Ancient hominid found - older than Lucy and taller too

It can be an anomaly in more ways than one. I'm sure there are tall progeneys from pygmys and visa-versa.

Pretty exciting stuff.

littlek, Don't take offense at my earlier post. I'm also very interested in this kind of subject. After my visit to Tanzania, Olduvai Gorge, where Mary Leakey did most of her research, I became fascinated about anthropology. I even posted something recently about a find in Indonesia - of a pygmy skull.

It seems like Hominids were well established throughout Africa, and were very diverse in morphology. Almost like a "Cambrian" explosion within the hominid line.

I wonder if the environment in that area changed in some significant way, or if a particular adaptation in hominids allowed them to exploit the existing environment in a significantly new way.

Did upright walking fuel the explosion, or was it intelligence, or something else.

Cic- absolutely no offense taken!

Rosborne - good Qs!

Lucy has been a familiar bip hominid. How would the newly found one be named.. (?)

They haven't classified it yet.

rosborne, In connection with your question, I've often wondered about how the different races came about some millions of years ago? What is fascinating is the "recognizable" differences of the races, and the somewhat smaller differences between the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. A bigger mystery are the Japanese Ainus, a caucasian race in the middle of Japan.

Eve?

They probably want to find out what sex it was before they name it. Or they can just do like Saturday Night Live and call it Pat

Merry, I doubt it - way too early. Or, way too late. Eve, in archeology and paleontology, is the one who gave us all our mitachondrial bits

Anyone could name Eve's daughter?

It's amazing how quickly superficial morphological differences accumulate in human populations. My guess is that sexual and cultural selection, more than raw survival selection, has a lot to do with how quickly human races develop.

People are notorious for prefering their own "kind" (or themselves), so there's a good chance that whoever was running the show in a particular place and time probably set the stage for generations to come (lots of snowballs started rolling down different hills).

Rosborne - Aren't those one and the same?

I don't think so. Even though sexual selection does affect an organism's ability to reproduce, I think you get a wider range of selected characteristics when you include sexual selection and not just survival.

Otherwise a Peacock would never have a showy tail. And ladies wouldn't wear lipstick and eyeshadow.

Quote, "Otherwise a Peacock would never have a showy tail. And ladies wouldn't wear lipstick and eyeshadow." We're talking real science now.

Damn. I just mentioned this in another thread. Now I am just a copycat.


Technically, there aren't any 'races' of humans. In fact the entire genome is very, very tight - chimps have a genetic diversity that swamps our own (and a history as long as ours for that matter). It appears that at one point in time the entire human population of the planet shrank to about 1,000 individuals - this 'bottleneck' has had some effects on our development. In smaller populations that don't outbreed (for whatever reason) there can be a number of odd genetic diseases occuring.

You have got to grasp the very potent idea that we aren't the 'best of the best', but the last ones standing. There have been at least a dozen types of 'human' that have been successful in the short term. Ours is the only only that lasted.

However, there are a number of morphological characteristics that still identify populations from various populations. If you are of predominantly Asian descent, you will have a more rounded skull than someone of Austronesian descent, for instance. But you will find that these genetic 'differences' are in no way so gross that it would confuse a naturalist from Alpha Centuri - they would check out our DNA and gleefully announce..

Quote, "However, there are a number of morphological characteristics that still identify populations from various populations." Still doesn't satisfy my curiosity why there are different "features" that seems to have 'stuck' that we humans call 'race.'

Stilly's point is close to the one I was going to make -- it seems possible that the hominids from each pool (Lucy's time, this new one's time) varied in height, and Lucy happened to be a short one and the new one happened to be a tall one. Could still be that, on average, the hominids from the new one's time could have been shorter than the hominids from Lucy's time. (Especially given that Lucy's female and they don't seem to know whether the new one is a male yet, since males are usually taller.)