Oldest Human Ancestor Skeleton Found

[Michael]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/images/091001-oldest-human-skeleton-ardi-missing-link-chimps-ardipithecus-ramidus_big.jpg

Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"

Jamie Shreeve
Science editor, National Geographic magazine
October 1, 2009

Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.


Source (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091001-oldest-human-skeleton-ardi-missing-link-chimps-ardipithecus-ramidus.html)

This is very interesting information. It never ceases to amaze me when the previously held theories (based on zero evidence) about human development are proven wrong (again).

[Greendruid]

This article is presented very poorly and misrepresents what has and has not been said about previous ideas about human evolution. As Michael points out, this would be amazing. Unfortunately, it's more media spin than anything else. If you look at the date of A. ramidus' discovery, we knew about this species when I was in my upper years of undergraduate in 1997. I got a really close look at photos of it in my PhD in 2000. I'll probably comment more on this later but right now it suffices to say that there is actually nothing surprising about the appearance of this creature, I'm only surprised at how the information we did and did not speculate on as an academic community has been completely warped.

[Michael]

This article is presented very poorly and misrepresents what has and has not been said about previous ideas about human evolution.
What elements of the article are you critical of?

[Greendruid]

I just spent an hour writing a response to this and Firefox crashed :pullhair:

I'm going to bed now.

[Michael]

I just spent an hour writing a response to this and Firefox crashed :pullhair:

I'm going to bed now.

Haven't you learned yet that one must NEVER compose serious or lengthy replies while online using a browser? :lol:

I always compose my longer posts in my word processor and then cut-paste the result into the browser. That process never fails. The frustration level of failure is so high that one ought to take precautions against it. ;)

[Lily]

Off topic a bit, but related. Some friends of mine wrote a jaunty little instrumental a few years back and didn't have a title for it. I suggested "Ramaptihecus Rag." It stuck. I wanted them to rename the band, "Lederhosen," too. They didn't go for that one.

Greendruid, I would be very interested in reading your take on this, if you can muster the will to give it another try. :)

[Greendruid]

I'm attempting this thread again, this time I've composed it in WordPad and will transfer it instead of having Firefox crash on me after an hour of dedicated thought. There are several things that are inaccurate, misleading and just plain wrong about this article that need to be addressed. I always considered National Geo as that pretty pictures magazine, not as a reliable source of science reporting to disseminate news to the masses. It has simply gone on to perpetuate mis-truths yet again and it really irks me! So, let the tirade begin!:

1. There is no such thing as a missing link. True, dedicated scientists have not been looking for one since Raymond Dart found the Taung Child in 1924 in S. Africa and the Piltdown Skull was shown to be a hoax. The fact is, this idea of a link between chimps and humans has several facts of evolution completely wrong. The first thing to understand is that chimps and humans are cousins. Humans did not evolve from chimps. The two species evolved from a shared, ancestral population of some other creatures which we have yet to find. There is no "link" that exists between the two of us. The second thing is the rather static view of evolution that so many people have in the popular understanding of the concept. People think about the human species as though it is one thing that exists and has existed from point A until present day. This is patently false. Homo sapiens is a unified species of individuals who are more or less the same but we are hardly static. Humans are constantly evolving and changing. The third thing is the concept of the way speciation occurs. People often believe in some new species springing forth one afternoon, or suddenly all the Australopithecus afarensis woke up one day and were suddenly transformed into Homo habilis or some version of this. Speciation occurs in some members of isolated populations, and occasionally the whole population, whereby the separation, physically or culturally, causes the two species to no longer be able to mate and produce viable offspring. This is not a rapid process and it is probably not entirely evident to those that its happening to either.

2. There are no Ardipithecus ramidus bones - they are now fossils. This distinction is important because bone would imply the ability to extract DNA from the remains.

3. The study of chimpanzee anatomy and behaviour will never be largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings. No anthropologist should have said that and I'd be shocked to find that one did. It looks like the comment isn't in quotes so I'm sure it was just journalistic commentary. The study of chimpanzee anatomy and behaviour, regardless of how they are related to us in the end analysis, has been extremely relevant to understanding our beginnings. Understanding what makes the difference between an efficient tool-maker (us) and a sufficient tool-maker (chimps), the anatomy associated with knuckle-walking, the behaviours around the killing and sharing of meat, there are too many for me to list here but the work that primatologists who study chimps have done to help us understand our beginnings has been invaluable.

4. The fact that Aridpithecus has a very generalist skeleton is not only not surprising but was to be expected. We have a generalist skeleton and you can almost never evolve a generalist from a specialist. It is not in the least bit surprising that this creature is neither well-suited to climbing trees nor to walking upright - neither are we. Any of you that have kids or remember your childhoods well will note the exuberance that most human children exhibit when given the opportunity to climb a tree. We do it - we don't do it as well as a chimp or orang-utan but we do it nonetheless. Some human societies actually live in trees were flooding is prone in the Southern Pacific. We also don't walk upright very well, at least our bodies take a bloody hard beating for it. Eventually we mess up our backs, knees, hips or feet or all of the above because our skeletons are based on a tree-dwelling blueprint. None of the adaptations are shocking to anyone doing this kind of work. The report of such is sensationalism.

5. Tim White likes the limelight. For him to claim that he's able to do biology with fossil remains is a bit like Dr. Frankenstein claiming he can do psychology now with his creation. No matter how hard any palaeoanthropologist tries, we can never reconstruct the biology of the past. We can certainly theorise about it but there are just too many variables to piece everything together again. This is why Tim White is an anthropologist and not a biologist. He deals with dead things, not living things. Just because they were once living doesn't make him an almost biologist.

6. The fact that they resurrected Lovejoy's Sex for Food hypothesis was the cherry on top for me. What a line of bullshit. This outdated, outmoded and sexist theory is a load of bunk that places the role of men in the importance of ancestral human societies far above its likely place. In all studies ever done on hunting and gathering peoples, 80-90% of the caloric intake of the groups was dependent on the gathering skills of women, not the hunting skills of men. It also removes the role of the woman from manipulating social situations for her advantage. As though women had no choice in making those decisions about whom they would mate with. Just wait around until some guy brings you food. When he does, you're set for life! Crap!

End tirade.

[Non Sequitur]

good post :thumbsup:

[Zarquon]

Enlightening; I can't really comment as I'm not in the science stream.
On a related note: Would you call Scientific American reliable or is it also sensationalist ?

[Lily]

1. There is no such thing as a missing link. True, dedicated scientists have not been looking for one since Raymond Dart found the Taung Child in 1924 in S. Africa and the Piltdown Skull was shown to be a hoax. The fact is, this idea of a link between chimps and humans has several facts of evolution completely wrong. The first thing to understand is that chimps and humans are cousins. Humans did not evolve from chimps. The two species evolved from a shared, ancestral population of some other creatures which we have yet to find. There is no "link" that exists between the two of us.

This is probably the most misunderstood fact of evolution and, the one most misquoted by the religious right when poo-pooing the entire Theory. Too many believe that there is a straight line between chimps and us, when in fact the evolutionary picture of homo sapiens looks more like a branching tree. Personally, I find it fascinating that modern humans and Neanderthals lived during the same time.

Thank you for a most enlightening rant, Greendruid.

[Americano]

Thank you Greendruid, excellent post!

[Greendruid]

No problem everyone - glad I could help disseminate my version of "the truth" :lol:

[Americano]

No problem everyone - glad I could help disseminate my version of "the truth" :lol:

Your professionalism shines for me. Not only do you heat with wood, the posts you make on subjects that normally make my head hurt contain enjoyable portions of technical expertise with excellent dialog.

[Greendruid]

:o Aw shucks! Hopefully my tenure committee feels the same way later this month.