http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/2924694/Humans-didn-t-evolve-from-chimps
Is it me or is the story written in a very agressive manner?
Is it me or is the story written in a very agressive manner?
Oldest Hominid Found - 4.4 million years old
- Thread starter Candlelight
- Start date
I don't feel it is aggressive writing, but I do think the article interesting.
It seems agressively written to me, and my knowledge on popular human evolutionary theory might be sketchy, but I'm pretty sure we didn't evolve from chimps but from apes, the two are very different creatures.
A
Amaris
Guest
Yeah, the article is interesting, but it's definitely angry for some reason.
J.
J.
I can't tell about the article as a whole, because pages at stuff.co.nz haven't been loading for me, the last few days (no idea why, as I've never had any trouble reading their articles before.) Going by the portion quoted here, I'd say it's less written aggressively and more written from a position of proactively anticipating and hastening to head off a few commonly-held misconceptions. The writer would seem to have been confronted by (and grown impatient with) said misconceptions before, but I'm not sure the article really benefits from their being addressed in this fashion.
It's not unreasonable to believe that knuckle walking is a derived feature, except one thing. It would suggest that Gorillas and Chimps split after splitting from us and I'm not sure if the evidence suggest that right now, especially since the genetic evidence is inconclusive for when the split took place (the article itself points out that it could have been 3 million years before this animal lived). I still think upright walking is a derived feature that post-dates knuckle walking (at least, early hominids were capable of knuckle walking just like modern chimps).
To sum up my post, I like the attitude of the researchers for not thinking "ape=more primitive", but I disagree with their conclusion.
To sum up my post, I like the attitude of the researchers for not thinking "ape=more primitive", but I disagree with their conclusion.
A chimp is a species of ape, as is a bonobo, a gorilla, an orangutan and even a gibbon. It was always assumed that the common ancestor of humans and chimps (and bonobos), our closest living relatives, was more chimp-like than man-like, though it would have been, strictly speaking, neither chimp nor man but some extinct species of ape.
If this article seems aggressively written, it's probably because the discovery, if it does not exactly upset the apple cart of our assumptions, does knock a few granny smiths loose to roll about on the road.
*YAWN*! big whoop!
Only our mitochondria, silly!
As a disclaimer, the article won't load for me, so this is based on the excerpts. But it seems to argue that bipedalism pre-dates knuckle walking and the chimpanzee-human split. I think that's more than a slight change in viewpoint. I'd argue that's a complete shift in our view of evolution and it's based on something that hasn't been firmly decided (DNA evidence).
I'd argue that, using traditional methods to determine derived and primitive features, all this does is push the date of the split to some time before 4.4 million years ago.
I thought that might be the case myself. In all fairness, I too only read the excerpts.
Hey--do orangs knuckle walk? Because they split off from the human/chimp/gorilla line a long time ago, if the DNA is to be believed.
Hey--do orangs knuckle walk? Because they split off from the human/chimp/gorilla line a long time ago, if the DNA is to be believed.
It was originally signed "You wanna know who wrote this? Go fuck yourself."
Luckily the cooler heads at National Geographic prevailed and it was edited.
IIRC, they sorta walk on the sides of their fists rather than their knuckles. The males do, that is. The females are light enough to actually go in the trees like they're supposed to.
Interesting.
I read an article on MSNBC earlier today about this event. It is interesting. To be honest, however, I maintain uncertain that science is advanced enough to truly piece together the events of millions of years of history concerning one species based off of a limited source of discovered remains.
I am not trying to discredit anyone; indeed, I am certainly not a scientist, or even particularly well informed in regard to scientific matters. Nevertheless, we have difficulty piecing together who we were 4,000 years ago; add three zeros, and I can only imagine that some pretty sketchy theories are being exchanged in the intellectual community. Naturally, once it makes it into a newspaper or magazine, however, the reason for doubt projected is somewhat filtered.
Right now this human origin business is like mapping the continents with a compass and pencil; just not really up to par with Google Earth yet. Nevertheless, as earlier noted, interesting nevertheless... or as Mr. Spock would put it, fascinating.
I am not trying to discredit anyone; indeed, I am certainly not a scientist, or even particularly well informed in regard to scientific matters. Nevertheless, we have difficulty piecing together who we were 4,000 years ago; add three zeros, and I can only imagine that some pretty sketchy theories are being exchanged in the intellectual community. Naturally, once it makes it into a newspaper or magazine, however, the reason for doubt projected is somewhat filtered.
Right now this human origin business is like mapping the continents with a compass and pencil; just not really up to par with Google Earth yet. Nevertheless, as earlier noted, interesting nevertheless... or as Mr. Spock would put it, fascinating.
While it's true that we have difficulty knowing what we were like back then, we don't need the certainty that is required of 4000 years ago. We do have a rough idea of what species were like back then based on the fossil record (provided we have a fossil we can accurately date) and we can reasonably compare it to what's before and after it to determine the similarities to us. It would be impossible to confirm that something is a direct descendant, but, considering the fluid nature of species, we can consider some things along the line of evolution that led to us more or less (Australopithicus or H. erectus are examples that are commonly referred to as our ancestors, probably were, and, if they weren't, whatever was is probably close enough to them to be basically the same thing).
Hmm. I don't see any reason to think that upright walking is an adaptation that occurred only once.
Nor knuckle walking, for that matter.
