Bits and Bites > Beyond Meat Exec Bites Man's Nose; 1.8 mn year old tooth found in Georgia

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Beyond Meat exec accused of biting man’s nose outside a game

September 19, 2022

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) — An executive of a vegan food products company has been charged with felony battery and making a terroristic threat after a fracas outside a football game in which he’s accused of biting a man’s nose, officials said.

Beyond Meat Chief Operations Officer Doug Ramsey has been accused of a road rage attack outside Saturday’s game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and Missouri State Bears in Fayetteville, Arkansas, according to Fayetteville television station KNWA.

A police report says the 53-year-old Fayetteville man attacked another man who tried to inch in front of him in a parking garage traffic lane and made contact with a wheel on Ramsey’s sport utility vehicle. A police officer responding to the reported disturbance arrived to find “two males with bloody faces,” the report states.

After speaking with Ramsey, the other man and a witness, the officer determined that Ramsey had gotten out of his SUV and “punched through the back windshield” of the other car. The driver of the other vehicle said he emerged from his car and Ramsey “pulled him in close and started punching his body” and also “bit the owner’s nose, ripping the flesh on the tip of the nose,” the officer reported.

That man and the witness also reported hearing Ramsey “threaten to kill” the man.

Beyond Meat has not responded to messages from the station and The Associated Press seeking comment.

Somebody get the man a hamburger!

Georgian archaeologists find 1.8-million-year-old human tooth

The Dmanisi finds were the oldest such discovery anywhere in the world outside Africa

Published:  September 10, 2022 15:35

Reuters

Giorgi Bidzinashvili, an archaeologist and the dig team's scientific leader, demonstrates a tooth belonging to

an early species of human, which was recovered from rock layers presumably dated to 1.8 million years old,

near an excavation site in Dmanisi outside the village of Orozmani, Georgia.

Image Credit: REUTERS

Orozmani, Georgia: Archaeologists in Georgia have found a 1.8-million-year-old tooth belonging to an early species of human which they say cements the region as the home of one of the earliest prehistoric human settlements in Europe, possibly anywhere outside Africa.

The tooth was discovered near the village of Orozmani, around 100 km southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, near Dmanisi where human skulls dated to 1.8 million years old, were found in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The Dmanisi finds were the oldest such discovery anywhere in the world outside Africa and one which changed scientists' understanding of early human evolution and migration patterns.

The latest discovery at a site 20 km away provides yet more evidence that the mountainous south Caucasus area was likely one of the first places early humans settled after migrating out of Africa, experts said.

It's interesting that Dmanisi is less than 400 kms due north of Mount Ararat, Turkey where Noah's Ark is said to have landed. Mt Ararat may also have been the headwaters of the rivers that flowed through the Garden of Eden. 

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"Orozmani, together with Dmanisi, represents the centre of the oldest distribution of old humans - or early Homo - in the world outside Africa," the National Research Centre of Archaeology and Prehistory of Georgia said, announcing the discovery of the tooth on Thursday.

Archaeologists work at a dig site following the discovery of a tooth belonging to an early species of human,

near an excavation site in Dmanisi outside the village of Orozmani, Georgia.

Image Credit: REUTERS

Giorgi Bidzinashvili, the scientific leader of the dig team, said he considers the tooth belonged to a "cousin" of Zezva and Mzia, the names given to two near-complete 1.8-million-year-old fossilised skulls found at Dmanisi.

"The implications, not just for this site, but for Georgia and the story of humans leaving Africa 1.8 million years ago are enormous," said British archaeology student Jack Peart, who first found the tooth at Orozmani.

"It solidifies Georgia as a really important place for paleoanthropology and the human story in general," he told Reuters.

The oldest Homo fossils anywhere in the world date to around 2.8 million years ago - a partial jaw discovered in modern-day Ethiopia.

Scientists believe early humans, a hunter-gatherer species named Homo erectus, likely started migrating out of Africa around two million years ago. Ancient tools dated to around 2.1 million years have been discovered in modern-day China, but the Georgian sites are home to the oldest remains of early humans yet recovered outside Africa.

Prehistoric ‘Hobbits’ Were Not Deformed Humans, but Another Species

The characteristically small skull of the Homo floresiensis © Beawiharta / Reuters

French scientists say they have come closer to resolving the riddle of the origin of small people deemed unlike any others on the planet, whose fossilized bones were found on an Indonesian island in 2003.

The 15,000 year-old remains of upright walking creatures, who were about 100 cm in height, and weighing 25 kg were dug up – still moist – in a cave on the Island of Flores, and dubbed Homo floresiensis by researchers, and “hobbits” by the media.

But behind the neat designations, a fierce academic debate had begun. One side said they were the descendants of the Homo erectus, a dead-end branch on the evolutionary path that produced modern humans, which died out about 70,000 years ago. Their small size would have resulted from "insular dwarfing" – a tendency of an isolated apex species to get smaller when marooned in an environment with few competing predators, but a poor food supply.

A life-size drawing of Homo floresiensis, who may have been a relative of whoever made the newly-discovered instruments © David Gray / Reuters
Of course this is mostly imagination. 

Another claimed that the “hobbits” were humans, whose small group of ancestors had a genetic disorder, which spread as the population multiplied. With small heads, and softball-sized brains like those of apes, the “hobbits” were thought to have suffered from microcephaly, or perhaps dwarf cretinism, a condition that develops as a result of a lack of iodine in the diet.

But using primarily high-tech 3D scans, recently produced in Japan, of the best-preserved skull from the nine found specimens, two French scientists appear to have disproved at least one of these theories, without confirming the other.

“There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull - there were no characteristics from our species,” Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France's Natural History Museum and a lead author of a newly-published paper in Journal of Human Evolution, told AFP.

While smaller defects were detected in the structure, there was nothing to suggest these were genetically-disordered humans.

But neither did the study confirm that this was an offshoot of the Homo erectus, opening up an intriguing third possibility. That the Homo floresiensis may be an entirely different species, emerging from an as-yet-unknown origin.

“For the moment, we can’t say one way or the other,” explained Balzeau, who plans to continue studying the other skulls from the excavation.