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Well I'll Be A Monkey's Uncle
killproc writes "A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought. The report, published in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago."
Scientists: Humans and Apes share a common ancestor.
:-)
Creationists: No they don't, God created us all as we are now.
Scientists: To clarify, we're actually descended from the interbreeding between our ancestral humans and early chimps, which created a third, infertile "hybrid" species, the human equivalent of a mule. Though incapable of breeding among its own, the hybrid is believed to have survived by mating with its parent human or chimp species.
Scientists: Oh, and our ancestor's were happily getting up to monkey business with their cousins (so to speak) for four million years after the split!
Creationists: Oh right, that clears that up then! Cheers
(Second scientist line ripped off from the rather good article on this subject on the Guardian's website.)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I liked my headline a whole lot better:
Was Your Ancestor a Monkey F**ker?
This guy's the limit!
Why, Steve Ballmer of course ;)
Oh no... it's the future.
"The Nature paper joins a wave of work showing that the lines between species are hazy ..."
This is the critical point that creationists who blather on about "macroevolution vs. microevolution" (a distinction without a difference) and "nobody has ever observed a speciation event" (just not true) willfully miss. Species lines are imposed by observers after the fact; they are not inherent in the nature of living organisms.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This is not news.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
According to my wife, it happened just last night...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
What this shows is that there was likely interbreeding between the ancestor line of humans and the ancestor line of chimpanzees. Unfortunately, all the headlines I've read skip that distinction and dive right into "humans and chimps interbred." They were not either modern humans or modern champanzees, and were likely much closer in genetics and appearance than we are to modern chimps, even though even now we are very close genetically after 5 million years of divergence.
I think I'll stop here.
A sampling of real headlines courtesy of Google News:
Gr-ape lengths made in human DNA study
Men mated with chimps for 1m years (now that's endurance!)
A chimp off the ol' block
Chimps & Early Man couldn't stop lovin'
Grandma Manimal
And they keep going and going...
This guy's the limit!
What a great way to start off the day with a laugh!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
here
Dubya!
That was weeks ago, and it was on a dare. Let's speak no more of this.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Robin Williams' body hair explained.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
I know the headline was probably meant as a joke, but before the Creationists go, um, ape on us it should be noted that Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Bonobos, Orangutangs and Man are all "great apes", evolved from earlier species. Apes evolved from Old World Monkeys about 25 million years ago.
Apes are differentiated from monkeys by their larger brain size, versatile shoulder joints, and lack a tail.
> I mean all that hair and leathery lips!
It doesn't seem to have slowed Paris Hilton down.
...final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago.
They should go to the mall sometime and revise their estimate accordingly.
John Hawks, a professor of anthropology, has a pretty sound and harsh refutation of the article. It looks like, if John is to be followed, that this is some pretty wishful thinking and sloppy work.
He has a follow-up post on his weblog as well.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I thought the last 2 US presidential elections were evidence of much more recent human-chimp interbreeding. Did I miss a meeting or something? Maybe it was orangs...
A-Bomb
Hell, some people are still screwing animals so I wouldn't be that suprised.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Please, you unenlightened folks all have it wrong. It's an indisputable fact that the Flying Spaghetti Monster implanted that genetic information in Humans and Chimps just to make it LOOK like we're evolved from a common ancestor. He's so sneaky!
Arrrrrrrr matey...
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I hate to quibble, but the summary is not quite right. It isn't like there were chimpanzees, humans evolved "up" from chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees remained the same. This isn't how evolution works. What happened was that a single species broke into two separate species. Both species continued to change and evolve. A chimpanzee has done just as much "evolving" as a human has, it just went in a different direction. Whatever the case though, if you were to compare a chimpanzee ancestor to a human and a modern chimp, you would find that you are looking at three very different species.
I am not saying that human evolution isn't teh pwn, but keep in mind that things don't "branch" like in a tree where the original branch remains. When things branch they move off in different directions and the original species before the branch is lost.
Let's not forget that Chimps have been evolving along the way as well - I highly doubt that they were the same 4.5-6.3M years ago as they are now, so *our ancenstors* were doing it with *their ancestors*, not with "chimps" per se.
We'll, I'm curious, since there appears to be relatively recent common ancestry. Do we know if humans can successfully mate with any other primate?
Now all the furries are going to come out and say that what they do is perfectly natural. Damn you, science, damn you.
Choked when I realized maybe Tarzan mated with Cheetah. Obviously we're taking about a common ancestor way before Homo Erectus--the latter dating back 2 million years ago. Still that explains why Chimps and Humans have so much in common, sharing 96% of their DNA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_sapiens
I'm surprised that nobody got killed trying to release this blasphemous information.
1) Earth older than 6000 years? check
2) Support of evolution? check
3) bestiality OMGWTFBBQ!! check
The fundies must be clawing their own skin off reading this!
do() || do_not();
Gosh, that gets on my every last nerve! Apes are not monkeys and chimps are apes! Now I feel better. Thank you very much!
A guy on vacation goes to the big city as a tourist when he makes the acquaintance of someone named Sal. Sal is a gregarious guy, knows everything about the city, and seems to have done everything it is possible to have done, so tourist guy is happy to have him along as a companion.
During their travels, Sal points to a block of row homes. "See those houses? I was on the construction crew that built those, and maybe half the other houses in this neighborhood. But do they call me "Sal, the home builder?" No."
Later, while crossing a bridge, Sal points to a spot on the river below. "See that? Right there, there was this rowboat with a bunch of kids in it, which capsized. Idiot parents didn't put lifejackets on the kids. So I had to jump in and save the little guys. Seven kids, I pulled out of the water! But do they call me, "Sal, the saver of drowning children?" No."
Later still, they're passing the metropolitan zoo. Sal looks particularly steamed. "Okay. See the primate house over there?"
"I fucked ONE chimp..."
quote: When I asked a professor point blank why the need for art and culture would develop through the course of evolution, he responded that he doesn't believe those traits would stem from evolution.
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What was he thinking? Of course it stems from evolution.
Art may be the equivalent of stronger muscles for the mind. Artists may make it possible to do completely new and useful activities.
Or easier to understand bee dances- artists may figure out new ways to communicate ideas for the rest of the social group.
Or a peacock's tail- artists may have sex & reproduce more than non-artists.
Or just another way of gathering food. "Rich" members of society give food & resources to artists allowing artists to survive and reproduce. So artists are a successful symbiote or parasite on powerful or rich members of society.
---
Some things like "perfect" pitch or a "four octive range" are rare but basic talents run strong in some families just as talent for football runs strong in others.
---
As soon as a creature has the ability to be happy or unhappy (and even dogs can do this) then you can train them to behave differently without having to give them real food or resources. How is a painting of a rich patron that different from a pat on the head and praise to your dog that fetched the dead pigeon for you (or rolled over and played dead).
Art could start randomly-- a joke or story or picture that stimulates the brain of barely intelligent apes could definately have value (and cost to produce). Once it has value and cost, then it will be selected for or against by natural selection.
A worst case example- if you spend your people's grain to build a big statue of yourself, they may all starve and then you will be killed by them or enemy soldiers.
So art can vary from the little ruffle of yellow on the back of a bird's neck to the gaudy and expensive peacock's tail (and it does-- people somewhere probably died because of the money and resources spent on the orange gateway art project in central park).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The blurb is very misleading. There was no "intercourse between humans and chimps" because THERE WERE NO humans or chimps back then. We did not evolve from chimps, humans and chimps simply had COMMON ancestry, a very long time ago. What this means is that the ancient ancestor of humans was able to, for a period of time, interbreed with the ancient ancestor of chimps. They were NOT that different back then. They may not have even looked very different. However, the genetic code was beginning to diverge because they had formed into two isolated populations, and then came back together briefly, before diverging forever into the lineages we can observe today. This "messy" split theory is still not entirely proven, but is an interesting analysis based on genetic sequence divergance data obtained from hundreds of specimens.
As everyone knows the secondborn were created by Iluvatar and the Valar.
The interbreeding occurded in Angband where Morgoth created the orks and in Isengart where Saruman created the Urugh.
Are all songs forgotten since the Eldar left?
*sigh*
Culture - traditions that are passed down over time. These are taught, and are not done by instinct. There are several bird species, as well as primates and orcas, that have "cultures" distinct from other populations of the same species. Some orca pods have learned (and taught their offspring) how to kill seals by beaching themselves. Other orcas don't do this. Similar things happen with dolphins, tool-using birds, Japanese macaques and other primates, and the list goes on. Umm, no, they don't get fancy headdresses and dance around, but where are you going to draw the line? Arbitrarily? Psychologically, these things are culture.
Art - Bowerbirds. Look them up. Yeah, maybe it's for sexual purposes, but maybe our own art began that way as well. Several birds have taken art to an extreme to the point that sex does not appear to be the main goal.
Language - birds of the same species have different dialects in different regions. Dolphins have sounds that represent names of individuals, each name being a part of the mother's name. It's true that we don't know exactly how animals communicate, but I doubt you would say that "dolphins are different from everything else" and mean this as a point in denying the processes of evolution for that species simply because they use echolocation.
These "people do this and animals don't" never hold up, because the same distinctions can be made with EVERY organism. You are creating arbitrary boundaries.
We look so much like monkeys, we must have fucked them at some point. Brilliant science! An epiphany struck over a pint of Guinness no doubt.
Well, the chaos thing doesn't work for a lot of people studying it. Evolution is not random. Mutations are random. The processes of evolution require that some mutations are more beneficial than others, and adaptation occurs when a population alters to the point of becoming better adapted to its environment. This may be morphologically or behaviorally. Evolution has a lot of genetic components (it wouldn't happen at all without genetic variation), but the environment is what the population has to adapt to. Remember, evolution acts on the level of species or populations, not at the level of genome, and it is anything but random.
I mean, after all, we now have proof it is for propagation...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.
You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.
I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.
If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.
I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.
Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.
So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our
-jpowers
Let me share with you all something I've personally witnessed about evolution. I think it dove-tails your thread fairly well.
When I was younger living in Kingwood, TX in 1985 (still considered to be a new development at the time), I remember seeing many dead gray squirrels on the road. It didn't really seem to matter what roads, as the road kill was evenly distributed throughout the city. Over the years, I've seen exactly how they would die. These squirrels would run across the road in front of traffic. But that's not what killed them. What kills them is that they freak out and run back the other way, then back again, and again. Basically, they just run out to the road and can't make up their mind by running back and fourth till...POP...they see the underside of a tire.
Fast forward to today where the population of Kingwood, TX has at least tripled. Though more construction has taken place displacing vast areas of forests, you can still see gray squirrels all over the place. In fact, I can visually see MORE of them today then I did back in 1985. Even more astonishing, I don't see ANY dead squirrels. Maybe I will find a dead cat, or possum in rare instances, but no dead squirrels. How can this be? How can the grey squirrel population increase and yet their dead on the road decrease?!
I found the answer. When those bastards run across the road, they don't freak out anymore. They run in one direction and never look back. They keep going, and fast!
They've gotten smarter, they're adapting, surviving...evolving.
Life is not for the lazy.
Your specific arguments asking why ants hadn't developed intelligence, speech, etc, is a rediculous. You might as well ask why humans haven't evolved blowholes and the ability to hold our breaths for hours. Ants are already perfectly well adapted to their environment, and in most respects have been vastly more successful than humans. Natural language would add nothing to a species that already communicates so effectively.
>Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model
>does not seem to explain us very well.
Really, your arguments could be simplified without losing anything substantive to saying that you object that humans could have come about by the same means that other animals, which seem to lack intelligence, language, art, and other things we tend to associate with human *dignity*.
You say that evolution doesn't seem to provide a model for the development of say art. This isn't true. What is true is that art isn't a direct adaptation to the external environment. To say that this makes art supernatural or magical, means not that you don't understand evolution, but that you don't understand art.
Not everything we do is to promote our own survival (some people believe this, but they are silly). Evolution provided us with a framework, a mind, a body, but it does not set our goals. You are right to say that we have goals that other animals do not. Humans are not particularly rational agents compared to other animals in the sense that we do not as often pick the correct action to achieve our goals. However, we have more sophisticated goals.
Ants are essentially reflexive agents, and can determine the correct action from their inputs (they don't need to check memory, or apply any learned behavior whatsoever). This doesn't work for all animals though. Mammals generally must be capable of some amount of learning. Animals that must learn their behavior generally cannot respond in a rational manner to situations which have no annalogue in their personal memory. Animals with genetically ingrained reflexes essentially have the experiences of the entire species at their disposal (figuratively, not literally. they of course can't remember specific events in their species past, but their reflexes are shapped to be a proper response to them).
Why have learned behavior at all then, when the learning experience is likely as not to kill you? The answer is that much behavior is too sophisticated to be encoded in any other way. Behavior in response to "I am hungry" is pretty simple, but rational behavior in response to "my herd is being stalked by a predator" cannot really be encoded in reflex. If that behavior were encoded purely in reflexive actions, a rational predator could predict reflexive actions, and manipulate the prey into a situation where the reflexive actions would no longer be rational behavior.
In fact, there are some reasons to think that predator prey relationships are the driving factors in the evolution of human intelligence. If you think about it, a competitive multi agent game is the sort where a more and more sophisticated intelligence pays off. There's some dispute as to whether humans where on the predator or prey end of things when we were developing our intelligence, but the results seem to be the same.
Anyway, once you have something like powerful general intelligence and sympathy (the basic faculty to understand and predict the motives and actions of other agents), it sure seems like general questions about art go away. Art may very well be of no particular benefit to our survival, but merely a side effect of our intelligence, which certainly is necessary to our survival in a competitive environment.
The same could be said of human dignity in general. The degree that we are "put above" other animals. We are obviously not superior to other animals in our ability to be happy or content, certainly animals can be and often do have better lots in life then humans in terms of physical pleasure, contentment, and most of the other