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Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally)
Omomyid writes "I wasn't actually aware that Dr. Tim White of UC Berkeley had been 'sitting' on A. ramidus but apparently he has (I remember the original flurry of interest back in the '90s when it was announced), but now Dr. White and others have assembled a nearly complete skeleton of the 4.4mya specimen and the descriptions being carried by the NY Times and the AP are intriguing. Ramidus is clearly differentiated from the other Great Apes and also more primitive than A. afarensis (Lucy), providing a nice linkage backwards to the last shared ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. According to the NY Times, a whole passel of papers will be published in tomorrow's Science magazine describing A. ramidus."
Update — 10/01 at 22:05 GMT by SS: Reader John Hawks provided a link to his detailed blog post about Ardipithecus, which contains a ton of additional details not covered in the above articles.
Now, as you can clearly see, there are TWO gaps in the fossil record, where before there was only one!
Nice try, science! /s
Why rush? After 4.4 million years, what's a decade or two?
Wow, I saw her walking down Ash street the other night. I didn't know they had crack 4.4 million years ago!
Free Martian Whores!
Monkeys have come from somewhere too - maybe humans are just another race from the same point, not related to monkeys in any way.
Well, humans come from apes, not monkeys.
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
If you had read the article - you would know that there were pieces of a large number of individuals found.
You can assume carbon testing was done, it's routine.
There's also the issue of associated plant and animal material in the fossil layer - which tends to give credence to the find.
...carrier dead.....
why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
and why exactly monkeys?
Because both the fossil record and DNA say that chimps are humans' closest relatives, with 96% identical DNA.
intelligently and in other ways they're totally different
The intelligence is only a matter of degree, and in many (perhaps more) ways that matter more than intelligence they are the same as us.
Monkeys have come from somewhere too
Monkeys and apes (including us; we are an ape species) have the same anscestors, for reasons mentioned above.
I'm not trying to troll or anything
If you are, you're doing a poor job of it.
Free Martian Whores!
That apes are not an inferior species but instead specialized in one direction and humans in another has been well understood by biologists since at least the 70's...the 1870's.
...can she run Linux?
No.
The OS designed for monkeys is MS Windows.
The long delay can be attributed to the scientist actually doing his job. Catalog, research verify, then publish. Its the difference between reactionary pseudo science and actual work that produces results.
Well, humans and apes came from a common recent ancestor.
I have an FAQ up on my blog.
It gives some of the story behind the news, and delves into the anatomy and implications for hominin origins. I'll be updating it as the day goes on to add more information.
Birthers are a group of clueless, angry white people who firmly believe President Obama was born outside the US. Deathers are a group, nearly identical in membership, that believes President Obama wants to enact 'death panels' that will deny needed health care to seniors. Most birthers are deathers, and vice versa. They also tend to believe that they either need to secede from the union, or stage a military coup, as the country has now become a communist dictatorship. Hope that helps.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ok, if you insist I not be flippant about the subject, so be it.
What creationists don't understand is that science isn't about killing religion, science couldn't care less what the religious implications of its discoveries are. Science is about the quest for knowledge, and knowing that humanity didn't evolve naturally would be the most important piece of knowledge ever discovered. In short, if evidence existed that contradicted our current scientific beliefs, it is in every scientists interests to bring that evidence to the table; the risk might be large but the payoff is enormous.
Unfortunately, the claim of an intelligent creator is difficult bordering on impossible to prove scientifically; it makes no predictions that can be tested, it happened so far in the past that there no remaining evidence to support it, and, unlike evolution, it is not an ongoing phenomonon.
It might be fun to say that humans come from apes not monkeys but the content of that statement is pretty low. Humans are apes. We share a common ancestor with the other great apes which looked pretty ape-like. But before that apes and monkeys share common ancestors that if one looked at today one would call a monkey based on appearance. So saying that we're descended from apes not monkeys is a) nitpicky and b) not completely accurate anyways.
How could you NOT be interested in knowing where humans came from?
A religious upbringing, a lack of imagination, and a poor understanding of why abstract scientific endevours can be of practical use to mankind all help. That and having your head firmly planted up your posterior.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
That isn't at difficult to explain. The problem lies in the assumption that evolution is continuous, steady change over time and that fossilization events are spread evenly throughout history. In reality, neither of those is true. Sudden changes in environment the rate of evolution to increase as ecological niches are created and destroyed. Likewise, fossilization events are rare and not spaced evenly throughout history. All it requires to create a seamingly large gap in the fossil record is for there to be a dearth of fossilization events while at the same time a sudden change in environment.
From what I have seen, you are too earnest and concerned about your karma to be trolling. So let me kindly point out some of the misconceptions others may have missed. Obviously, you get the point that nobody thinks we are descended from monkeys. That's been hammered home, yes? But above that, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that biological science consists of deciding which critters look like which other critters. While this used to be the case, back before we had better methods, we can now do genetic analysis and figure out much more accurately what is or was related to what.
You also seem to be confused as the the concept of 'related.' If you and your sister are descended from the same point, say, your mother and father, are you related? Yes. Yes you are. We are not the descendants of monkeys, but we are still in the same family, so to speak. In fact, based on genetic evidence, even several million years after we split off from our common ancestor, we were still occasionally getting it on with them and making babies. It was discussed right here on Slashdot some time ago.
I can't really tell you why this whole idea of common descent is interesting, either you find it so or you don't. I can tell you why it is interesting to other people, though. Science is a process that approaches, but never reaches the truth. We make theories, and we see what predictions those theories make. Then we look for evidence showing whether or not those predictions are true, Finally, if the evidence shows the predictions are not true, we modify our theories. For instance, we had to modify Newton's theory of gravity when its predictions about the orbit of Mercury proved false. That lead to the Einstein's theories of relativity. But we still use Newton's theories in day to day engineering, because they are simpler to calculate and give correct results outside of relativistic situations. The truth or falsehood of theories is irrelevant, the only relevant question in science is, does the theory make accurate predictions?
How does this relate to the theory of evolution? Well, it is one piece of a giant puzzle. We have all of these pieces of evidence: fossils, DNA, carbon dating, and so on. They all fit together, forming a giant structure of factual support for the theory of evolution. If even one of these pieces did not fit, for instance, if we found a rabbit skeleton from the Jurassic period, then we would have to modify inconceivably large chunks of our current theories, not just evolution, but just about everything would need reevaluation.
So here we have a new piece. Does it fit? I find that question interesting. Many other people do too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Man this sounds like an infinitely recursive loop.
And not in a bad way. If you think about the computer simulations we're been able to create in the short existence of our computer systems, it's pretty clear that someone else could had created our whole world as a simulation. Computing power is quite infinite; we're making even more and more progress all the time. And if simulation theory would be correct, we cant possibly know what kind of systems are running us.
(yeah it sounds matrix like.. but atleast it makes more sense than any religious/god crap anyway)
Except that that is not how the evidence points. As a couple of scientists I've talked to have pointed out, the real destruction of your theory isn't genetics itself, it's developmental biology. If all organisms were, as you said, simply examples of copy and paste, why on Earth would, during developmental, would fetal snakes have signals that basically turned off the leg producing genes? Those genes are still there, still pretty close to identical to the genes found in the closest relatives to snakes that do have legs.
In fact, one of the chief arguments against life being engineered, that common genes being an example of procedural code being moved around like it was some sort of biological glibc is that everything about development is made up of hacks of this kind. Whether it's developmental hacks that shut down instructions to grow legs, to the very nature of many organisms physiology (such as a certain bipedal species with spines and knees only halfway adapted to full time upright walking) that would indicate that if your theory is right, the guy that made life is outrageously incompetent or malicious to the extreme.
Besides, it isn't just a matter of some similar genes. It is the differences in genes that are often key as to relatedness. Chimps and humans have a high degree of similarity, but it isn't one-to-one for many genes. Over time the two species have diverged, which means that even the same genes aren't always identical. These differences, particularly in mtDNA, can actually be used as molecular clocks to make estimates as to when the two species diverged.
In short, the evidence does not support your point of view. That view was long ago falsified. We are not the products of copy-and-pastes, but the products of evolutionary forces that work on populations over long stretches of time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
and it seems rather odd to me that we could've had a significant population of ancestors that failed to leave a fossil record.
It's not really so odd. First, however, is the assumption that there is a significant population who didn't leave fossils. It's probably more likely that there are fossils and they just haven't been found. The Earth is big and only a small percentage of it has been searched for fossils.
Then you have to consider that not all geologic structures and death conditions are conducive to fossil formation. Go out into a wild area today and count the number of animals you find. Then count the number of somewhat intact carcasses you find. You won't find many. So of the critters out there alive today, only a tiny percentage of them will end up as fossils in another few million years. On top of that, if the places humans like to live today were in similar conditions (near large sources of water, for example), there's a good chance that we've built over any fossils many times over.
I suspect that if you made a Drake-Equation like formula for predicting finding fossils of any particular type that even if many fossils might exist, very few of them would be found. Consider that of the millions of A. afarensis that probably existed, we have only found a handful of their fossils.
So sure, there is a gap, but there's a pretty reasonable explanation for that gap. Until we have exhausted such possibilities, and without startling evidence to the contrary, we can't seriously claim that the gap in the fossil record is caused by divine or extra-terrestrial intervention.
The unifying characteristic of birthers and deathers is hopeless credulity.
Whatever the man on the Fox channel says becomes their reality. And he's convinced them someone else is forming a cult of personality. The parade of irony continues.
Part of the problem is that you're not really explaining yourself. What do you mean here? Do you mean altering of existing genes (1)? Do you mean creating completely new and novel genes (2)? Do you mean inserting kelp genes into humans (3)?
In the first example, that's pretty much an artificial form of normal genetic changes. The second example would be pretty unique, but still, the bulk of the new organism would definitely be human (or whatever species). The third example is very rare in more complex organisms, but horizontal gene transfer can occur here as well. Some part of our genome is, in fact, the product of viral infections (endo-retroviral insertions), which means that nature has already given us examples of my third type; genes that come from completely different lineages.
Now maybe you would have something of a point if we completely constructed an organism from artificial genes, or maybe constructed an organism from an entirely different replication chemistry. In that case, yes, it would be an example of wholly different tree of life. I would argue if its more a spare parts sort of an affair, where they construct a new genome from genes found in existing lineages, while it gets complicated, at its root, it still fits within the tree of life, just at multiple points. But then again, that would apply to any form of horizontal gene transfer. I've listed one pathway; ERVs, prokaryotes like bacteria often move genes back and forth, sometimes between very distantly related lineages.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't know if you noticed, but brain matter doesn't fossilize particularly well.
I disagree. You should see some of the effing fossils I work with.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I'm not sure where you get the idea we're more social. Both members of genus Pan are highly socialized (pygmy chimps are probably more socialized than humans are).
Umm... Do they have Facebook? I thought not. So obviously they are even less social than me.
Perhaps, but Bonobos (pygmy chimps) clearly get laid more than you do.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I've discussed this issue repeatedly, and always point out that your idea isn't testable. Yes, maybe God created all life. Yes, maybe He created the Earth (and our memories) 30 seconds ago. But since neither of these notions (or yours) can be tested, they're not competing with evolution because evolution can be tested. For instance, finding a chimp fossil in the Precambrian or a 1950s discovery that all species used different DNA bases. That's what makes evolution a science, while creationism is a religion.
...thanks to one abbreviation too many. It talks about "A. ramidus" (Ardipithecus ramidus) and then immediately jumps to mentioning "A. afarensis". If you didn't already know what "A. afarensis" was, you might assume that it's another species within genus Ardipithecus, but that second "A." stands for a separate genus, Australopithecus.
Humans and apes come from a common recent ancestor in the same way that Great Danes and dogs came from a common recent ancestor.
That is to say that humans are apes.
Apes are simply members of the superfamily Hominoidea, parvorder Catarrhini, order Primates, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia.
Even more specific, humans are Great Apes (please ignore the narcissism), or members of the family Hominidae, which is restricted to humans, chimps, bonobos, bili apes, gorillas and orangutans.
Humans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Homo.
Chimps, Bonobos, and Bili apes have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Hominini, genus Pan.
Gorillas have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae, tribe Gorillini, genus Gorilla.
Orangutans have:
superfamily Hominoidea, family Hominidae, subfamily Ponginae, genus Pongo.
"So, yes, chimps certainly must have evolved somewhat, but not as much as humans"
I would contend that they are equally as evolved as humans. They simply evolved in a different way.
Simply because they didn't evolve to be more akin to humans doesn't make them less evolved.
The human tailbone is most certainly vestigial. Vestigial does not mean useless; it means that it once had a given function (external tail in this case) but no longer performs that function, but does not mean that it doesn't perform a different function. In humans, our coccyx is usually comprised of 3-5 vertebrae, which are usually fused into two or three segments. Not all function in muscle attachment, as is unsurprising given the variability in the structure. People have been born with nine calcified bones in the coccyx (plus cartilaginous structures), and external tails complete with articulating vertebrae (five's the record as far as I know) have been reported in the medical literature. People have also been born without a coccyx at all, although like external tails this is rare. Removal of the coccyx is called a coccygectomy (say that to your five year old!) and can be done on the whole or just a part of the structure with little or no side effects.
You might recall that John Hinckley was a seriously deranged young man who shot President Reagan in the early 1980's.
Hinckley was absolutely obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster, extremely jealous, and in his twisted mind, loved Jodie Foster to the point that to make himself well known to her, he attempted to assassinate President Reagan.
There is speculation Hinckley may soon be released as having been rehabilitated. Consequently, you may appreciate the following letter from Nancy Reagan to the staff at the mental facility treating Hinckley reports to have intercepted:
To: John Hinckley
From: Mrs. Nancy Reagan
My family and I wanted to drop you a short note to tell you how pleased we are with the great strides you are making in your recovery. In our fine country's spirit of understanding and forgiveness, we want you to know there is a nonpartisan consensus of compassion and forgiveness throughout.
The Reagan family and I want you to know that no grudge is borne against you for shooting President Reagan. We, above all, are aware of how the mental stress and pain could have driven you to such an act of desperation. We are confident that you will soon make a complete recovery and return to your family to join the world again as a healthy and productive young man.
Best wishes,
Nancy Reagan & Family
P.S. While you have been incarcerated, Barack Obama has been banging Jodie Foster like a screen door in a tornado. You might want to look into that.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I thought he was socialist!
Or maybe that was yesterday...
He socialist communist nazi antichrist fascist muslim black-supremacist [insert bad thing here], and NO ONE who opposes him is racist. Not. One.
You can't take the sky from me...
If we'd applied the same criteria to these groups that we apply to other mammals, there actually wouldn't be two genuses here, there'd be one.
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