Re: Explain 'Little Lucy's deposition?

"Lee Olsen" <paleocity@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1161361232.653067.198070@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Since there is good evidence that the skeleton was dispersed in a
swamp....."
"Therefore, it seems most likely that the body rotted, lying face
down in the water, and that most of the straight-rooted anterior teeth
from the front of the jaws dropped out in one spot while the body was
largely intact. Later, the body rotted further and the parts were
pushed by a gentle current so that the main concentrations came to lie
in a rough line to the southwest of the initial position."
Bone breakage.
"Some breakage has occurred following or during this
disarticulation."

The evidence indicates that
(a) the body escaped scavengers;

No, that is not true either. It just means it escaped LARGE predators,
like hyenas. There are marks from small predators. This would not have
occurred if buried immediately at death, unless you could match the
marks with those of mice or something.

The first disturbance of the corpse -- leading
to the dropping of the teeth (and probably
the breakage of the bones) took place "while
the body was largely intact". The bites from
small scavengers most likely also occurred at
this time.

(b) it disintegrated in two stages
(i) little movement up to the time the
teeth fell out

Right, little movement at the time the body was decomposing. This says
absolutely nothing about its whereabouts before it started to fall
apart, just to make the point perfectly clear.

On the contrary, it tells us that it was (almost
certainly) buried in a shallow grave. You need
to say that the 'grave' was created by natural
forces. But, if so, they were so gentle that they
did not break nor damage the body. This 'grave'
also protected it from large scavengers.

(ii) some subsequent disturbance
and breakage.

This virtually REQUIRES an initial burial,

Yes, AFTER animals possibly broke the bones. There is no direct
evidence that this happened (no serrations that are generally
accompanied by trampling), only the fact that many were broken suggests
they were trampled while in the water.

Sure -- something like a hippo walked over
it in the mud.

followed by later flooding and disturbance.

You have that backwards, all the disturbance was prior to the silts
that buried the body.

The survival of the body at all probably means
that it was substantially covered by soil or mud
at all times. Otherwise larger scavengers (such
as crocodiles) would have been likely to find it
and destroy it completely. The distribution of its
parts would, almost necessarily, have to be when
the body was in an advance stage of
decomposition.

Later flooding, yes, but no other later disturbance, except slight
movement to the southwest at the time of decomposition and weight of
ground above it until it partially eroded out 1.7 million years later.

The only question is whether that initial
burial was deliberate, and made by his
living companions, OR whether it was
accidental.

There was no secondary burial, you are injecting your own conclusion
into this that is not based on the words of the excavators.

I suggest only one burial -- in a river course
that later became flooded.

An 'accidental burial' is hard to explain
in the first place. And, given the almost

No, it happens all the time. There are many cases of nearly complete
animals that escaped predators and were buried by natural processes,
long before hominids were around to deliberately bury them.

Explanations for those burials can be given.
Yours -- for 15000 -- is noticeably absent.

As is, of course, any explanation from
anyone as to how 1808 survived as a fossil.
Further, no one (except me) has tried to
explain the 'popped-up' scapula of 'Little
Lucy ', nor her 'rolled-into-a-ball' state.

certain death from tooth infection, it

M.D. Crowley probably imagines he is Napoleon before he goes to bed at
night.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/WT15k.html
"It is unknown how the boy died."

Of course -- they're disbarred from
drawing the simple and obvious
conclusions from the evidence.

becomes almost inconceivable.

Not in this case.
1) no thorns or cairn. (one on your prerequisites)

Any thorns would have disintegrated
within about 2-5 years. Any layer of
protective rocks would probably have
been dislodged by water or by hippos.

2) The bones were in the water at the time they were covered with silt.
Zero weathering is consistent with this, says the excavators. Teeth
caught in footprint or depression is consistent with a floating body.

Hardly 'floating'. It was moved by
a hippo or by water.

3) Comrades buried boy in a swamp? Ever try to dig a hole in the bottom
of a swamp with a digging stick? Ridiculous.

Dry ground can turn wet -- e.g. as the dry
season turns into to the wet. The sand of
a river bed is usually soft and easy to dig.
A river can change course, in either a minor
or major way.

4) Crowley: "He could have crawled into some kind of burrow,...."
This means dry land. A burrow with a footprint in the very bottom of
it?

This was (as I made clear) an example of a
theory that would NOT work.

And later a hippo comes along and digs out an entire body and still
managed to leave the teeth in the footprint?

Several hippos (maybe decades apart)
could have dislodged, damaged and moved
the body in the mud.

5) The distribution pattern of the bones is consistent with bone spread
experiments done in flumes.

Something has to put it into the stream
-- i.e. dislodge it from its 'grave'.

Yet again, of course, you "forget" to deal
with KNM-ER 1808 -- the one who died from
hypervitaminosis-A.

Was there something worth remembering here? Thorns, digging sticks
nearby or imagination?

It is routine to come across posters here
who avoid questions. But I don't think
I've seen anyone -- with pretensions to
science -- who does so as shamelessly as
you. You possess not one single fibre of
scientific sensibility.

The question about KNM-ER 1808 is 'How
did she get buried?" -- since she undoubtedly
died a slow, agonising death, and was quite
incapable of movement.


Paul.


.

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