Regardless of what pols want you to believe, it's an old, old, old, old world

If you're able to drag yourself away from a blogosphere now contemplating a Presidential debate that found most of the GOP field spluttering on about not "believing" the Theory of Evolution or making incredibly bad, ass-backwards "points" about Galileo (John Huntsman excepted), something of much more relevance to science - specifically, the type of science that evolution deniers in that debate would like to ignore (feel free to peruse Josh Rosenau's piece on this phenomenon or Howard Stern's [!] take on it) -  has been recently uncovered in South Africa:

Two fossil skeletons of early humans appear to mark a halfway stage between primitive "ape-men" and our direct ancestors. A year of detailed study has revealed that the skeletons are a hodgepodge of anatomical features: some bones look almost human while others are chimpanzee-like.

The two fossils, an adult female and a juvenile male, were discovered in the Malapa cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2008. Both about 1.2 metres tall, they are unusually complete and well-preserved and date from 1,977,000 years ago. Excavated by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and colleagues, they were given the name Australopithecus sediba.

Let's face it, though: despite evidence such as Berger's find, certain career politicians will make a game of proving how much the evidence doesn't matter to them and how proud they are of their ignorance of it. Feel free to shudder at the possibility that one of them may be making scientific policy decisions in the future.