UPDATE (2008/4/15): The presentation was withdrawn from the meetings. I'm told that the information in the abstract is accurate, and that the withdrawal doesn't concern the science...
And no, the room wouldn't have been nearly big enough...
ORIGINAL POST:
Just flipping through the abstracts volume...this looks interesting:
New Homo erectus crania from Ethiopia
Simpson, S. W., Semaw S., Quade, J., Levin, N. E., Butler, R., Rogers, M. J., Holloway, R. L., Renne, P. R., Dupont-Nivet, G., Stout, D., Everett, M.
By the Early Pleistocene, members of the genus Homo were distributed throughout Africa and Asia, spreading into Europe by the Middle Pleistocene. As expected from such a widely distributed and long-lived species, variation in anatomical details is marked. This variation has fueled debate about the number of Early Pleistocene Homo species that existed and their relationship with modern humans. Here we report on two newly discovered hominid adult crania - one female and one male - dated to 1.5-1.7 My from the Busidima Formation, Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project area, Afar State, Ethiopia. An additional H. erectus cranial fragment (˜1.24My) is also reported. These crania are near contemporaries of specimens from Kenya, Tanzania, Republic of Georgia, and Southeast Asia and are attributable to Homo erectus. These fossils document a greater degree of brain size variation than previously known and allow a better accounting of the magnitude and character of cranial sexual dimorphism in size and shape.
New fossils, "greater degree of brain size variation," very cool. I hope they have a big enough room.
