another missing link

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Here's a news story about a hominid fossil named "Ardipithecus" that is about a million years older than Lucy (Australopithecus), thus making it the oldest hominid fossil ever found. It supports the hypothesis that humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor that was neither chimp nor human, rather than humans evolving from a relatively modern chimp. This one, like the Australopithecines, has a cranial capacity similar to chimps but walked upright and had teeth more similar to a human.

Oldest human skeleton offers new clues to evolution - CNN.com

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@Aedes,

Aedes;94698 wrote:

Here's a news story about a hominid fossil named "Ardipithecus" that is about a million years older than Lucy (Australopithecus), thus making it the oldest hominid fossil ever found. It supports the hypothesis that humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor that was neither chimp nor human, rather than humans evolving from a relatively modern chimp. This one, like the Australopithecines, has a cranial capacity similar to chimps but walked upright and had teeth more similar to a human.

Oldest human skeleton offers new clues to evolution - CNN.com

amazing how long it takes to analyze these things...discovered 17 years ago, and still more to be learned from it...

so they have never come up with an earliest 'man' or earliest 'chimp either? they are just trying to trace where the apelike creatures split off and became their modern day counterparts (or became extinct)?

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@Aedes,

Well, a lot about the common ancestry is known from genetics. In fact a common ancestor could probably be predicted genetically to some degree of accuracy given that chimps and humans have roughly 95% identical genomes.

As for fossil evidence, I have no idea -- but there are people who study primate paleontology, maybe there are extinct apes with fossils that seem to be at a junction between chimps and humans.

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@Aedes,

It appears more complex and confusing the more that is found. How many leaps of evolution will they find ?

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@Aedes,

Yea, I think we tend to get stuck in the idea that evolution is a straight line. It's not; it's full of dead ends, tried this-failed, tried this-kind of worked and so on. With so many twists, turns, forms, iterations and adaptations it'll be a continuing 'evolving' process to learn what happened when.

By the way, if you all haven't clicked that link and read the article, it's quite fascinating.

Thanks

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@Aedes,

I seen one movie once where they assumed humans were the top of the evolutionary line and that all animals evolved in a linear path. In this they "devolved" a person and turned him into a shark man, thus saying that human ancestry came from sharks. But I think in reality if you find the common ancestor between sharks and humans, it probably would not be like a shark very much but more like a small vegetarian fish.

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@Khethil,

Khethil;94906 wrote:

Yea, I think we tend to get stuck in the idea that evolution is a straight line. It's not; it's full of dead ends, tried this-failed, tried this-kind of worked and so on. With so many twists, turns, forms, iterations and adaptations it'll be a continuing 'evolving' process to learn what happened when.

Not to mention that we're generalizing about an entire species at a small cross-section of time based on a small number of incomplete specimens. It'd be nice to study 1000 australopithecine fossils, but that'll never happen, so it's hard even to know what is an intermediate evolutionary stage versus something unique to the one specimen (like size, limb length, etc).

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@Aedes,

Aedes;94921 wrote:

Not to mention that we're generalizing about an entire species at a small cross-section of time based on a small number of incomplete specimens. It'd be nice to study 1000 australopithecine fossils, but that'll never happen, so it's hard even to know what is an intermediate evolutionary stage versus something unique to the one specimen (like size, limb length, etc).

Yes... with many pieces of that puzzle perhaps never recoverable. The conditions needed to preserve remains, for THAT long, are rare. But I think its important that we all keep in mind the complexity of the issue; we're not the end product, an increased intellect increased the chances of survival and prospering. The more I see and learn of the natural world, the more I realize how this whole system works. But it's like a big puzzle for which we don't really know what the end picture looks like, with some pieces missing, others that fit *somewhere* and so on. Quite fascinating

The article's specimen is a very nice find indeed.

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@Aedes,

... just saw the Discovery Channel's report on this: Discovering Ardi. There's also a ton of information on the web - just released after almost 20 years of analysis.

I was highly encouraged and fascinated with the wealth of information this find brought. 4.4M Years old, pelvis clearly shows this one walked upright; and did so in a terrain (now Ethiopia) that was vastly different. She had opposing thumbs (including still the feet) yet still a much smaller brain. Apparently, this specimen falls in the human-line (not the "Y" in the road) but its age suggests that the the simian/human breakpoint is much older than thought previously. If true, the chimps we see today aren't what we evolved from; moreso, what we have today are the distant descendants of our common creature.

In any case,. it brought up many more questions, but still is an exciting piece of the puzzle.

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another missing link

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