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Ancient Skull Unearthed in Africa
BrianGa writes "This BBC article reports on
a skull which scientists say is the most important discovery in the search
for the origins of humankind since the first
Australopithecus ape-man remains were found in Africa in the 1920s.
The newly discovered skull finally puts to rest any idea that there might be a single missing link between humans and chimpanzees, they say. Analysis of the
ancient find is not yet complete, but already it is clear that it has an
apparently puzzling combination of modern and ancient features."
They already tried this with a mammoth and ran into some problems and this is with something that died a lot more recent and was in a lot better condition when found. I doubt that they will be able to clone something from this. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/m ammoths000313.html
If someone can tell me how to make an acutal link I'd appreciate it.
On a more serious note, seeing as a human being has already been cloned, would it be too much to expect a clone of this guy or girl? It would only take a tiny amount of good DNA... If it survived.
Unfortunately, DNA simply doesn't survive the fossilization process. The closest they've been able to come is extracting damaged Neandertal DNA, and that specimen was fairly old (40,000 bp if memory serves). Even with that, they had to drill pretty far into the partially fossilized bone to get it. Something on this order is simply not possible.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Not to be rude, but "duh." Even Darwin said that apes and humans evolved from a common ancestor--the only ones who talk about humans descending from apes are horribly misinformed creationists. It's akin to your family tree--unless you live in West Virginia, typically you're not descended from your cousin. From an evolutionary standpoint, modern apes are our cousins, not our ancestors.
Regarding the statement you quoted--the mystery is not that our family tree has branches. That much we know. For example, based on DNA analysis we know that Neandertals were probably a subspecies that died out, not our ancestors--another branch in the tree, you could say. The wonder lies in investigating these branches, and discovering new forks, roots, and origins.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
In my mind while this does raise a slew of new questions, it still amounts to increasing proof of some form of evolution (even if Darwin's exact description of the process doesn't turn out to be all that accurate).
On the funny side, this will be the second time in recent history the right has been upset over hanging chads (from trees this time
11*43+456^2
of the jury, I am just a simple caveman. Your "scientists" found me frozen in an ice flow and unthawed me. /. I wonder if little men are inside my screen writing messages to me.
Your ways frighten and confuse me. When I read
But there is one thing I do know, that picture of the skull is my dead brother!
Wasn't that claim made about the Piltdown Man, which was in the textbooks for a number of years, before it was found to be a fake? Good science means extensive and thorough testing. Once said testing has taken place, then that claim be made.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards. I suspect in many regards there is more in common between us and a baboon than a baboon and a gorilla.
I stole this Sig
And in the interest of fairness, will moderators be willing to equally mod up the rebuttal to SciAm's article?
Note: posted anonymously so no "karma whore" charge can be leveled on asking for mod-up.
> > Evolution is one theory that explains it, creation is another.
> The difference is that we have overwhelming evidence for evolution, as well as actual observation. For creation, we have zero evidence and no possibility of ever having evidence.
Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation. Two species are similar? God re-used a good design! Two species are different? God used a different design! The predator is well equiped to ravish the prey? God didn't want it to go hungry! The prey is well equiped to escape from or defend against the predator? God didn't want it to be eaten!
It's a wildcard explanation, and because it can "explain" anything, it explains nothing.
The only thing the "theory" of creation is incompatible with is the theory of evolution. And that's only because creationists don't want it to be.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Hell, in 1862 Lord Kelvin (absolute zero guy) deducedthe world was only 400 million years old, so evolution couldn't possibly happen [his math was valid, but was based on assumptions that were later discovered to be wrong].
I don't think it's fair to call it "assumptions". The fact is, radioactive decay hadn't been discovered yet, so he can hardly be faulted for leaving its effects out of his equations. (Lurkers: he calculated the earth's age based on how long it would take to radiate off the heat of gravitational collapse, down to how hot the earth was at that time. Unaware that the core is still generating heat, he vastly undercalculated how long the earth could have been around and still be so hot.)
> Anyhow, the dawn of humans/humanoids has consistently been pushed back and assumptions proven wrong as more artifacts are discovered.
Yes, creationists like to crow whenever new evidence requires scientists to revise their models. What they neglect is that the consistent trend of those required revisions over the last several hundred years has been to relocate the beginnings of {humanity, the earth, the universe} to vastly earlier epochs, i.e. further from what you can squeeze out of the biblical story. I.e., the more evidence we get, the more egregiously wrong creationism is shown to be.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think that you should set this story a little higher. While the ethno-palentologist(s) who found the skull (and jaw fragments) won't say that its the missing link (quite correctly, we don't know that such a thing exits yet), it does fit right into the middle of a five million year gap in our knowledge (between 10 and 5 million years ago we had nada).
--
imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein-
> > Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation.
> Oh right, and "The Theory of Evolution" isn't? When was the last time you read of someone using "The Theory of Evolution" to make a valid, provable prediction on the evolution of a species?
As a matter of fact, I read that kind of stuff quite regularly. The ToE predicts intermediate forms; we find intermediate forms. A new one was announced today, if you happened to read the story at the top of this thread.
The ToE also makes interesting predictions about how DNA comparisons will turn out, what age of rock certain fossils will appear in, etc. And the DNA and rocks serve it up, as expected, regularly.
Learn a bit about the facts before you try your hand at evaluating the theory.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards.
Yes, we are considered apes by any reasonable standard.
That is, it's impossible to draw the primate family tree such that every species below some chosen fork is called 'ape' and these two constraints hold true for the chosen sub-tree:
- everything we think of as an ape is in the sub-tree
- humans are not in the sub-tree
To get a conventional meaning for 'ape' requires special pleading, a definition to the tune of "all the species in this sub-tree except humans".That can be done, of course, and in fact that's how the traditional list of 'apes' works out now that we know the cladistic relationships, but the result is a definiton that obscures rather than reveals. Best just to call ourselves apes and let the creationist snivel.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Tell me of examples of rates of mutation where a beneficial mutation occurs compared to harmful/harmless mutations. Cite an example where such beneficial mutations are shown to take place on enough of a regular basis to be useful.
...Consider also that for two parents to possess the same beneficial mutation, they must have obtained it from a common ancestor - meaning that they likely inherited a number of other harmful recessive mutations - of which there is a much greater chance of the child inheriting them and expressing them. So if a child has both recessive genes of a harmful mutation, he likely has inherited a number of other, harmful recessive genes.
The merest moment's thought would have told you that the more "fit" a species is, the less likely any given mutation is going to be beneficial. However, as the climate changes, or meteors strike, or a new predator moves into your stomping grounds, you suddenly find that your species is less fit than before. The result is that for purely external reasons, the rate of "good" mutations is suddenly higher.
This is a simple optimization problem, and like all optimization problems, there is a law of diminishing returns.
It's also the mechanism of punctuated equilibrium, q.v..
> Also, take note of this: most mutations are recessive.
Even if that is true (and I've certainly never heard it before), "most" isn't sufficient to disrupt evolution. At worst it would slow things down, but no one says evolution is in any hurry.
In fact this may help evolution along since it increases diversity in the population by sheilding some "bad" mutations from being selected out. Because what's "bad" today might suddenly be "good" after the big meteor strikes next week.
>
Who's making up all these rules requiring "a number of other harmful recessive mutations"?
> Face facts: genetic diversity decreases under normal circumstances.
No, it's extraordinary circumstances that decrease genetic diversity, such as the genetic bottleneck that reduced the population of cheetahs to something like 17 in the not too distant past, almost eliminating their genetic diversity in the process.
> The history of genetic traits points all creatures to a common ancestor merely 6000 years ago.
That statement smells exactly like you would expect it to smell, considering where it came from.
<Snip silly probability argument based on a parody of the theory of evolution and made-up numbers; see last week's thread if you are interested in such guff. The surest sign that creationism is a pseudoscience is that its proponents keep offering arguments long after they have been refuted.>
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Note that this skull was found in sand, not in volcanic rock. It clearly fossilized in a different area (sand is not high enough in calcium carbonate to cause petrification) and got relocated into the sand. The dating was done by comparison with other fossils found in the area, but if they were all relocated there somehow, why assume they're from the same layer of rock somewhere else? There were no skeletal bones which would indicate whether this skull belonged to a bipedal species, nor were there any gender identifying bones found. So that means we have a skull with the size of a chimp skull, the brain capacity of a chimp skull, less striking canines than modern chimps(male) but about the same as modern chimps(female). Hmmm, wonder if this is just a female chimp. Apply Occam's razor, folks! Look at this without the hype, and it's pretty clear it's not what many claim it to be.
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