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Friday Nite Videos | May 24, 2019

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Stop Investigating Me! Or Else! W. Kamau Bell's Candid Conversation With Two Anti-Abortion Activists. Exploding Star Spews Building Blocks of Life. A Louisiana Town in the Heart of 'Cancer Alley'. 'Stable Genius' Needs an 'Intervention'? Two Views.

An Exploding Star Spews the Building Blocks of Life

The elements that make up nearly all that you are and can see first came from the explosion of massive stars. Step inside one such explosion and explore the forces that connects each of us with the stars.

Friday Nite Videos -- June 10, 2016

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Elizabeth Warren on Trump and Republicans' Attempt to Bludgeon the Judiciary Into Submission. Bernie Cranks Up the Heat in DC. John Oliver: Debt Buyers. Bernie on Talk With Obama and Where Next. Hobbit Histories: The Origins of Homo Floresiensis.

Hobbit Histories: The Origins of Homo Floresiensis

The origins of the species known as 'the hobbit' - a human relative only a little over a metre tall - have been debated ever since its discovery in 2004. Now new fossils may reveal the ancestors of this strange species and help us to understand its history.

New Human Species Discovered: Homo naledi

Homo naledi adds a new human relative that was primitive but shared physical characteristics with modern humans. The location of the fossil bones suggests that they were deliberately disposed of underground.

New Stone Tool Discoveries Predate Humans

Jacob Kastrenakes The Verge
Stone tools unearthed at a site in Kenya predate any identified human ancestors -- previously thought to be the first makers of stone tools -- by hundreds of thousands of years. These finds "will force us [to rethink] what makes us humans ... Increasing knowledge of our remote past is casting doubts on previous certainties and is showing that the process of becoming what we are now is far more gradual than what we previously thought."

Contextualizing the Hobbits

Jyoti Madhusoodanan blogs.plos.org
While very little in paleoanthropology is ever “settled,” a new study represents an important step forward in terms of settling that the "Hobbit" people were really a different human species, and not pathological individuals of Homo sapiens. The question that remains to be answered definitively is which species of archaic Homo is the most likely ancestor of Homo floresiensis.
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