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Ape-Human Split Moved Back By Millions Of Years
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 26, 2007 01:29 AM
from the everything-you-know-is-wrong-again dept.
from the everything-you-know-is-wrong-again dept.
E++99 writes in to let us know about a development in paleo-anthropology. It seems that up until now, scientific consensus has placed the divergence of man from the ape line five to six million years ago (based on "genetic distances"). But newly discovered fossils in Ethiopia place the divergence at least twice as far back, and perhaps as long ago as 20 million years. They also largely put to rest any doubts that man and modern apes both emerged from Africa. From the article: "The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago... Beyond that... fossils of early humans from the Miocene period, 23 to five million years ago, disappear. Fossils of early apes especially during the critical period of 14 to eight million years ago were virtually non-existent — until now... [T]he new fossils, dubbed 'Chororapithecus abyssinicus' by the team of Japanese and Ethiopian paleo-anthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split occurred before that."
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How very fitting (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Creationists Declare Evolution Disproved (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently the 98% genetic similarity with chimpanzee doesn't convince you.
Or you just patologically deny the facts, like your predecessors denied the round earth (aww, man, we would all fall down if earth isn't flat).
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But which one?
Yahweh?
Baal?
El?
Lilith?
Pazuzu?
Rodney Dangerfield?
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Careful of naked statistics.. For example 99% uptime is HORRIBLE. You have to provide a frame of reference.. What would the genetic different be between a worm and cat. How about cat to an ape.. great-ape to a chimp. Etc.
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, lots and lots of living organisms have some 40%-60% in common with humans, if not more. So that really means we only differ some 60%-40% from some drastically different organisms. That really means 98% genetically alike really means something like 4%-6+% genetically different where it matters. Add in the fact that a tiny percent of one percent in genetic material can have huge impact what it it means to be "human". This really suggests we have far more not in common then we have in common with the likes of chimps and great apes. Especially once you consider not all genetic material is created equal. Seriously, where it matters, ignoring the material that is largely common between humans and other varying life, we are probably some 10%-20% different...where it really matters.
What an Maroon! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:4, Informative)
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Scientists aren't exactly in the proof business. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HaHa,,, STILL trying to PROVE evolution... (Score:4, Informative)
A lie and a fake for 40 years.
Nebraska man was speculation, not a "fake" or a "lie", that was revealed to be porcine rather than hominid during peer review, and it was disproven in three years with the finder of the tooth declaring doubts within two. It was never accepted as a human ancestor, and it certainly didn't last for forty years.
You are a liar. Anyone who has done even a little bit of research would see that your claims regarding Nebraska Man are a shameless, brazen lie.
What do you believe that you are proving by lying so transparently? Why should anyone believe anything that you say when you lie so blatantly?
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Easy... it's pretty butchered and you're wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Prior to that time the mammal line had already split much more than we previously gave it credit for, a lot of the main groups were developed. This article is a fairly worthless crock. Basically some teeth were found that looked vaguely gorilla like and dated back 10 million years. So we know that there was some ape-like creature with a gorilla-like diet 10 million years ago. However, saying that this is the Ape-Human split is as stupid as saying it's the Human-Mammal split. Humans are apes. We are clearly within the same grouping of gorillas, orangutans, and chimps. There's no real grouping of animals which includes those yet excludes humans. This find perhaps sets back the date of chimp-gorilla split but not "human-ape". That's just stupid. Chimp-human is a split which dates back about 4-6 million years. Gorilla-chimp goes back 8 million years, though perhaps 10 if this isn't just some offshoot.
Finally, 10 million years is about 2/17th of 85 million years. Basically your math is off, and you're using old information, and to top it off this article is totally stupid. It's 10 million year old gorilla-like teeth. It actually has almost nothing to do with human evolution, though if you studied gorilla evolution you might care. Though, it's even weak evidence that it's actually a gorilla just that it had a diet like that of a gorilla.
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The rate of phenotypic change isn't constant. (Score:5, Informative)
The line that would eventually give rise to the mammals split from the reptile lineage before the emergency of the dinosaurs (the number cited is 324 Mya); look up "synapsid" for more information. It was actually the dominant type of land fauna until the greatest mass extinction in history at the end of the Permian (250 Mya), which was followed by the emergence of the dinosaurs. There were large synapsids in the early years of the Mesozoic, but the branch that would give rise to the mammals--the cynodonts--emerged about 220 Mya. There's a rather exhaustive description over at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]; also see talkorigins [talkorigins.org].
On a more relevant note, consider the whales. It appears now that whales are more closely related to hippos than hippos are to cows. (Again, see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for a good summary.) This was mightily confusing, because we generally take phenotypic change as an indicator of distance between species. The important thing to remember here is that species change due to pressures put on them. Rapid pressures brought on by migration into a new environment (like the sea, for example) will cause a greater rate of phenotype change than would exist if the environment remained constant--consider the shark for this latter case.
Also, as another commenter has pointed out, the mammalian lineages had already split at that point; divergence points for some groups of mammals are after the KT boundary, but many are before it. However, it appears that even though the groups were separate, they all looked pretty much alike until they migrated into the niches vacated by the dinosaurs and diverged widely.
And lastly, your math isn't quite right. 7 million years (the divergence point for the chimp and human lineages, notwithstanding a very poorly written article) is more like a tenth of the time it took to get from (many kinds of!) shrew-like mammals to a similar level of mammalian diversity to what we see today.
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Heck, look at the variety of dog races we have! Allmost all of them were created by man using selective breed... In only a few thousand years we come from a wild wolf to a punny chiuaua!
How "inteligent design" folks can deny this evidence?
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simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
don't laugh too much... there's people out their who really think this way.
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:simpsons quote (Score:4, Interesting)
- Man was incapable of sin until eating the fruit.
- Man became capable of sin after eating the fruit.
- Man at the fruit while incapable of sin.
- Eating the fruit was a sin.
There's a ??? step I'm missing somewhere...Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
- Man was incapable of sin until eating the fruit.
- Man became capable of sin after eating the fruit.
- Man at the fruit while incapable of sin.
- Eating the fruit was a sin.
There's a ??? step I'm missing somewhere...Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask yourself why.
With our schools being under attack from the creationists who want to indoctrinate our children in their superstitious fairy tale, it's not surprising at all. We of no faith don't have to turn the other cheek, but are morally free to kick back. So we do.
Butt kicking for goodness!
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with religion. I don't even have a problem with teaching religion. Just do it down the hall in the Philosophy department with the rest of the Humanities subjects and leave it the hell out of the science labs.
And keep the more rabid Creationists OUT of the School Boards. That's MY tax money going to waste teaching religion as 'science'.
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Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
If not, why didn't he fix that in us? Did something go wrong?
If he does, why? They only serve negative purposes for humans.
No, evolution and a belief in men created in the image of god just doesn't mix. If anything, that's less believable than what the creationists hawk. At least they can say that god created everything to look like there had been an evolution, for purposes we don't understand. Ridiculous as it is, it's at least theologically possible, while the view that evolution has led to humans in the image of god just doesn't fly.
However, Occam's razor tells me that the simpler explanation is true: God was created in the image of humans.
Re:simpsons quote (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you've come very close to the real reason a number of Christians have a problem with evolution. The bible tells us that man was created in God's image, but evolution tells us that we are just the latest in a long line of incremental improvements. Taking these two together means that humanity is being created into God's image, and our descendants will be the beings that God originally intended, and we are no more special than any other ape.
Having your religion tell you that you aren't special is hard for a lot of people to take; especially people attracted to a religion like Christianity that tells you that you are so special Jesus chose to die for you. For some people, it's easier to just disbelieve the evidence that attacks their ego the most strongly.
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Interesting)
With a lead in like that, it's hard to disagree. There are a couple of billion Christians world-wide by some measures. We could probably find "a number of Christians" who have a problem with evolution because they were attacked by monkeys as children, and they associate evolution with monkeys because of that famous graphic depicting an ape slowly turning into a man.
The bible tells us that man was created in God's image, but evolution tells us that we are just the latest in a long line of incremental improvements.
This enters into it, but not in the way that you and the parent seem to think. The parent asked, "If we're created in the image of your god, does he have a tail bone and an appendix?" It's hard to tell whether he's being sarcastic. If not, why stop there? Men and women have some obvious physiological differences. So, which is it? Are men created in the image of God, or are women? Apparently (and amazingly) the parent believes that being created in the image of God means that we bear some physical resemblance to him. Just drawing attention to this premise in his argument should reveal how ridiculous it is, but just in case, I'll spell it out. No group of Christians I'm aware of has ever believed that the Imago Dei has anything to do with our physical bodies.
Having your religion tell you that you aren't special is hard for a lot of people to take; especially people attracted to a religion like Christianity that tells you that you are so special Jesus chose to die for you.
Again, this is a little hard to refute. All over the world, there are undoubtedly sermons being preached about how inherently special we are. But you should take note of a fine but significant distinction. Historically, most Christians have not believed that Jesus died for people because they were special. The song is called Amazing Grace because Newton believed the favor shown to him by God was completely undeserved. He calls himself a wretch, which some modern, mainline denominations have edited out in the belief that traditional Christianity has too negative a view of mankind. If you're shopping around for a worldview that caters to ego, there are much better options than Christianity.
I'd like to suggest to you that the real psychological problem (that is, putting aside the theology and science) that a lot of people have with evolution isn't, as you say, as simple as stubborn, childish insistence that we are better and more important than the apes. The problem is with naturalism. (Many educated Christians believe in "theistic" evolution.) Absent something like the image of God, it's hard for many people to believe that their lives have meaning, that they are capable of apprehending truth, that morality boils down to anything more than personal preferences (which in turn boil down to chemical reactions), etc. In other words, what they are really afraid of is radical nihilism. This is more than just a blow to the ego. It's a question of whether it can be meaningfully said that such a thing as the ego exists.
Precisely (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. But it is important to remember that *rad
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
- We can't eat and breathe the same time.
- We have to keep our blood constantly warm while other animals don't have to.
- Our eyesight sucks compared to a lot of animals. If "God" can design such good eyesight for some animals, why not design this for himself and us?
- Our hearing sucks compared to a lot of animals.
- Did the designer fail Gravity 101? Why are the woman's intestines continually slamming against the uterus and in some cases causing pain and bleeding? As if it was "designed" for walking on 4 legs
- Why is it that a hyena can pretty much eat shit and not get sick of it, yet us, designed in the image of "God" would die from that or get very sick?
- Cancer? Is that some kind of stack overflow in the DNA programming by "God"?
- There are a few gases like CO that we can't smell and that would kill us. Why didn't "God" design us in a way so we can smell them? A practical joke mayhaps?
- What kind of engineer puts the pleasure center of the body inches away from sewers?
If "God" really created us in his image, he is either:
(1) Grossly incompetent.
(2) He is weak himself.
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine and dandy. But why must kids be forced to learn religion tarted up and presented as 'science' when it ain't no such animal? The only 'design' in Intelligent Design is to get it past the people who'd reject overt religious programming in favor of science.
Personally, I'm agnostic. I don't have a clue if there is a god, where it hangs out at, or what it wants. I also believe everybody else is in the same boat. People who tell me god sits on their shoulders and feed them the answers make me nervous. People who tell me god told them they're special and should be running things make me want to grab a gun and prepare to defend myself from what appears to me to be an extremely dangerous person capable of anything under the cover of god telling them to do it. "Sorry, god told me to kill the president" doesn't cut it as a defense in a courtroom. Why should it cut it on the street?
Re:simpsons quote (Score:5, Insightful)
At that point I realized that calling oneself agnostic because there is a very tiny possibility that a god exists is just playing with the definition of the word agnostic. For all practical purposes I am an atheist.
Othwerwise, I agree with what you said.
Re:simpsons quote (Score:4, Informative)
Bertrand Russell posed the postulate that there is a teapot in orbit around the Sun between Earth and Mars. Because the teapot is too small, we cannot detect it with even our best telescopes (although this may change in the future). Since we cannot disprove the existence of the teapot, must we be "teapot agnostics"? Technically, yes, but from a practical standpoint, we are all "teapot atheists".
The problem is that there are an infinite number of bogus postulates. Unless we are to be agnostic about everything (Will the Sun really rise tomorrow?), we must go by the preponderance of evidence. The lack of evidence otherwise suggests that there is no God, which is my current belief. If the evidence changes, so will my beliefs.
Incidentally, the "bogus religion" theory throws a monkey wrench into Pascal's Wager [wikipedia.org]. Pascal's Wager assumes that the only two possibilities are a Christian God who rewards belief and no God at all. What if, for example, God rewarded skepticism? What if Hinduism is correct? Since there is no solid evidence to suggest that this religion is any more correct than any other religion, we cannot make such an assumption.
No, this latest discovery doesn't break science. This kind of discovery is exactly what science is all about - constantly looking for new evidence to enhance our understanding, whether or not that evidence supports the current theory. Scientific skepticism isn't about being closed to new ideas, it's about treating every theory with a critical eye and constantly trying to prove yourself wrong.
When was the last time you heard a Fundamentalist Christian utter the words, "I was wrong"?
Implications on inter-ape relationships (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect they will adjust the molecular clocks to reflect the new knowledge and make a new guess. But the lesson of this whole discovery is that the current models for molecular clocks seem to be a bit lacking.
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And that a drift with NO control whatsoever never has stagnant times or changing times. (Natural radiation varies from place to place so if one group of life e
Pak (Score:2)
Misleading to talk about a "human-ape split" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misleading to talk about a "human-ape split" (Score:5, Informative)
My impression of the Nature article [nature.com] (subscription required) is that the authors are claiming that their paleontologic find pushes the gorilla split (from the human-chimp lineage) back to ~12 million years. Based on this, they essentially recalibrate the molecular clock as it relates to several of the ape divergences. This information is in section 5 of the paper's online supplementary materials [nature.com] (subscription not required), not the body of the article. Keep in mind that supplementary materials generally aren't peer-reviewed as rigorously as the rest of the article.
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However, Hom
Summary of the Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, they MAY be earlier than the previously proposed date for the gorilla an human split."
===========
The fossil teeth demonstrate that the last common ancestor of the gorilla and human was "out of Africa" (although this has been disputed), it is not a point of real controversy.
This whole article reeks of conditionals, and restatements of non-controversial theories (e.g. " There is broad agreement that chimpanzees were the last of the great apes to split from the evolutionary line leading to man, after gorillas and, even earlier, orangutans"), and there is nothing but speculation and weasel wording in the entire article.
This is just grant-milking, and possibly -- though I hope not -- nationalism and nonsense of the worst kind. NOTHING reported in the linked article is substantive in any sense, and is not worthy of comment or rebuttal unless and until some real theorems are posited.
Non-news. Pass it by.
You don't seem to understand how it works (Score:5, Insightful)
1. _Nothing_ is sacrosanct and beyond questioning in science. "Consensus" just means the stuff we already have plenty of data to confirm, but noone's stopping you from finding new data that shows the limits or shortcomings of it.
2. You are, however expected to present the data and logical train of thought from data to conclusion, if you want to question anything. And more specifically,
2.A. any hypothesis, if it's going to make it to "theory", is supposed to explain the data we already have.
2.B. if we're to replace an existing theory with a more complicated one, well, Occam's Razor still applies. We don't do complexity for complexity sake. You're supposed to show exactly what wasn't adequately explained by the old theory, but follows naturally and reproducibly from yours.
To pick an example out of the hat, take general relativity:
1. Yes, even something as accepted as newtonian gravity could be questioned, but
2. It had to show the data and maths that people can examine and decide for themselves. Among other things, as I was saying: (A) It still had to match the measured data. E.g., applying general relativity to an apple, still had to match the measured time to fall. And (B) it had to be useful on at least one case where newtonian gravity doesn't produce the measured results. E.g., light deflection near a massive star.
Anyway, I'm surprised at the number of people who don't understand one of the two. We have no shortage of nutcases who either:
1. treat science as some fucked-up religion. (I'd give more examples, but you only have to look at the wave of retards postings stuff along the lines of "nooo, don't try to think about it! You're not worthy enough to question these guys!" each time a science or tech story comes up and someone dares ask "well, then how did they solve well known problem X?")
2. think that "questioning" or "investigation" means making up bullshit, supported by nothing more than handwaving, generous application of logical fallacies, plus a lot of wishful thinking.
In a nutshell, noone's stopping you from questioning any theory you wish. Take your pick, really. You may not necessarily get a grant, but noone's stopping you. Who knows? You might even be right. But show us the hard, reproducible data you base that on. If you don't, well, then you qualify as a crackpot. We're still not stopping you, but we might do mean things like point and laugh.
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I mean, not many people question that humans are scientifically animals, but it is still conve