What does the fossil record say?

[tumbleweed41]

Did I step in it? probably so.

Just wipe your shoes off before continuing...

 

[Etritonakin]

well, I guess I'm stupid, but is that a NO or a Yes???

"Thou hast said!"

Mat 5:37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil......

....doesn't mean what many think it means, and is often used by those with imperfect or loaded questions against those they query...

Luk 23:3 And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answered him and said, Thou sayest it.

Questions may also be of evil -some cannot be answered with a yes or no because they are illogical questions -and others should not be answered with a yes or no because the intent of the one asking is evil.

 

[Alceste]

you have a point on adaptability, but this is mental evolution that has nothing to do with letting go of disproved cosmologies. its just another creationist tactic

Yes, a "tactic" for maintaining what one feels to be a relationship with divinity without becoming so attached to the dogma spouted by one's deity's middle men that one makes a complete *** of oneself every time one discusses the natural world and what we know about it.

 

[BIG D]

"Thou hast said!"

Mat 5:37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil......

....doesn't mean what many think it means, and is often used by those with imperfect or loaded questions against those they query...

Luk 23:3 And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answered him and said, Thou sayest it.

Questions may also be of evil -some cannot be answered with a yes or no because they are illogical questions -and others should not be answered with a yes or no because the intent of the one asking is evil.

I'll have to take that as a ''god made it that way''

 

[newhope101]

I have never and will never say that humans evolved from chimps. They are our closest living relations, but we are cousins not brothers nor ancestor/descendant.


No, I have shown fossils that demonstrate the hominid line going back to Australopithicines. I have never and will never claim that humans are descended from chimps. I don't know where you get these ideas, but it's not from paying attention to anything I say.:faint:

And I agree with Lovejoy.... I've said so several times... again you don't seem to pay attention to what others say. :thud:

The only thing i see is your inability to retain any information you don't like. Including my repeated agreement with Lovejoy and explainations of his position on evolution... like your crazy fixation on wanting me to say humans evolved from chimps. :slap:

No one argues that... but it doesn't refute human evolution nor does it change it all that much.

I have no smeging clue what you are trying to say here... No one has argued against this.

You refuse to define what a human is... how do you know they are all non-human?

Yeah, let me know when that happens. Thus far all we have is a creationist jumping the shark and making some outlandish claims unsupported by the very articles they quote. :sarcastic

wa:do

The ancestor of chimps have always been thought to be chimp looking. Hence, all the fossil skulls. Researchers always believed we evolved from knuckle walkers until recently. That is why Lovejoys paper is debated.

Evos have Ardi with fairly human looking hands and fingers sketched into her drawing on Wiki, which is the representation shown everywhere. Ardi was found in 1994 and details of the discovery were not published until October 2009. She is dated at 4.2 mya. Ardi is 4ft tall and assumed to weigh 50kg. Brain capacity of 300-350cc. So brain increase did not precede bipedal walking as initially expected.

Then you have Ardi’s supposed descendent ‘Lucy” with curved chimp hands.. I believe feet were never found for Lucy yet researchers have allowed the representations to have the kind of feet they assume Lucy had. She is dated to 3.2mya. Lucy is debated by researchers as to her status as her jaw is akin to a Gorilla jaw. Lucy was 3’7” and weighed 29kg. Brain capacity 375-500cc. Lets not forget that Gorillas can have a brain capacity of up to 564cc with an average of 500cc.

Feel free to explain how an ancestors hands and fingers chimped up from a more human appearance in Ardi to chimp looking hands and fingers in Lucy and then back again for the Homo genus. I understand why researchers may have wanted to sit quiet on Ardi for a while.

I believe all these researchers have found are variations and ancestors of non human primates. These researchers are out to make a name for themselves and grasping for any straw is the way to go, it seems.

Now we can debate these findings for years. None of us are going to have the last word when well credentialed researchers, with more credentials than anyone here, cannot agree on this research amongst themselves. If any of you think you know all the answers then you had best prepare a paper for submission to the scientific community.

The best we can all do is refer to the body of research that suits us and ‘not accept’ the rest or ignore it. This appears to be a fruitless exercise.

Suffice to say in relation to the thread topic…. No the fossil evidence is not a convincing record of chimpanzee transition to human, which is the currently popular and generally accepted model. Rather the fossil evidence is a great example of confusion, disarray and inconsistency.

 

[outhouse]

Now we can debate these findings for years

but there not

I understand why researchers may have wanted to sit quiet on Ardi for a while.

there not

I believe all these researchers have found are variations and ancestors of non human primates.

ya i know what you mean, neanderthals and homo erectus are so ape like


LIKE IT OR NOT

the farther we go back in time the more the fossils turn up looking primate like all the way back to 7 million yeasr in the past . And homo sapiens do not appear anywhere past 200,000 years.

 

[newhope101]

Outhouse..you did not answer to the main point. "There not" (incorrectly spelt) is not the best refute. Please explain how Ardi has human style hands and Lucy has chimpy hands. You may also like to speak to the debates queried below.

Wiki ORRORIN:
If Orrorin proves to be a direct human ancestor, then australopithecines such as Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") may be considered a side branch of the hominid family tree: Orrorin is both earlier, by almost 3 million years, and more similar to modern humans than is A. afarensis. The main similarity is that the Orrorin femur is morphologically closer to that of H. sapiens than is Lucy's; there is, however, some debate over this point. [5]
Other fossils (leaves and many mammals) found in the Lukeino Formation show that Orrorin lived in dry evergreen forest environment, not the savanna assumed by many theories of human evolution.

The team that found these fossils in 2000 was led by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford[6] from the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. The discoverers conclude that Orrorin is a hominin on the basis of its bipedal locomotion and dental anatomy; based on this, they date the split between hominins and African great apes to at least 7 million years ago, in the Messinian. This date is markedly different from those derived using the molecular clock approach, but has found general acceptance among paleoanthropologists

Your reply has not convinced me..the fossil record is about as clear as mud. But if you know it all and the answer to these dilemmas, do please prepare your research for submittance. The scientific community is eagerly awaiting it.

 

[David M]

The ancestor of chimps have always been thought to be chimp looking.

No. Having some features that chimps have, which is what is meant by "chimp-like, is not "chimp looking". Its always been clear that this position was tentative due to the lack of fossils from before the LCA for chimps and humans.

Hence, all the fossil skulls. Researchers always believed we evolved from knuckle walkers until recently. That is why Lovejoys paper is debated.

Not quite, they believed that knuckle walking was probably a basal feature of the Hominid lineage because they had no fossils to confirm or refute this. Thats why it was always a tentative conclusion and not a certain one.

This is what science does, it says a statement is tentative when there is no good evidence either way and corrects itself when new evidence is found. It doesn't do what religion does and make dogmatic claims without evidence.

 

[Autodidact]

Suffice to say in relation to the thread topic…. No the fossil evidence is not a convincing record of chimpanzee transition to human, which is the currently popular and generally accepted model. Rather the fossil evidence is a great example of confusion, disarray and inconsistency.

No one has ever asserted that it is. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, and that is what the fossil record, including the reports you have provided, show.

 

[newhope101]

Outhouse..again..why would anyone think that Ardi with much more human like hands is the ancestor of Lucy with more chimpy style hands? It truly sounds like nonsense.

This is my reply to Autodidact: Yes, of course, I apologise. After all it is about flavour of the year or decade.
Wiki Human Evolution.The classification of humans and their relatives has changed considerably over time. The gracile Australopithecines are now thought to be ancestors of the genus Homo, the group to which modern humans belong. Both Australopithecines and Homo sapiens are part of the tribe Hominini. Recent data suggests Australopithecines were a diverse group and that A. africanus may not be a direct ancestor of modern humans. Reclassification of Australopithecines that originally were split into either gracile or robust varieties has put the latter into a family of its own, Paranthropus. Taxonomists place humans, Australopithecines and related species in the same family as other great apes, in the Hominidae.

Wiki Knuckle-walking:
Gorillas and chimpanzees use this style of locomotion as do anteaters and platypuses.
Anthropologists once thought that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans engaged in knuckle-walking, and humans evolved upright walking from knuckle-walking: a view thought supported by reanalysis of overlooked features on hominid fossils.[1][2]
Since then, scientists discovered Ardipithecus ramidus, a human-like hominid descended from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. Ar. ramidus engaged in upright walking, but not knuckle-walking. This leads scientists to conclude that chimpanzees and apes evolved knuckle-walking after they split from humans 6 million years ago, and humans evolved upright walking without knuckle-walking.[3]

Let's see what flavour of the year is for 2011. That is why I say the fossil record is not convincing. Perhaps if new finds confirmed hypothesis already held, instead of leading to new ones so often, it would be convincing. About the only thing that has stayed constant is that humans evolved from some primate. Instead the alterations and changes appears to be researchers grabbing at any straw to support Toe. Hence any hypothesis built on a foundation of straw will be easily torn down, as is the case with many past hypothesis on human evolution.

 

[painted wolf]

The ancestor of chimps have always been thought to be chimp looking. Hence, all the fossil skulls. Researchers always believed we evolved from knuckle walkers until recently. That is why Lovejoys paper is debated.

Chimp like not chimp looking. And Lovejoy has been acceptedfor nearly a decade.

Evos have Ardi with fairly human looking hands and fingers sketched into her drawing on Wiki, which is the representation shown everywhere. Ardi was found in 1994 and details of the discovery were not published until October 2009. She is dated at 4.2 mya. Ardi is 4ft tall and assumed to weigh 50kg. Brain capacity of 300-350cc. So brain increase did not precede bipedal walking as initially expected.

Then you have Ardi’s supposed descendent ‘Lucy” with curved chimp hands.

Lucy does not have "chimp hands". Ardi does not have more human hands than Lucy. Both have fairly identical hands in terms of mechanics...with less curvature than Chimps and more than humans. Though, Austailopiths have shorter more human proprtions to their fingers.

. I believe feet were never found for Lucy yet researchers have allowed the representations to have the kind of feet they assume Lucy had.

Lucy is not the only example of her species, Lovejoy described the foot morphology of other members of her species and her locomotion.

She is dated to 3.2mya. Lucy is debated by researchers as to her status as her jaw is akin to a Gorilla jaw.

Source? I've never heard anyone compare her jaw to a gorillas.

Lucy was 3’7” and weighed 29kg. Brain capacity 375-500cc. Lets not forget that Gorillas can have a brain capacity of up to 564cc with an average of 500cc.

Gorillas are also much larger overall, with much larger skulls. Tigers have larger brains than house-cats.

Feel free to explain how an ancestors hands and fingers chimped up from a more human appearance in Ardi to chimp looking hands and fingers in Lucy and then back again for the Homo genus. I understand why researchers may have wanted to sit quiet on Ardi for a while.

They didn't you are jumpling to conclusions based on drawings not on the actual fossils.

I believe all these researchers have found are variations and ancestors of non human primates. These researchers are out to make a name for themselves and grasping for any straw is the way to go, it seems.

Everyone is aware of your beliefs.

Now we can debate these findings for years. None of us are going to have the last word when well credentialed researchers, with more credentials than anyone here, cannot agree on this research amongst themselves. If any of you think you know all the answers then you had best prepare a paper for submission to the scientific community.

The best we can all do is refer to the body of research that suits us and ‘not accept’ the rest or ignore it. This appears to be a fruitless exercise.

Suffice to say in relation to the thread topic…. No the fossil evidence is not a convincing record of chimpanzee transition to human, which is the currently popular and generally accepted model. Rather the fossil evidence is a great example of confusion, disarray and inconsistency.

Would you please stop with the "chimpanzee to human" lie. It only shows you have no credibility on this issue to keep repeating it.

wa:do

 

[outhouse]

Would you please stop with the "chimpanzee to human" lie. It only shows you have no credibility on this issue to keep repeating it.

its like a broken record

 

[newhope101]

PW. They look different to me. It's a wonder the diagrams haven't been resketched like neanderthal was to fit in. I also note Lucy's feet have been added without fossil evidence. They now need to put flesh on Lucy's hands and make her hands appear even more human..if that's possible.

Above is Lucy

Above is Ardi, at about 4ft tall and about 6 inches taller than Lucy. The common chimp is 5'6".So the line shrunk a little with the slight increase in brain size and then got bigger again. However Gorillas do have a brain capacity up to 564cc. Here is the info re Lucy's gorilla jaw. The research will be quoted in Wiki. I don't see this creature, Ardi, being comfortable in arboreal life, with a body like that. He looks like he would have fallen off the perch when asleep. Or perhaps he nested like a gorilla.

Wiki Lucy: A study of the mandibular structure of a number of specimens of Au. Afarensis indicated that Lucy's jaw was rather unlike other hominins, having a more gorilla-like appearance.[17] Rak et al. consider that this mandible structure arose "independently in gorillas and hominins", but that Au. Afarensis is therefore "too derived to occupy a position as a common ancestor of both the Homo and robust australopith clades".[7]

From Wiki: Lucy was only 1.1 m (3 ft 7 1⁄2 in) tall,[14] weighed 29 kg (64 lb) and looked somewhat like a Common Chimpanzee, but although the creature had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in function to those of modern humans, showing with certainty that these hominids had walked erect.[15


"Looked somewhat like a common chimpanzee" is how Lucy is described. Yet Ardi, Lucy's ancestor, looks nothing like a chimp in the representations. Perhaps they need to put flesh on Lucy, yet she is descibed as looking 'somewhat like' the COMMON CHIMP, apart from her locomotion.


Maybe Lucy and Ardi evolved from humans. It's just that you have not found the human fossils yet. Maybe next year!

 

[Autodidact]

This is my reply to Autodidact: Yes, of course, I apologise.

Great. May I use this as my new sig?

You do understand that it is the nature of all scientific knowledge to constantly grow and change, right?

 

[outhouse]

I also note Lucy's feet have been added without fossil evidence.

the right leg bones that connect to the feet dictate that, as well as the toe on the left foot.

the hip and leg bones together dictate the bipedalism which also dictates how the feet will be shaped.

Maybe Lucy and Ardi evolved from humans.

maybe you have something more then a malicious guess???

yet she is descibed as looking 'somewhat like' the COMMON CHIMP.

yet we know she was bipedal

 

[Nepenthe]

She is dated to 3.2mya. Lucy is debated by researchers as to her status as her jaw is akin to a Gorilla jaw.

Source? I've never heard anyone compare her jaw to a gorillas.

I'm guessing newhope101 is referring to Yoel Rak's Gorilla-like anatomy on Australopithecus afarensis mandibles' paper which asserts Australopithecus afarensis is too derived to be our ancestor due to the shape of the coronoid process, condyle and mandibular notch, etc. Rak claims there's more of an "afarensis-gorilla"-like trait in the mandible (i.e. coronoid process higher than the condyle, etc.) as opposed to chimp-like ones. Long story short, based on the mandible features Rak clumps together humans, chimps and orangutans (the primitive condition), while gorillas and australopithecines are derived and get their own unique compartment.

But Rak and associate's paper glosses over allometrics and only touches upon sexual dimorphism so I'm not particularly blown away by his claims that there may be more gorilla-like traits in australopithecines than previously thought. Taxonomic nitpicking is going to provide a wide variety of fossils and their traits blurring into each other- particularly amongst australopithecines and homos. Point being Rak's paper hasn't had any major impact on reanalyzing Lucy's jaw and remains a minority view.

It's similar to the Ardi' hyped controversy- there's nothing to suggest the demise of our primate ancestry much less evolution. It's just more of the usual scientific debate over the LCA. But like she did to Lovejoy, this is newhope101's misinterpreting the actual study and forcing it to conform to her preconceived creationist dogma. Myself, you PW, and plenty of others, have already gone over her misunderstanding of Lovejoy's comments all to little avail.

I have no reason to think this will change her mind but here's an excellent critique of Rak, Ginzburg and Geffen's study.

 

[painted wolf]

PW. They look different to me.

of course they do.. one is a posed skeletal model and the other is a drawing.

It's a wonder the diagrams haven't been resketched like neanderthal was to fit in. I also note Lucy's feet have been added without fossil evidence. They now need to put flesh on Lucy's hands and make her hands appear even more human..if that's possible.

Again, you realize that Lucy is not the only member of her species right?

Above is Ardi, at about 4ft tall and about 6 inches taller than Lucy. The common chimp is 5'6".So the line shrunk a little with the slight increase in brain size and then got bigger again.

Males of Lucy's species were more than 5ft tall. What is your point?

However Gorillas do have a brain capacity up to 564cc.

You do understand that a larger skull will often have a larger brain in it right... like a tiger has a larger brain than a cheetah or a house-cat.

Here is the info re Lucy's gorilla jaw. The research will be quoted in Wiki. I don't see this creature, Ardi, being comfortable in arboreal life, with a body like that. He looks like he would have fallen off the perch when asleep. Or perhaps he nested like a gorilla.

really? with the opposable big toe and long fingers? I know you don't know a lot about morphology but really?
Here is Ardi's hand, showing the natural curvature and climbing adaptions.

Here is the foot showing the climbing and walking adaptations.

Wiki Lucy: A study of the mandibular structure of a number of specimens of Au. Afarensis indicated that Lucy's jaw was rather unlike other hominins, having a more gorilla-like appearance.[17] Rak et al. consider that this mandible structure arose "independently in gorillas and hominins", but that Au. Afarensis is therefore "too derived to occupy a position as a common ancestor of both the Homo and robust australopith clades".[7]

What do you know... I hadn't read that paper from the 1980's

From Wiki: Lucy was only 1.1 m (3 ft 7 1⁄2 in) tall,[14] weighed 29 kg (64 lb) and looked somewhat like a Common Chimpanzee, but although the creature had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in function to those of modern humans, showing with certainty that these hominids had walked erect.[15


"Looked somewhat like a common chimpanzee" is how Lucy is described. Yet Ardi, Lucy's ancestor, looks nothing like a chimp in the representations. Perhaps they need to put flesh on Lucy, yet she is descibed as looking 'somewhat like' the COMMON CHIMP, apart from her locomotion.

Yes Ardi does... and do you understand the term "Somewhat like"?
Here is ardi's skeletal reconstruction.

Nothing like a chimp?

Maybe Lucy and Ardi evolved from humans. It's just that you have not found the human fossils yet. Maybe next year!

LoL

wa:do

 

[painted wolf]

For those interested here are some comparisons between Us, Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.

Hip showing that Ardi is less human like than Lucy but not as arboreal as the modern Chimp:

Dentition between humans and apes

enjoy

wa:do

 

[David M]

"Looked somewhat like a common chimpanzee" is how Lucy is described. Yet Ardi, Lucy's ancestor, looks nothing like a chimp in the representations. Perhaps they need to put flesh on Lucy, yet she is descibed as looking 'somewhat like' the COMMON CHIMP, apart from her locomotion.

Guess what...We look somewhat like a common chimpanzee. Lucy looked slightly more like a chimp than we do but that does not mean that Lucy looked exactly like a common chimp. Ardi also looked somewhat like a chimp (but in slightly different ways).

This is because Humans, Chimps, Lucy and Ardi are all primates and are related species.

 

[newhope101]

Well David M.Wiki says something about Lucy being on the outer if Ardi is in. Yes apes and humans are skeletally incredibly similar yet miles apart.

PW..it is not me you need to tell. These researchers know all this stuff you post and yet still disagree on major points. There is no point convincing little old me, if your leading researchers cannot see the simplicity and obviousness your posts allude to, go tell them.

The point being this. We can chew on these old bones for years. You can put up arguments that I cannot speak too. However that does not detract from the fact that various leading researchers can look at the same old bones and disagree. They disagree on whether or not some creature was bipedal, they disagree whether or not some creature belongs in the human line or not, and they disagree on many other points.

What makes it into the text books is what is most commonly accepted by researchers. As we have seen with knuckle walking etc the most widely held views have not meant certain validity, the foundation soon crumbles and a new most widely held view ensues. I think it quite reasonable for someone to not let go of religious beliefs based on this science as evidence.

Then there is the genomic evidence. The same thing applies. Disagreement, phylogenic dates for human divergence that do not line up with the fossil record, as already posted. So evolutionists still have a hard task ahead.

Wiki Chimpanzee Genome:
Results from the human and chimp genome analyses should help in understanding some human diseases. Humans appear to have lost a functional caspase-12 gene, which in other primates codes for an enzyme that may protect against Alzheimer's disease. Figures published in Nature on September 1, 2005, in an article produced by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, show that 24% of the chimpanzee genome does not align with the human genome. There are 3% further alignment gaps, 1.23% SNP differences, and 2.7% copy number variations totaling at least 30% differences between chimpanzee and Homo sapiens genomes.

Evolutionary literature now cites a 6% difference between the human and chimp genome. I understand that the 1.5% was based on nucleotide by nucleotide differences but this isn’t all there is to it. These estimates do not consider the genes that are not there.(Hahn 2006)

Then there is the research on the Y chromosome.

Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content
Received 3 August; accepted 24 November 2009.
Published online 13 January 2010.
We found no new chimpanzee amp iconic genes. We did discover that, within the ampliconic regions,
three out of nine multi-copy, testis-expressed gene families present in human have been mutationally disabled or are simply absent in chimpanzee (Table 1). For example, the chimpanzee MSY contains
five loci homologous to the human XKRY gene family, but all five copies share a frameshift mutation that severely truncates the open leading frame and predicted protein (Supplementary Table 3).
We confirmed the presence of this disabling mutation in five other chimpanzees and two bonobos, close relatives of common chimpanzees (data not shown). Similarly, the HSFY and PRY gene families are well represented in the humanMSY but absent from the chimpanzee MSY. Although it is unclear whether the PRY family was gained in the human lineage or lost in the chimpanzee lineage, the presence of HSFY in the cat25, rhesus macaque and bull MSYs (H.S., personal communication)
leads us to conclude that this gene family was deleted outright in the chimpanzee lineage.
In aggregate, the consequence of gene loss and gain in the chimpanzee and human lineages, respectively, is that the chimpanzee MSY contains only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human MSY, and only half as many protein-coding transcription units (Table 1). In contrast, in the remainder of the genome, comparison of chimpanzee draft sequence with human reference sequence suggests that the gene content of the two species differs by ,1% (ref. 15).
Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310million years of separation26.

The paper further states the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds the number of distinct gene families and 47% of the protein coding regions compared to humans. The 30% of the entire chimp Y chromosome has no counterpart in humans. Also those chimp Y chromosomes that do have counterparts in the human Y chromosome are often located in different regions of the chromosome. Note the comparison between chicken and human.

For me, the more your researchers learn the less they appear to know. The genetic data appears to be about as solid as the fossil evidence. I believe the reason is scientists are looking for evidence of something that just isn’t there, ancestry.