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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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();
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..."
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.
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.
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.