A reconstruction of a one-million-year-old skull suggested that our species started to emerge hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, according to a brainy new study published in the journal Science.
“From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?” said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis, the BBC reported. Dubbed Yunxian 2 skull, the ancient cranium was reportedly exhumed in 1990 from an archaeological repository in Hubei province in central China.
The story of evolution beats the snot out of the creationist crap we were fed about Adam's rib and all that, but I have to pose a serious question: If we are/were truly evolved from apes, why are apes still around? Enquiring minds (pun intended) want to know.
...
Handmade gifts are extra special when
they're for someone extra special...
Click on the picture for more information on this beautiful, one-of-a-kind
bracelet made with Swarovski crystal and silver beads.
...
Graduated from high school thinking evolution answered the questions. Took college classes teaching it as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But...I started seeing holes in what was being taught. At some point after that the Classic Darwinists and the Neo-Darwinists split. Each group, respected evolutionary scientists, had a number of arguments as to why the other's explanation was untenable. I decided to believe both of them and went with another major. As for "The Science Is Settled" argument, seems we hear that in other places as well. Better to say that, at this point, we still don't know enough.
ReplyDeleteFAFO
ReplyDeleteHas anybody run this be the Leakey's? They're dead, nevermind.
ReplyDeleteJpaul
There were many species of apes. The question is, what jump started one species on such a huge evolutionary advantage?
ReplyDeleteSince my anthropology classes at University of Tennessee in the 70's with Dr. Bass( the body farm innovator) the timelines
and discovery of different lineages of proto-humans has exploded. Maybe someday we will find some answers.
Bubbarust
Apes are still here because Theres a niche for them. If every evolved species eliminated the species from which they evolved, logically there would be only one species alive on earth. And yes, science is never settled but a working hypothesis is a necessary platform for continuing research. Every honest scientist wants the current hypothesis replaced by a better one.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote "a serious question: If we are/were truly evolved from apes, why are apes still around?"
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, this kind of situation was pretty well understood in a general way even in Darwin's work. Famously Darwin wrote about how different specialized variants of finches developed when they were isolated on islands. Thus I expect Darwin would have told you both (1) that specialization and speciation by natural selection would tend to happen even if a single pregnant Eve-the-finch had been the only finch ever to be stranded on that island, and (2) that at least one of the resulting species could well be very similar to the original Eve.
I haven't read most of Darwin, so from here on I will just paraphrase what I know of the more modern understanding of evolution. When a variant species evolves from an existing species, it doesn't necessarily displace the existing species. Pretty commonly a variant species can be more competitive in some niche but not across the board. Today humans are more competitive than apes almost across the board --- apes want forest or savanna, and with modern tech almost all forest and savanna can be used by humans for agriculture with modern tools and weapons and communication tech, and so apes lose hard. But hundreds of thousands of years ago agriculture apparently wasn't a thing, and in mild climates where fire and clothing weren't crucial for survival, ape advantages such as fast breeding, hardiness, and (slower, clumsier) strength could well have been competitive with human advantages such as greater intelligence and more gracile (but weaker) limbs.
If my handwaving above about possible ape competitive advantages seems too much like special pleading for epicycles, consider that this "doesn't necessarily displace" pattern is pretty common and clear in various extreme cases. E.g., it is apparently pretty common for caves to hold blind, albino, or otherwise specialized subspecies. In such cases, the ancestral unspecialized species does not necessarily go away. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, only very seldom does a specialized blind albino subspecies rampage out of the depths and drive the ancestral species to extinction. The protohuman ecological niches of long ago are less indisputably obvious than the Gollum niche of a blind albino salamander, but the principle that the generalist ancestral species doesn't necessarily get stomped by the niche variant species is not just a special epicycle that evolution fanatics have cooked up to explain away an anomaly of persistence of apes, but an ordinary unsurprising outcome observed in many other cases.
We are still missing a large amount of bone evidence to link all these ideas together. We probably will never find all of it. Been destroyed over the years or washed down into the sea. Someone needs to invent a time machine to go back and find out how it really happened. Course that probably will never happen, especially in my life time.
ReplyDeleteHeltau
"why are apes still around?" might as well ask why 'races' of humans are still around ....sh*t happens ... gets back up again and trundles along as if nothing has changed (or meet their maker). The winners are the ones who show up; the losers do not.
ReplyDelete