Tuesday, November 25, 2014

ABC of Moving Political Lips - A story of Lucy

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has denied he has broken a pledge not to cut funding to the ABC and SBS, telling Parliament his government had "fundamentally kept faith with the Australian people". The comments were Mr Abbott's first on budget changes to the ABC since a $254 million reduction was announced by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week. ABC breaking up is hard to do - promises worth the moving lips

“Feeling really lucky,” Donald Johanson wrote in his diary the morning of 24 November 1974, while staying at a remote camp in northern Ethiopia’s Afar region. Hours later, the palaeoanthropologist, now at Arizona State University in Tempe, happened upon the 3.2-million-year-old remains of a small-bodied early human, possibly on the lineage that gave rise to Homo sapiens. He and his collaborators named itAustralopithecus afarensis, and the skeleton became known to the world as Lucy. Forty years on, Johanson, now 71, talks about the discovery and Lucy’s enduring importance and appeal.What researchers have learned about human evolution 40 years since Lucy