Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Really?









OBJECTS IN PHOTO MAY BE DINO POO
RIPPED FROM AOL NEWS HEADLINES: 
ANCIENT BONE COULD BE NEW SPECIES OF HUMAN
     Thanks to a bone fragment discovered in Siberia's Altai Mountains, scientists may be on the cusp of adding a new species to our hominin family. . .
     [The goofy, freaking scientists] who describe their findings in the current issue of Nature, used new sequencing technology and methodologies to analyze the DNA in [a] bone fragment -- believed to be a chip off the pinky of a 5- to 7-year-old child -- which was uncovered in material dated to 30,000 to 48,000 years ago. 
     "Hey, Walter, does this look like a chip off the pinky of a 5- to 7-year-old child to you?" 
     "What? That piece of petrified monkey poo? Are you insane?"
      Once they had sequenced the DNA, they compared it to that of modern humans and Neanderthals, both of which were living in the Altai Mountains in that time period, and found a surprising number of differences. "It really looked like something that I'd never seen before," [one of the scientists] says. "It was a sequence which was similar in some way to humans but is still quite distinctive." 
     "What you've got there is a piece of shit, Sherlock."
Based on these comparisons, the researchers estimate that modern humans, Neanderthals and this unknown hominin shared an ancestor about 1 million years ago. 
     Give or take a couple of years.

3 comments:

Remo said...

It WOULD make for an interesting episode of Jerry Springer.

Chris said...

Actually it was a Chicken McNugget thrown out of a car window circa 1989. Same difference!

EmcogNEATO! said...

Just by the picture, I thought I was looking at rawhide treats for dogs. But perhaps Chris is right...