Hat-tip to F.R.

Link to youtube The Real Pliocene Hominin.

And for a more serious video that covers human evolution, here’s one from last year: Meet the Family: Human Evolution.

Ryan North is the artist, and you can see his work over at Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com. The hat-tip goes to Greg Laden, who featured this comic in his post Anonymity and Behavior Change.

Wondermark: All are Shaped by Circumstance

Many thanks to Brian Johnson of Recursive Sagacity for pointing this out!

Our own Paul Mason just used a PhD comic in his latest post on the travails of field work. If you want to know more about the comics, including the 200 most popular ones, go here. You can even get books collecting the work of Jorge Cham, the cartoonist who has compared me to a ninja.

Coincidentally Meg and I just published an article together entitled “Community Approaches to Preventing Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission: Perspectives from Rural Lesotho .” So kudos to Meg!

He was always polite and never rude, he liked to smile and he would never sneer.

But the story of Little Sacc isn’t so happy it’s true, his plight is somewhat tragic let me make that clear.

In all the happiness of making a drink, His real future just went down the sink.

But is his destiny so different from our very own?
Should we really smile on this fella whose death we condone?
Dying in his own excrement is no heroic fate,
But who are we to judge? Let me explain, just wait;

Little sacc was a Saccharomyces cerivisiae,

A bacteria of sorts should we put it that way.

In cold weather he was not a happy chap,

Rugged up in clothes, he was prone to nap.

 But when the temperature was heated to the celsius just right,

There would be a sparkle in his eye and women in his sight!

One thing leading to another, as leading things often do,

 Little Sacc hit the sack and now there were two!

Now that he was mating, he was on assignment,

To produce good ol’ ethnanol until his retirement,

But would he make it to live that long?

That is the question we ponder on!

So he shovelled in the glucose,

and the enzymes did their most.

And he Bubbled out the ethanol,

He couldn’t stop he was on a roll!

Then suddenly, exhausted by his appetite, the resources disappeared,

He was drowning in his own excrement, the end had neared,

And so in the abundant ethanol, he drowned and flopped,

This was the end, his life had stopped! 

So that’s the story of poor Little Sacc,

That little guy who, tempted by the heat;

dared to undress and taste the sweet.

And in-so-doing died in his own-made heap.

His death we may mourn but may not weep,

too close to our own is his earthly demise,

a species with a gut but without any eyes,

 hence blind to the excrement of naughty ways,

and thus limiting the number of one’s future days.

The Embden Meyerhof Pathway
A pathway for a species to die on its own effluent
A metaphor for the future of Homo sapiens sapiens
A reflection on climate change and cultures with consciousness
Paul Mason, 2008

For those of you wanting to know more about the actual site, here’s the Wikipedia Stonehenge link. Britannia also has some good short coverage that focuses on the construction of the henge.

Eternal Idol discusses recent claims that Stonehenge was a site of religious healing, while remote central covers the emerging evidence that Stonehenge was used as a burial site. And for some actual digging, see the Stonehenge Riverside Project.

ACROSS
2   Evolution in two or more species, such as predator and its prey or a parasite and its host, in which evolutionary changes in one species influence the evolution of the other species. 
4   Living underwater. 
5   The theory and practice of biological classification.
10   Australian-born South African anatomist and anthropologist (1893-1988). In 1924 he described a fossil skull collected near Taung in South Africa, naming it Australopithecus africanus. 
13   The process by which humans breed animals and cultivate crops to ensure that future generations have specific desirable characteristics. 
18   A two-footed, upright form of locomotion typical of hominins. 
20   Scientific study of the earliest stages of growth and development in organisms. 
21   A molecule made up of a sequence of amino acids. 
22   The physical or functional characteristics of an organism, produced by the interaction of genotype and environment during growth and development. 
23   An easy date. 

   DOWN
1   The species of humans that followed Homo habilis and preceded Homo sapiens 
3   An evolutionary mechanism that occurs when some individuals of a population are better able to adapt to their environment and, subsequently, produce more offspring. 
6   Heritable characteristic of an organism that improves its ability to survive and reproduce in its environment. 
7   Australopithecines and humans are… 
8   A simple measure of brain size but not necessarily of intelligence. 
9   Form of selection that tends to keep the form of a population constant. 
11   Members of any species of the genus Australopithecus. They lived during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene geological Epochs in Africa (i.e., ca. 4.2-1.4 million years ago). 
12   A scientist who uses fossil evidence to study early human ancestors. 
14   The process by which a similar character evolves independently in two species. 
15   Living in trees. 
16   The bones of the hip region. 
17   A sequence of nucleotides coding for a protein (or, in some cases, part of a protein); a unit of heredity. 
19   The study of ancestral relations among species, sometimes described as having a resemblance to ontogeny.

Please click here for answers.

I found out about this through “Some Guy Went and Built a Sentry Gun” which provides some much needed cultural context, including 134 comments.