scientific consensus considers global warming a real—and human-caused—problem.

Organizations like the Institute for Energy Research, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow had spent $23 million of Exxon’s dollars in the last 10 years, according to The Guardian, to plant seeds of doubt about global warming and prevent government action.

Greenpeace’s blog claims that even with the cuts to those nine, ExxonMobil still channels cash to 28 other global-warming-denying groups. But this announcement was the first time that the oil giant has publicly conceded that deniers detract attention from researching clean and viable alternative energy sources. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca And, interestingly, this minor change of heart was spurred by the Rockefeller family, big-time shareholders in ExxonMobil, who have been pressuring execs to go greener. Cutting funds to a few interest groups might have been simply a move of appeasement, as the company held its annual shareholders meeting in Dallas yesterday with the Rockefellers in tow. But a baby step is better than nothing.

draft

May 18, Wednesday. Selected the Visitors to the Naval Academy, although we have not yet the appropriation bill, but we can no longer delay, if there are to be Visitors. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Congress is very dilatory in necessary business, and yet impatient of delay in others.

Mr. Seward called on me this afternoon at a late hour in reference to alleged misconduct of the Marigold, which is charged with firing a gun at a blockade-runner within six hundred yards of Morro Castle. As Temple, Fleet Captain of the East Gulf Squadron, had left me but a few moments previously, I sent for him, there having been no report of the case. While waiting for Temple, Mr. S. informed me that a forged proclamation had been published by sundry papers in New York, among others by the World and Journal of Commerce, imposing a fast on account of the failures of Grant and calling for a draft of 300,000 men. Seward said he at once sent on contradicting it and had ordered the English steamer to be delayed. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

He then had called on Stanton to know whether such a document had passed over the regular telegraph. Stanton said there had not. He (S.) then ordered that the other line should be at once seized, which was done. Seward then asked if the World and Journal of Commerce had been shut up. Stanton said he knew of their course only a minute before. Seward said the papers had been published a minute too long; and Stanton said if he and the President directed, they should be suspended. Seward thought there should be no delay.

Gold, under the excitement, has gone up ten per cent, and the cotton loan will advance on the arrival of the steamer at Liverpool with the tidings. It seems to have been a cunningly devised scheme, — probably by the Rebels and the gold speculators, as they are called, who are in sympathy with them.