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Two Ethiopian fossils have been crowned as the oldest known members of our species. An estimated 195,000 years old, the pair were witness to the earliest days of Homo sapiens.

The discovery adds yet more weight to the argument that Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, was the birthplace of humans. The dating sits well with genetic analyses of modern populations, which suggest that H. sapiens first appeared in Africa around 200,000 years ago.

The fossils, called Omo I and Omo II, were found in 1967 at Kibish, near Ethiopia's Omo River, by the famed fossil-hunter Richard Leakey. Although Leakey realized that Omo I, at least, was a H. sapiens, the dating of mollusc shells found with the bones suggested that the specimens were only 130,000 years old.

"In 1967, dating techniques weren't what they are now," says John Fleagle of Stony Brook University, New York, who took part in the latest analysis, published in Nature1. And besides, Leakey and his colleagues were more concerned with hunting for something millions of years older. "The fact of the matter is, they wanted early hominids; modern humans were like chump change," Fleagle says.

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Human history is AT LEAST 195,000 years old, and 95% of it unrecorded.

[ 17 February 2005: Message edited by: JimmyBrogan ]

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Everyone knows the fossil record was planted by Satan to deceive men.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Silly archaeologists! Everyone knows the fossil record was planted by Satan to deceive men.

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I think you've mispledded "God" there, Magoo.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Silly archaeologists! Everyone knows the fossil record was planted by Satan to deceive men.

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Clearly Satan is smarter than God . . .

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No. That is crazy talk. Satan is only of this world and God created everything, so each planet, moon and star have their own Satan. The one on the North Star is quite evil.

Edit: speling

[ 18 February 2005: Message edited by: Tommy Shanks ]

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Why is this thread in science when it belongs in babble banter?

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Originally posted by Michelle:

Well, I think it was originally meant to be an interesting science thread, but it quickly got taken over by Satan's Satirists.

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The 'mollusc dating' was probably C14 dating, which can be a bit dodgy when conducted on mollusc shells, particularly if they're marine molluscs as the uptake of C14 by sea creatures is different largely because the proportion of C14 in the sea doesn't track with the proportion in the atmosphere. Also in 1967 they didn't have particle accelerator mass spectrometry available, so they would have needed a larger sample and a loooong time to pick up enough C14 decays to get an age.

The K/Ar dating dates volcanic deposits and is better suited for the age ranges we're dealing with here (half life in the millions of years instead of about 5500 years). But, it doesn't directly date the living material, just the rocks below where they found the skulls. So you have to infer how long it took for the overlying deposits to accumulate.

My question is this: why haven't they tried to date the skulls directly? I'm guessing they don't want to remove even the little bit of material they'd need for C14 dating as this would represent unjustifiable damage to the (priceless) fossils.

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orbiting the earth and landing on the moon

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Originally posted by Papal_Bull:
Over the past 50'000 years I evolved...To physically fly to the moon on my wings of AWESOME!

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Originally posted by B_Nichol:
I guess my question is, how are the creationists, IDers and anti-science types going to spin this?
Have they even commented on h.florensis?

OK, two questions...

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Yes, so it would seem we were walking around with this rediculously gigantic brain for 185,000 years or so, with precious little artifacts to show for it.

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There may be a reason for that. Couple of reasons. The tools they had were made of organic materials, which tend to revert back to their natural form. And nomadic peoples don't carry a lot of luggage: they use what's available and leave most of it behind. So their stuff is scattered all over the landscape. Mostly, we find tools and weapons that have been buried with the dead... and that won't happen until they invent a religion which features an afterlife - that requires fairly sophisticated imagination.
The big brain can be used to store information about one's surroundings, the invention of language, the detection of danger - a lot of purposes that don't involve hardware.

That skull fragment isn't very big. Certainly not enough to reconstruct a face. Where is the rest of him? Where is his family?
I would guess this specimen was found a long way from home - possibly carried off by a predator or flash-flood. There should be a lot more someplace in the neighbourhood. I assume archeologists have been digging madly in all directions, without much luck.

I haven't seen the other one. Maybe it's a female: Adam and Eve, fleeing the Garden of Eden. No luggage. They meet with a saber-toothed lion, which eats them up and expels the indigestible bits over the next week and 200 miles. The fig-leaves are digestible: gone forever. A&E haven't had a chance to multiply....
God takes a nap of 190,000 years, wakes up, finds a few strands of pubic hair on a bleached lion tooth, clones Cain and Abel and we're back in business. Reconciled.

[ 19 February 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Originally posted by Surferosad:
And you're confusing cultural change with biological evolution! Not the same thing!

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Originally posted by B_Nichol:
I guess my question is, how are the creationists, IDers and anti-science types going to spin this?
Have they even commented on h.florensis?

OK, two questions...

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I think WingNutDaily resident pseudoscientist, Kelly Hollowell, wrote a column on Flores man a few months back. But a couple of bloggers took her to task for getting stuff wrong. See Kelly Hollowell makes stuff up again and Kelly Hollowell strikes again.

[ 19 February 2005: Message edited by: Snuckles ]

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Silly archaeologists! Everyone knows the fossil record was planted by Satan to deceive men.

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Originally posted by Papal_Bull:
Over the past 50'000 years I evolved...To physically fly to the moon on my wings of AWESOME!

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[ 19 February 2005: Message edited by: oldgoat ]

What's this ?

[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Oh wait, those are snakes... Do they sometimes put snakes in tequilla instead of worms?

You're not making any sense, Fidel...

[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: Surferosad ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Surfer, you've never made sense as far as I can tell, so we're even.

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Tommy: you're glossing over a lot of hominid/early modern human development with your '185,000 years' line.

First: the tool tradition in place at 195000 BP was Acheulian, the famous 'handaxes'. Now, a handaxe, especially a good one, is a tricky thing to make, and there is a sequence of refinement going on within the Acheulian tradition. If you look at handaxes from the beginning of the period, say around 400kBP, they're much cruder and rougher, whereas by 200kBP they're much more refined. As well, as has been noted, there's an complete lack of knowledge regarding any and all types of organic tools being used. For all we know they were weaving linen clothes out of wild flax at 200kBP--the evidence just won't survive except in the most rarest of circumstances.

By 200kBP, H.s.Neanderthalensis and Sapiens are now both known, Neanderthals primarily in Europe and adapated for the colder climate, Sapiens in Africa. Handaxes continue to be made, but the Levallois technique is developed about the same time, leading to stone flake tools appearing for the first time. This represent a much more efficient use of flakable stone resources than handaxes, producing much more length of usable edge. This Levallois technique was further refined into the Disk-core technique, which is very similar, but with greater core preparation producing a further increase in efficiency and economy of materials.

Note that even at this stage, evolution is still playing a certain role in human origins and development, as the more gracile Sapiens from Africa eventually replace the more robust Neanderthals who developed from H.Heidelbergensis primarily in glaciated Europe.

Mousterian technologies persist from 200kBP to the end of the Middle Palaeolithic, about 40kBP. While MP technology is most associated with Neanderthals, this is mainly due to 1) most research initially being conducted in Europe and 2) a glossing over of the fact that early Sapiens were also using Levallois/Mousterian technologies.

By 40kBP the Neanderthals are gone from Europe, an the population is entirely Sapiens. At this point we see a blossoming of technological improvements, which fuels the debate about how 'smart' Neanderthals really were: if they had brains as big as ours, why didn't they use them to invent better tools? I won't get into that one here.

The Upper Palaeolithic lasts from 40kBP to about 15kBP (note that we still haven't reached your 10,000 cutoff point!). During this period a series of technologies rise and fall, partly for functional reasons, but now we also start to see more artistic and stylistic changes in tools. Solutrean points, for example, are sometimes made so large and so thin that they would be useless as hunting weapons--perhaps they were traded, or used as ritual objects. The UP tool traditions are Aurignacian (very similar to Mousterian), Gravettian, Perigordian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. With Magdalenian, we find microliths being produced: tiny flakes and blades that can be used as part of composite tools, meaning that a broken point now can be easily repaired by replacing the broken bladelet, instead of making an entirely new point.

At 15kBP the ice age is in terminal decline, the forests are recolonizing the landscape of Europe, bringing with them a multitude of smaller animals. The old, big, heavy weapons needed to bring down an aurochs or a mammoth are no longer suited for hunting fox or fowl, or spearing fish. We now see the flowering of both the microlith technologies, and a further increase in the variety and complexity of the archaeological record through to the advent of the Neolithic, whose timing varies from place to place (as does that of the Mesolithic--technically most pre-contact First Nations were using Mesolithic technologies, *technically*).

So there's a series of 'burgeonings', times when technology took a step forwards, throughout your 185,000 year period. Taken as a whole, they represent the transition of hominids from evolutionarily-determined creatures to culturally-determined ones, adapting at a rate far faster than evolution ever could.

At a certain level, there is a 'laziness' factor in evolution: if an adaptation is working, and working well, it won't change dramatically. H.heidelbergensis was well-adapted to a warm subtropical pre-Ice Age Europe. When the climate changed, they evolved into Neanderthals, still big (for a hominid), still strong, but shorter and squatter and better at making stone tools and planning a hunting expedition. At the same time, early Sapiens in Africa were developing along other lines, more gracile, perhaps slightly more dependent on technology although that's a *very* contestable point, and once they and Neanderthalensis were living in the same regions, Sapiens had the edge. If it had been the other way around, we'd probably look similar to what we look like now, if slightly bigger-boned, but we'd talk about how the disappeared 'Sapiens' hadn't been able to deal with the climate in Ice Age Europe. Remember: evolution doesn't have a target in mind, just a harsh elimination of those that aren't fit enough.

[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Yes, deliberately so. It would seem to me that what we call civilization is the result of people being moved from what was once savannah into river valley refuges due to desertification of Northern Africa and the Middle East. At some point, some kind of critical mass of human brain power is reached, and we start building cities, technology takes off, etc.

At least that was the conventional thinking, based on the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates models. But it seems to me the Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs and Incas didn't need environmental change to transition from hunter gatherers to civilization.

Was it farming and the production of surplus food that is the driving force? Maybe, but it seems a long time in the nomadic existance for this to happen.

But inbetween the discoveries of partial skull fragments and the odd femur bone of a hairy relative, the story is far from complete I think. Why would Egyptologists get their underwear in knots over someone trying to explain weathering patterns on the Sphynx when they know that none of them has attempted to do so before ?. It doesn't fit with their own neatly pre-packaged assumptions on Egypt. So what?. Why the attempts in haste to provide alternate theories for the erosion ?. And do they really expect us to believe that the out of proportion Pharoahs head belongs on the lions body ?. C'mon!.

I mean, they don't really know what the "helicopter" and other glyphs mean at the Abydos tomb, but they can still explain it, surely.

When you post in babble, you often allude to theories and ideas that either don't have a shred of indisputable evidence supporting them, or that have been completely discredited... Things that are closely associated with pseudo-science and quacks on the fringe of science... And you know it too!

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."

[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: Surferosad ]

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
"Tommy: you're glossing over a lot of hominid/early modern human development with your '185,000 years' line."

Yes, deliberately so. It would seem to me that what we call civilization is the result of people being moved from what was once savannah into river valley refuges due to desertification of Northern Africa and the Middle East. At some point, some kind of critical mass of human brain power is reached, and we start building cities, technology takes off, etc.

At least that was the conventional thinking, based on the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates models. But it seems to me the Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs and Incas didn't need environmental change to transition from hunter gatherers to civilization.

Was it farming and the production of surplus food that is the driving force? Maybe, but it seems a long time in the nomadic existance for this to happen.

I'm not invoking Fidelian explanations here, just wondering if I'm missing some other factor?

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It has been speculated that there was a long period were people mixed agriculture with hunter-gatherer practices.

[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: Surferosad ]

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Was it farming and the production of surplus food that is the driving force? Maybe, but it seems a long time in the nomadic existance for this to happen.

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As aRoused pointed out, this didn't happen all of a sudden. A group of migrant people maybe found a hospitable place, stayed a while, then the weather turned bad or the game ran out, and they moved on. You don't give up a relatively carefree nomadic existence unless you have to. You don't adopt drudgery and serfhood until you have to. And it takes quite a long time before you learn to consider these things the norm.

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But it seems to me the Chinese, Mayans, Aztecs and Incas didn't need environmental change to transition from hunter gatherers to civilization.

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Fidel:

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What's this?

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[ 20 February 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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It would seem to me that what we call civilization is the result of people being moved from what was once savannah into river valley refuges due to desertification of Northern Africa and the Middle East. At some point, some kind of critical mass of human brain power is reached, and we start building cities, technology takes off, etc.

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There are some San Bushmen, some Northwest Coast First Nations, some Maasai and some Lapps that would like to speak to you about what constitutes 'civilization'.

Most incipient state societies began around river systems. Remember that the Maya, Inca and Aztec were all secondary states following on from the Olmecs and Toltecs and such. The early Chinese and Indus Valley (hint..) states also began around river valleys.

But sedentism isn't always linked to more complex forms of social organization. We've now found permanent structures dating back to the Mesolithic, and of course there's many examples of modern-day sedentism within gatherer-hunter or horticulturalist economic bases.

But why this obsession with state society, glossing all previous forms of social organization? Some of our direct ancestors as Euro-Canadians (I'm playing the odds on you here, Tommy) were semi-nomadic up until the early Middle Ages. Were they 'uncivilized'? I hope you don't think so: some of those semi-nomads brought the word 'law' into the English language..

nonesuch has it right: it's much harder work to live in a sedentary horticultural or agricultural community than it is to be a hunter-gatherer. Also, you tend to be sick a lot more often and die a lot sooner. It's hard work getting in the harvest every year and hoping it lasts the winter! Our meat- and milk-eating Germanic and Scandinavian ancestors looked like giants to the stumpy grain-fed Romans, and that was comparing them to the legionaries!

At the same time, sedentism means you're no longer limited to having one child every five years or so, because you don't have to carry them around as you follow the group.

Just as evolution doesn't stop, so it's incorrect to describe a chimpanzee as our 'ancestor', because chimps have continued to evolve after our _common_ ancestors diverged evolutionarily, it's also incorrect to speak in terms of 'more civilized' or 'more developed' forms of human social organization. Every society develops along its own path, responding to changes around it both environmental and social. Some exchanged relatively easy lives for harder lives with greater population density, is all. Your formulation makes it sound like some people 'progressed' and others didn't.

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Originally posted by aRoused:

Most incipient state societies began around river systems. Remember that the Maya, Inca and Aztec were all secondary states following on from the Olmecs and Toltecs and such. The early Chinese and Indus Valley (hint..) states also began around river valleys.

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A theory on the demise of Mayan culture is that it was the consequences of making of endless supplies of lime. They used lime extensively in temples and buildings, and Mayan's burned acres and acres of forest to make relatively little lime. Agricultural yields diminished, and so the gods demanded more more work, higher pyramids and more wars with other tribes for resources. Agrarian collapse was the result of overspending natures capital. It must have dawned on them at some point that working for the gods and their incompetent mortal leaders was a losing proposition. Revolt ?.

Ronald Wright says that almost all societies that have existed to concentrate wealth and power at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy have collapsed because of this. Easter Island was a closed experiment in greed that ended in disaster.

More recently, the approximately 30 year experiment in Smithian laissez-faire capitalism focused on individualism to extremes was rejected throughout the western world in the 1930's. Pyramidal individualism has been a relatively hard sell for what have been some of the richest people in world history in our own modern times. Indigenous people in Bolivia and all over Latin America are rejecting globalism and resisting seizure of their countries natural wealth by marauding capitalists. Exclusive property rights are as unnatural now as they were to native North American's when European's arrived and simply moved into their villages. Native people have always known that the earth is what sustains us, not worship of false economic gods.

[ 21 February 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

[ 21 February 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by nonesuch:

There may be a reason for that. Couple of reasons. The tools they had were made of organic materials, which tend to revert back to their natural form. And nomadic peoples don't carry a lot of luggage: they use what's available and leave most of it behind. So their stuff is scattered all over the landscape. Mostly, we find tools and weapons that have been buried with the dead... and that won't happen until they invent a religion which features an afterlife - that requires fairly sophisticated imagination.
The big brain can be used to store information about one's surroundings, the invention of language, the detection of danger - a lot of purposes that don't involve hardware.

[ 19 February 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Originally posted by aRoused:
...nonesuch has it right: it's much harder work to live in a sedentary horticultural or agricultural community than it is to be a hunter-gatherer. Also, you tend to be sick a lot more often and die a lot sooner. It's hard work getting in the harvest every year and hoping it lasts the winter! Our meat- and milk-eating Germanic and Scandinavian ancestors looked like giants to the stumpy grain-fed Romans, and that was comparing them to the legionaries!...

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That's interesting; I would expect the sedentary life to be more secure from famine; but maybe the trade-off is working longer and harder. Are hunter-gatherers usually larger than farmers? I guess it would depend on the environment.

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Those who live a sedentary life tend to rely on fewer food sources which actually makes them less secure from famine than hunter gatherer groups. Agriculture requires a lot more time and energy to be devoted to these few food sources so if something happens to them it is difficult to compensate by exploiting other food sources.

First off, I know there's a difference between "civilization" and "civil behavior". For the purpose of this discussion, I was skipping over that. It seems another topic altogether, where my opinions would not differ much from you guys, I think.

Second off, yes my ancestory is European. As far as I can tell it's pretty much a hodge podge. My mother was a war bride from Reddish, near Stockport, and not so far from Manchester, the Venice of the North. (guffaw) And my father's family was from the south. He had straight black hair and a bit of a hump on his nose, features normally associated with Italians. In fact, when on a sight seeing tour with the 1st RCR's in Sicily and Italy, the natives of that country thought he was one of their own. He was told, as a youngster that he had "Norman" features. One Great Grandmother was Acadian. On me mom's side there's some Irish. And that's just going by living memory.

If people like my ancestors, with this mix-- real or imagined-- could consider themselves ethnically "English" I see no discernable rule that prohibits me from considering myself ethnically "Canadian".

So I do.

Anyway.....

It occurred to me while reading both aRoused and Nonesuch's posts that maybe the real factor for "civilization" (yes, I'm rolling my eyes) is isolation.

I think our nomadic and semi nomadic forebears probably noticed that their garbage dumps became little fields where errant seeds took root. I can't believe it took us 100,000 years or more to stumble upon agriculture.

It struck me that the common factor between all these ancient...groups of politically associated people who may or may not have acted civily toward each other... existed in isolation for some period of time. These river valleys in Asia and the Middle East were isolated not just by desertification, but also from other geographical reasons. In the new world, mountain ranges seem to have played the roll that the deserts played in the Middle East. And China has it's deserts and mountain ranges too that would have protected people in the Yangtze and Yallew valleys (sp) from mauraders. For a time.

'Progress' is an even more problematic concept. Once a process has begun, it moves along a certain path to some kind of conclusion. Every step along that path is progress. That's no proof that the path itself isn't an evolutionary blind alley, or a colossal mistake.
Every group considers itself the norm or model of group behaviour and organization. In an aggressive species, the group that's won the most battles, wiped out or enslaved the most other groups, sees itself as the most advanced. We're tempted to think: "This is the top. I am what evolution had in mind all along."

But evolution has a longer view and no predetermined goal. We can be a blind alley, an intermediate step, an accident, and experiment, or the best thing since corn... nobody knows for sure.

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
Interesting.

Second off, yes my ancestory is European. As far as I can tell it's pretty much a hodge podge. My mother was a war bride from Reddish, near Stockport, and not so far from Manchester, the Venice of the North. (guffaw) And my father's family was from the south.

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I think our nomadic and semi nomadic forebears probably noticed that their garbage dumps became little fields where errant seeds took root. I can't believe it took us 100,000 years or more to stumble upon agriculture.

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Very likely true. But, as has been pointed out, agriculture is harder work than hunting and gathering, and tends to make you less flexible in coping with minor environmental fluctuations because you've put all your eggs in one basket. So knowing a plant could be encouraged to grow and actually devoting some effort to doing that encouraging are two very different things. In raw economic terms you wouldn't rationally do something that reduces your adaptability and increases your energy outlay versus energy production unless you absolutely had to.

Most likely agriculture developed in regions which were circumscribed in some way (as you suggested, Tommy) so that the option to move on isn't as available. Under those conditions, if population grows (not guaranteed to happen) so that the hunter gatherer adaptation is being strained, you might experiment with encouraging the growth of some of the grass species you rely on for part of your food for the year. If the processes of circumscription and population growth continue, you might find yourself devoting more and more time to encouraging grass growth while dropping some of the less efficient other foods, or foods which conflict with grass 'encouraging' time. Eventually over the course of generations the population shifts from full-spectrum foragers to focusing on a single or small group of resources, and you've got semi-sedentary horticulturalists or agriculturalists.

The Siksika (Blackfoot) were hunter-gatherers who followed the bison migration; but they planted tobacco in the spring and came back and harvested it in the fall. (They had a story about someone who went to the tobacco field during the summer and saw little people tending the plants; he was driven mad by the sight.)

I didn't know there was a difference. I did notice that a whole lot of people in Northern Wales had the same general physical build as I do, and the same texture hair. I think my maternal Grandfather's family came from Chester, on the Welsh border, so I often fancy there's a lot of Celt in me. Although, I do tend not to lose sight of the big picture, the central goal and not engage in petty infighting within whatever group/organization I'm in, so maybe there's not much Celt in me at all. (wink)

Saxon or Celt, all I know is buying work boots to accomodate my ever widening feet is becoming difficult.

Oh, I should make this somehow relevant.....

I make a big deal about people moving around so much that there's really no point in identifying too strongly with one ethnicity or another. But there was a case a few years ago, where a very old skeleton was found in a cave near a village in England. I think the remains were ten thousand years old or so. Anyway, some scientists were able to extract some DNA from a tooth, and on a lark they got samples and compared it to the DNA of people currently living in the near by village. They found a match with, of all people, the school history teacher.

Subjectiveness of the word "civilization" and "progress" aside, I think the History teacher had a warmer place to go to the bathroom than what his ancestor had. That's gotta count big time.

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

Since I'm about to identify with this group, who are all the people I should currently be hating?

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An Englishman walks into a pub in Glasgow and orders a beer. Instead of a beer, the barkeep sucker punches the Englishman, knocking him to the floor.

Shaking off the shock, the Englishman gets up and says "What the hell was that for!!??"

"The Battle of Culloden", the barkeeper exclaims.

"The Battle of Culloden!!?? that was over two hundred and fifty years ago!"

"Aye," says the barkeep, "But I just heard about it last week."

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

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I think the History teacher had a warmer place to go to the bathroom than what his ancestor had.

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The gents in my local is outside. You nearly literally go out in the back garden and pee against a retaining wall. Ah, Blighty.

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
It would seem I have a Celtic foot.

Since I'm about to identify with this group, who are all the people I should currently be hating?

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ha ha Good one. I'm not sure, just that I read where archaeologists in England have found that skeletal remains generally fall into two main categories: Celtic and Saxon. They found that true Celtic feet were narrow and had squared-off toes or straight across at the end from big'un to lil'un. The Saxon's feet were typically broad with downward sweep from large to small toe. Predominantly saxon feet on the Yorkie side of my family. My feet are halfandhalf, but would fit in with those relatives if only for appearance sake.
Londoner's and Canadians wouldn't know what the 'eck they were sayin tho.

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Human history is AT LEAST 195,000 years old, and 95% of it unrecorded.

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So is the why no one can yet tell me why I often have a sore back?!

Actually, I remember reading several years ago that the remains of a humanoid (they called it a "homanid") were found in Ethiopia that were estimated to be over four million years old.

It was supposedly a female, which scientists named Lucy, who they figured walked with a hunched back.

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Boring? BORING?!! Listen, curlers are about to march on the CBC for screwing up its coverage of the Tournament of Hearts. If you think hockey sticks hurt, try having a broom thrust up your nose.

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Ya mean y'actually speak from experience of havin a broom thrust up yer nose?

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As for your bad back, is it possible you have a heavy tummy in front that is pulling on it?

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Uh-huh. Should a figered some silver-tongue devil like yew would make that suggestion.

A bit of advise: never tell a redneck that he's got a "heavy tummy." Use the term "beer gut." It's safer.

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Ackshully, the Romans refused to eat from the four food groups! And they got fat from sitting and watching the games.

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Check out the upper-right glyph. That's a curling stone if I ever saw one.

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To say nothing of the glyph immediately to the left of the curling stone.

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on the Northwest Coast seem to have used fired to clear areas of forest.

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