The 2005 Darwin Day event designed for students!
was on Monday 14 February

www.darwinday.org
Darwin Day's international home page
- see other programs around the world.

queries

Professor Colin Groves, School of Archaeology & Anthropology, ANU, spoke on

THE HOBBIT FROM THE
ISLE OF FLOWERS.

Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit, caused a sensation when its discovery was announced late in 2004. So tiny, so unexpected, so late in time yet so primitive - and right on Australia's doorstep. Since then it has been accused of being anything from an australopithecine to a bird-headed dwarf. What was it, really, and how does it fit into the human family tree?

The mind's big bang

video from

SBS/PBS/WGBH2's 7 part  series on Evolution was screened.

showed how evolution moved from the biological sphere to the human mental sphere.  Colin Groves  showed by a graph that the brain evolved from about 0.4L to about 1.4L from 6 million years ago to about 35 000 years ago when the mind did its big bang.  With that human society began, complex language capability developed, social status consciousness and "symbolic" life arose, technology transfer between individuals and groups became possible, rapid technological development began;  no evidence of such technology transfer and symbolic life has been found in the Neanderthals, for modern humans evolution passed from being biologically determined to human mind directed;  our future became what we humans make of it; the human species became the most successful - so far!