Posted on 11/18/2004 3:41:57 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WASHINGTON - A nearly 13 million-year-old ape discovered in Spain is the last probable common ancestor to all living humans and great apes, a research team says in Friday's issue of Science magazine.
A husband-and-wife team of fossil sleuths unearthed an animal with a body like an ape, fingers like a chimp and the upright posture of humans. The ancient ape bridges the gap between earlier, primitive animals and later, modern creatures.
This newest ape species, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, is so significant that it adds a new page to ancient human history.
The researchers sidestepped a controversy raging through the field by not claiming their find moves great ape evolution - and the emergence of humans - from Africa to Europe. Salvador Moya-Sola, one of the Science paper co-authors, said the new ape species probably lived in both places.
"The problem is the fossil record," Moya-Sola said. "The fossil record in Africa, especially in the upper Miocene, is very scarce. And the fossils are very rare. But this is only a question of work, and work, and work."
David Begun, a University of Toronto researcher who studies fossil evidence of human and ape evolution, said the Spanish find bolsters the idea that modern apes evolved primarily in Eurasia.
"There is no evidence in Africa, so you can always speculate they might have been there," Begun said. "I prefer to go with the evidence."
Coaxed by a reporter to say Pierolapithecus catalaunicus represented a "missing link," Meike Kohler, another of the paper's co-authors, demurred. "I don't like, very much, to use this word."
Kohler added: "This does not mean that just this individual - or even this species, exactly this species - must have been the species that gave rise to everything else which came later in the great ape tree. But it is, if not the species, most probably a very closely related species that gave rise to it."
Maybe. Maybe not, argues David Strait, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University at Albany who studies early humans. He said the specimen is "spectacular," but he worried the team's approach to assigning evolutionary relationships was a bit informal and needs confirmation by more rigorous methods.
"'Ancestor' is a loaded term. It's very hard to identify ancestors in the fossil record," Strait cautioned.
The site near Barcelona that yielded the specimen had only one hominid, or ape-like primate. Moya-Sola said apes, however, were common in the area millions of years ago. The team has already found a tooth elsewhere and expects to find more hominid fossils.
Still, scientists who puzzle through the mysteries of early human history were electrified by the Pierolapithecus catalaunicus discovery.
"This is a remarkable find," said F. Clark Howell, a University of California at Berkeley professor emeritus. "It indicates a diversity in hominids ... in western Eurasia at a time where we're beginning to think we had a good handle on how much diversity there was."
Howell helps run a National Science Foundation initiative that examines hominid origins.
Living great apes include humans, chimps, gorillas and orangutans. The group is thought to have split from the lesser apes, such as gibbons and siamangs, about 14 million to 16 million years ago.
Paleontologists have searched for remains of great ape ancestors after that key split. Fossils have been scarce and hypotheses floated on the basis of bone fragments.
The team led by Moya-Sola and Kohler pieced together 83 bones and identifiable fragments of bones from an adult male ape.
This ape didn't swing through trees with the curved fingers of an orangutan. Nor did it knuckle-walk on four limbs with the horizontal trunk posture of a chimp.
The ape's body design suggests it was an adept and agile climber that kept its trunk upright. To do that, its chest had to be shaped in a certain way and the shoulder blades needed to hold to a certain position on the back.
"Our fossil shows this," Moya-Sola said.
What it does not show is the evolution of hands suited to the demands of such locomotion as swinging through tree branches. That fine-tuning of great ape hands, the team argues, came later.
ping
BTTT
Why don't they ever put a disclaimer in these articles, stating that these are truths based upon your belief in Darwins theory? They write these as if they were fact rather than fiction.
The first Spanish Socialist!
Basque Separatists trying to gain some media attention?
I didn't know Helen Thomas was that old!!!!
What's with the keyword spamming? Leftist slobs have nothing better to do?
From his latest photos, KClinton the Impeached is catching up fast with fossil guy.
The researchers sidestepped a controversy raging through the field by not claiming their find moves great ape evolution - and the emergence of humans - from Africa to Europe. Salvador Moya-Sola, one of the Science paper co-authors, said the new ape species probably lived in both places.
hmmm...I think I spotted this guy with a DEAN in 04 sign
during the early runoffs
Doogle
they were frenchmen, at the height of their power and prestige. Been downhill since.
Micael Moore's Family Plot Discovered?
"Another one of those things that don't exist and will never be found" ping!
It's very hard to identify ancestors in the fossil record," Strait cautioned.
I agree. That is because there aren't any.
We have keyword trolls.
It's a miracle!
It's just one more on a pile of once-missing links. No coincidence. It's been raining them for decades.
Nothing to see here ....move along.
They unearthed an ANIMAL? I thought they were fossil hunters! And can anyone explain how fossils supposedly 13 million years old can show the posture of the original animal? I think the likely story is that they unearthed a fossil, and the rest is conjecture.
Yikes!
Ping the usual suspects?
Animals that walk upright have very different skeletons from animals that walk on all fours.
No, this is not a human ancestor.
It is clear from the study of the cranial dimensions which are limited, and its orientation that this creature belongs in the line of democrats.
Maybe because this is directed at the scientific community, which except for an extreemly few folks who make their money selling Creationist literature, is 100% in agreement with Evolutionary theory.
LOL!
Flying monkeys haven't evolved very far, have they?
Or it could just be another extinct animal.
(But it's still one from a spot on the family tree we didn't have before.)
The funny thing, though, is how those extinct animals when we find them continue to further outline what looks like a phylogenetic tree of life, as evolution demands. That's important because an intelligent designer wouldn't have to mimic evolution so precisely.
For instance, we could someday find a bird-amphibian hybrid or a fossil thereof, if only an intelligent designer had ever once seen fit to order one. Such a monster could not have evolved under the commonly understood amphibians-reptiles-birds evolutionary scenario. In fact, it would falsify that scenario at once. However, 145 years after Darwin, we have seen nothing like that. What we see might as well be evolution as anything looser.
Hyperbole. Even among evolutionists there is not 100% agreement.
You can't really confirm these "Human-Chimp" skeletons, since you can never get any DNA evidence from them proving that they're the real missing link.
Chalk this one up in the "Junk Science" category.
The presence of evolution doesn't preclude design, nor would the existence of a Designer preclude evolution.
No one has claimed that Pierolapithecus is the missing link, only that it has characteristics and the right age that one would expect to find in a missing link. Words like "proof" and "proving" don't have a place in this conversation. No one can prove anything here, they can only assemble evidence. Then we look at the preponderance of evidence and assess reasonable doubts. There is never a final verdict, only strongly indicated conclusions, on an investigation that remains a work in progress. That's not junk science.
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks WG. Similar, newer topic linked below. Will add 'em and ping from this one after I get home.
Fossil Ape May Be Ancestor of All Apes - Report
Science - Reuters ^ | Thu Nov 18, 2004 | Maggie Fox
Posted on 11/18/2004 7:00:02 PM PST by Pharmboy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1283460/posts
Creationists have no room to talk about 100% agreement. How old is the world? 6000 years? 4 billion years? Some unknown number?
The Creationists are made up of innumerable religious denominations. Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, Gentiles, even Islamics. None of you can agree on what the Bible says. You have no room to criticize science for a few minor disagreements, none of which deal with abrogating the basic tenents of Evolution.
I've stated my opinion innumerable times on these threads. I think that Creationists are creating an artificial stumbling block for young people by insisting on contesting science over an issue that isn't central to their faith. It matters none exactly HOW God created the universe and life. Just that He did it. Just as God can work in your life and you might write it off as "chance", Evolution works exactly the same way. There is no contradiction between Genesis and science.
And those Creationists who promote the idea that Creationism should be taught side-by-side with Evolution in schools are being particularly stupid. Getting government schools to present two sides and forcing kids to discuss which they must pick is a guarantee that many of them will reject God forever in their lives. Had you agreed with me that there is no contradiction between Evolution and Genesis and taught your children that fact, that half of the classroom that rejected God might someday come to know Him.
You fools.
Design cannot be disproven. Neither can it be disproven that when you walk out of a room, its contents including everyone in it vanish. It cannot be disproven that your waking life is a dream and your dream life real. Some ideas just aren't as useful as others. Creation, whether billions of years ago, six thousand years ago, or last Thursday, is not a usefully tight hypothesis.
By comparision, evolution might have been disproven, but hasn't been. It might have failed to accumulate an impressive volume of positive evidence, but it didn't fail.
Then you have the obvious nature of where the evolution skeptics are coming from: religious horror. It's not really about science.
Now, strictly speaking it is a fallacy to rebut an argument by pointing out the motivation of the person making the argument. In theory, it's irrelevant to the science questions that some huge percentage of evo skeptics are either Protestant evangelicals or fundie Muslims. However, you also never get any good arguments from the evo skeptics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics thing: just bogus. The "no transitional forms" mantra: unadulterated BS. Irreducible complexity: a spurious claim that a poorly defined set of features cannot have evolved. (The standard for what is IC and what is not is vague. At any rate such features could evolve by scaffolding effects.)
And where is the controversy being fought out? Not in the scientific journals and halls of academe. It's in school boardrooms and courthouses around the country. We have a political movement to damage science education without the consent of science.
It's obvious what's going on.
I agree. That is because there aren't any.
That would be a neat trick -- has each generation been hatched anew from fairy eggs, then?
It's fought on the margins on both sides. Gould often fancied himself a theologian. His adherence to evolution spilled over from scientific evidence into the realm of unimaginative hubris.
You fall into the hole he dug when you say "That's important because an intelligent designer wouldn't have to mimic evolution so precisely."
If evolution is scientific, it has nothing to say about God. Nor does it have to.
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