Life consists of a long series of small wounds that slowly drain the joy of living away. When all the joy is gone, the final wound does no further harm.

Interesting to see that human pre-history has now been moved back to 4.4 million years. Sorry Lucy, we hardly knew ye.

Now Great, great, ..., Grand Ma is Ardi recently from Ethiopia. (Probably started the tradition that any thing a male grunted was wrong) has been located.

And the discovery suggests that humans and chimpanzees evolved separately from a common ancestor that was much older. It also seems to suggest that there were any number of stub branches in the hominid bush rather than a long slender tree branch.

Which raises the question: Why are we alone as the only remaining member of the human branch? What happened to our cousin humans? As a hypothesis I would like to see a harder look at the results of the Toba super volcano eruption 75,000 years ago. We know that humans went through a "choke point" then. We may have dropped to as low as 1,000 survivors. I wonder if the other human branches were wiped out at that time.