Isn't that special?
Posted on 11/07/2005 8:35:20 AM PST by dead
Palaeontologists excavating a dump outside Barcelona have found a skull dating back 14m years that could belong to a common ancestor of apes and humans.
The nearly intact skull, which has a flat face, jaw and teeth, may belong to a previously unknown species of great ape, said Salvador Moya, the chief palaeontologist on the dig. "We could find a cradle of humanity in the Mediterranean," he said.
A routine land survey for a planned expansion of the Can Mata dump in Els Hostalets de Pierola turned up the first surprise in 2002: a primate's tooth.
Since then, scientists from the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Sabadell have unearthed nearly 12,000 fossils of primates and other animals that lived during the Middle Miocene era - between 14m and 8m years ago - when the area was covered by tropical rainforest and populated by the precursors of today's elephants, antelopes and monkeys.
Last year, the team found a 13m-year-old partial skeleton, also believed to be a common ancestor of apes and humans - a male fruit-eater, nicknamed Pau.
"If there is a place in the world where it is possible to find an entire skeleton of a common ancestor to the great apes and humans, it is Hostalets de Pierola," Mr Moya told El País newspaper. "In few places [will] you uncover so many connected vertebrae in such good condition."
The Can Mata dump sits above clay soil in which animal remains became trapped and well-preserved.
The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer was the work of an illustrator collaborating with the scientist Grafton Elliot Smith, and was done for a British popular magazine, not for a scientific publication. Few if any other scientists claimed Nebraska Man was a human ancestor. A few, including Osborn and his colleagues, identified it only as an advanced primate of some kind. Osborn, in fact, specifically avoided making any extravagant claims about Hesperopithecus being an ape-man or human ancestor:
Most other scientists were skeptical even of the more modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate. It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible. For example, in his two-volume book Human Origins published during what was supposedly the heyday of Nebraska Man (1924), George MacCurdy dismissed Nebraska Man in a single footnote:
Based on his own theories about how brains had evolved and wishful thinking, Dubois did claim that Java Man was "a gigantic genus allied to the gibbons", but this was not, as creationists imply, a retraction of his earlier claims that it was an intermediate between apes and humans. Dubois also pointed out that it was bipedal and that its brain size was "very much too large for an anthropoid ape", and he never stopped believing that he had found an ancestor of modern man (Theunissen 1989; Gould 1993; Lubenow 1992). (The creationist organization Answers in Genesis has now abandoned the claim that Dubois dismissed Java Man as a gibbon, and now lists it in their Arguments we think creationists should NOT use web page.)
Despite this, the skullcap definitely does not belong to any ape, and especially not to a gibbon. It is far too large (940 cc, compared to 97 cc for a gibbon), and it is similar to many other Homo erectus fossils that have been found. One of these is Sangiran 17, also found on Java. This skull, which is never mentioned by creationists, is an almost complete cranium and is clearly human, albeit primitive. Others are the Turkana Boy and ER 3733 fossils, both of which creationists recognize as human.
It is easy to score cheap rhetorical points by implying that scientists are so incompetent that they cannot tell the difference between a human and a donkey. A more charitable explanation, which turns out to be the correct one, is that the bone is genuinely difficult to identify, as proved by the fact that debate over its status has continued for over 10 years.
A fractal analysis of the skull sutures by Gibert and Palmqvist (1995) strongly indicated that the fragment was not from an equine. Also in 1995, an international symposium was eventually held at Orce to discuss this and other material, and a number of workers there also suggested that VM-0 was a hominid fossil (Zihlman and Lowenstein 1996).
Two articles appearing in July 1997 disputed that claim, however. Palmqvist (1997), citing errors in the paper that he had coauthored with Gibert, now claimed that the fractal evidence was clearly in favor of an equid origin for VM-0, and Moya-Sola and Kohler (1997) made the same claim based on an anatomical study. Even this has not resolved the debate, because a later paper (Borja et al. 1997) has argued in favor of VM-0 being a hominid, based on immunological studies of fossil proteins performed at two independent laboratories. For now, it would seem safest to make no firm conclusions about the identity of VM-0 or the other possible hominid fossils from Orce.
Given the topic, it is somewhat appropriate that the pic of Helen Thomas you posted on #70 appears to have a skull for the top button.
Yes, you are.
Hey! It's tough to nail this stuff down to a particular date. Why, since this "find" was reported a year ago, this little fella aged one million years. Course, what's one or two million years in the grand scheme of evolution? Peanuts, I tell you!
'Original' great ape discovered
Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas. The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.
Nobody prays to Darwin, any more than anyone prays to Einstein. In fact, most people who accept the theory of evolution also have some sort of religious beliefs.
AND..Why would an educated group of people spare no expense in trying to prove that they are really monkeys?
Because, as uncomfortable as the fact might be to some people, we are apes. Pretending an uncomfortable fact doesn't exist doesn't actually change that fact.
Isn't that special?
You would prefer that children be taught that the 2LoT proves evolution is not possible?
Or that the speed of light, along with decay rates, was infinitely fast 6000 years ago?
Or perhaps one of the other hundreds of intentional creation science lies?
But we can tell from the fossils and the genome the sequence of ancestors of the human body, and its closest relatives, soul or not.
Our common ancestry with the other apes isn't a question of belief, it's a fact supported by all the available evidence.
Why does the thought that we are closely related to chimpanzees bother you so much?
Care to show some evidence for this? Care to show what this 'information' is?
Bite your tongue and sign me up for the 2nd revolution already!
<< That's clearly a demon from hell. >>
What could possibly have given you the idea that "demons" are "from hell"?
You must not believe in ID, then.
"Why does the thought that we are closely related to chimpanzees bother you so Much"
It doesn't bother me in the least if you believe you evolved from chimps.
Kudos, You beat me by 8 minutes. :P
(Sigh) Humans didn't evolve from chimps. We share a common ancestor with chimps.
Although he is perhaps better known for his other contribution to mankind...
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