Forgive me, Reader, for I have thinned. It's been 9 days since my last expression. I think I'm a victim of learned uselessness. It's the only way I have to explain my absence from the intertubes this past week or so. And it's not as if I've been busy doing anything else. Piles of piles surround me and the final solution will undoubtedly be to bring a firehose in here and just flush it all out and start over again.
I've been wrestling with a couple of issues pertaining to my work here, but I'm having great difficulty bringing them to light [or keyboard, as it were]. One is an argument against the conventional wisdom that has relegated you and me to a subtribe within the Hominoidea, specifically the Hominina. The only other mammal group that I'm aware of that employs just fine distinctions is that of the cow-like animals---the bovids. Hell! Even the Old World monkeys---all 20 something genera---eschew the subtribe in favour of the loosely collective taxon "group" [which is, by the way, a valid taxon according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature]. I think a re-revision of the revision of Hominoidea is long overdue. And I'm just the archaeologist to do it! [Psssst. Wanna buy a bridge in New York City?]
The other matter that keeps trying to worm its way out of my overworked brain is a novel argument that seeks to put an end, once and for all, to the notion that hand axes and Levallois flakes are the result of ideas in the heads of every hominid since Homo erectus. You can probably guess how easy that's going to be.
So, please, have pity. My mind's working 23/6, but nothing is ready to be excreted therefrom as yet.
Wish me luck!
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