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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
 Posted - 10/01/2009 : 10:41:46
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Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"
Forget the headline. It's crap. The find is important.
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.
The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings... |
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 10/01/2009 : 11:50:59 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"
Forget the headline. It's crap. The find is important.
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.
The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings... |
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An excellent find indeed! And it's questions demonstrate yet again that the more we learn, the less we know.
AiG is going to have so much fun with this -- and so am I!
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 12:12:01 [Permalink]
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I really hate how National Geographic goes for the cheap, deceptive headlines. Lucy has lost no importance at all. This is just another former unknown that is now being revealed at last. NG has again given the Creationists fuel for their quote mills with this distorting journalism. At least the details seem mostly sound.
All my life, every time I've read an account of human ancestry written by a competent scientist or science writer, they've always emphasized that modern apes and modern humans share a common ancestor which is neither like modern humans nor like modern apes. Science has apparently found a specimen that's on the path that lead to both apes and humans. That in itself is no surprise, simply good scientific work.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 10/01/2009 12:13:17 |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 12:35:04 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by HalfMooner
I really hate how National Geographic goes for the cheap, deceptive headlines. Lucy has lost no importance at all. This is just another former unknown that is now being revealed at last. NG has again given the Creationists fuel for their quote mills with this distorting journalism. At least the details seem mostly sound.
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Yeah. They want to grab readers. As I said, the headline is crap. Wait until the popular press gets hold of this story. Worse headlines will follow, is my guess. When the evening news reports on it, the story will be written by people who don't know shit from shinola. Someone should send all science writers and editors this memo: "There is no such thing as a 'Missing Link!!!'" But noooo...
Yeah, the creationist fools will probably run with headline alone. But then, they would have gone after the find either way. It's just that this kind of hyperbole makes it too easy for them.
Insanely cool find though.
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 22:55:10 [Permalink]
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News Focus
Ardipithecus ramidus:
A New Kind of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled
Ann Gibbons
In this special issue of Science, a multidisciplinary international team presents the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor, 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Ethiopia. This remarkably rare skeleton is not the oldest putative hominin, but it is by far the most complete of the earliest specimens. It includes most of the skull and teeth, as well as the pelvis, hands, and feet—parts that the authors say reveal an "intermediate" form of upright walking, considered a hallmark of hominins. To some researchers' surprise, the female skeleton doesn't look much like a chimpanzee, gorilla, or any of our closest living primate relatives. Even though this species probably lived soon after the dawn of humankind, it was not transitional between African apes and humans. Instead, the skeleton and pieces of at least 35 additional individuals of Ar. ramidus reveal a new type of early hominin that was neither chimpanzee nor human.
Read the Full Text |
It should be noted that this animal was first described and named back in 1995. But they didn't really know exactly what they had. That same year was when the fossil in this article was was found. They have been working on it for that long. It is considered to be the most important hominid fossil since Lucy. It's a very big deal.
The story of Ardipithecus Ramidus is described in an article at Science-AAAS. You will have to register to read it and the related materials, including a great video. It’s free to register for, well, the free stuff. (Most studies do not become freely available until a year after publication.) I recommend registering because it’s a terrific online resource that I use often. Today, I really hit the pay dirt...
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 23:18:34 [Permalink]
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You can get an online (or print) membership to AAAS (and get full access to articles online) for $142/year, or less than $100 if you are a student, teacher, or a couple of other things.
Not a bad deal if you are interested in a real science publication.
This week's issue has eleven papers on this specimen, and two or three news type articles.
I've been a AAAS member for several years, well worth the $ in my opinion.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 10/01/2009 : 23:36:24 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
You can get an online (or print) membership to AAAS (and get full access to articles online) for $142/year, or less than $100 if you are a student, teacher, or a couple of other things.
Not a bad deal if you are interested in a real science publication.
This week's issue has eleven papers on this specimen, and two or three news type articles.
I've been a AAAS member for several years, well worth the $ in my opinion.
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All of the papers are available, this one time, for free. I have access to the whole thing. Nice for me, because of all the sciences, human origins is the area that interests me the most. |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 10/02/2009 : 08:54:04 [Permalink]
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PZ puts it in perspective:
What a day to be stuck in airplanes for hours on end; I had to slurp in a bunch of files on my iPhone and then look at them on that itty-bitty screen, just to catch up on the story of Ardipithecus. Fortunately, you can just read Carl Zimmer's excellent summary to find out what's cool about it.
For a summary of a summary: it's another transitional fossil in our lineage. Ardipithecus ramidus is old, 4.4 million years or so — so it's well before Lucy and the australopithecines. The latest result is a thorough analysis of a large number of collected specimens that shows it is an interesting mosaic of traits: it was bipedal, but not quite so well adapted to terrestrial locomotion as we are, and it had feet with an opposable big toe. And of course it had a small brain, only a little larger than a chimpanzee's.
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And further down:
| "Transitional form! Boo-ya, creationists!" |
Boo-ya indeed!
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 10/02/2009 : 09:28:10 [Permalink]
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Here we go -- the phrenologist at UD kicks it off:
Human Exceptionalism
Clive Hayden
Wesley J. Smith has written a blog on human exceptionalism at Secondhand Smoke, his blog at First Things, in light of the recent publications about “Ardi”, the hominid that is supposedly “pretty close” to the common ancestor of humans and chimps way back 4.4 million years ago.
Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes…I bring this up because some Darwinsists and other assorted materialists have attacked human exceptionalism on the basis that our supposed emergence from the great apes and/or our genetic closeness means that we should not think of ourselves as distinctive. I never thought that was in the least persuasive. What matters is what we are now, not what might have been millions of years ago or how we got here…
And that brings me to Ewen Callaway’s review in New Scientist of the book Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human authored by Jeremy Taylor. As Mr. Callaway explains, Jeremy Taylor’s book sheds light on the issue of genetic similarity:
In this book, his first, the former BBC producer synthesises recent genetic, behavioural and neuroscientific research to argue that far more than a handful of genes divides humans from our evolutionary cousins, 6 million years removed.
Take that 98.4 per cent, an oft-repeated figure that has been used to argue that chimps deserve human rights. True, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes share an extraordinary amount of genetic similarity – yet humans and mice share almost as much.
My own conceptual difficulty of evolution’s measurement and falsification is this:
So it appears that humans didn’t evolve from apes after all, so the correlation of modern genetic similarity between us seems a non-issue. It’s interesting to me to note that genetic similarity is used in evidence for evolution, showing how closely related organisms are, but so is genetic dissimilarity, showing that evolution accounts for why they have grown apart. After all, evolution is supposed to exist in the differences, otherwise something isn’t evolving unless it is moving away from something else. And if something isn’t going away from something else, then there is no evolution. But in order to know the proximity of something to another thing, you have to know the basis for comparison, but the basis of comparison is assumed to be a result of evolution too. The measuring stick and the thing being measured are both evolving, and are indeed both the continuing result of evolution, so there cannot be a steady baseline for comparison because the measurement has evolved along with the variation it is supposed to be measuring in a continual process. Unless the measuring stick is separate from the thing being measured, you can do no measuring, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis. That is one difficulty.
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I'm not sure of what Clive is trying to say here, but he certainly says a lot of it.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 10/02/2009 : 09:31:57 [Permalink]
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| Oh, crap, when I saw the title I thought it was going to be something about Kil's birthday. |
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's alright-
Jerry Garcia
Robert Hunter
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 10/02/2009 : 09:55:56 [Permalink]
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We have thought that the chimp and the other great apes were a variation on some older ape species with a structurally similar body to the apes that we see today. What we now must wrap our heads around is that the great apes evolved as much as we have over the last 7 million years. It's now, for example, likely that knuckle walking is a rather modern adaptation in great apes, and we shouldn't expect to see it in our common ancestor. There is so much more here, and a lot of turns what we expected to see in a species close to our common ancestor on its head.
This all doesn't mean that Chimps are not our closest relatives anymore. What it means is that our common ancestor had many more hominid traits than what was ever imagined.
While Lucy told us a lot about the road our ancestors were on, origins still had to be inferd to a much greater degree than with Ardipithecus. What Ardipithecus does is bring us closer to our origins which no doubt brings inferences about what that common ancestor looked like into a range of predictions that can be made with a much greater degree of confidence. She is just stunning.
Ain't science grand?
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 10/03/2009 : 14:23:08 [Permalink]
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As expected (first article):
1. Meet “Ardi”
Evolutionists aren’t yet sure if they should call it a human ancestor, but one thing they do know is that “Ardi” does away with the idea of a “missing link.”
Although first discovered in the early 1990s, the bones of Ardipithecus ramidus are only now being nominated for evolutionists’ fossil hall of fame—via a slew of papers in a special issue of the journal Science. In it, Ardi’s researchers describe the bones and make the case that Ardi is even more important in the history of human evolution than Lucy.
Despite claims of its evolutionary significance, one of the scientists who studied Ardi noted, “It’s not a chimp. It’s not a human.” That is, instead of looking like the hypothesized “missing link” (with both chimpanzee and human features), Ardi’s anatomy—as reconstructed by the scientists—shows it to have been distinct from other apes as well as from humans. The researchers have consequently shunned the notion of a missing link: “It shows that the last common ancestor [between humans and] chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between,” explained Penn State University paleontologist Alan Walker (who was not part of the study).
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And the punch line:
Given the number and scope of the papers presented this week on Ardi, it will take some time before creationists are confident in our conclusions on Ardi and her kin. Based on our first look, however, the facts seem solidly behind the idea that Ardi was a quadrupedal ape with relatively little in common with humans (i.e., no more than most apes); the key basis for the alleged Ardi–human link (which even the authors are hesitant to confirm) is the idea that it walked upright—an idea that even evolutionists have criticized. And we can’t forget that all of these conclusions are inferred from digital reconstructions and fallible reconstructions of bones that were in very bad shape.
Without having a live “Ardi” to observe, scientists will only ever be able to come to probabilistic conclusions about its characteristics. As far as we’re concerned, the evolutionary “threat” to creationists from Ardi is no more than that posed by Ida: viz., none.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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| Edited by - filthy on 10/03/2009 14:25:58 |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2009 : 11:36:48 [Permalink]
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The latest faith-based take on Ardi:
| Holy Bible Disproves Latest Scientific Find, And All Those Forthcoming, For That Matter! |
This'll put them atheist eggheads in their place!
Freehold, Iowa - The Landover Baptist Board of Deacons erupted in laughter when they learned through FOX News that scientists studying a pile of monkey bones for the last 10-years announced they had come "the closest ever" to finding a common ancestor to prove Evolution.
"We were all watching FOX Christian television" said Deacon Hargraves. "When the artist's sketch of the creature they're calling, Ardi, comes up on the screen, Brother Hardwick leans over and whispers in my ear, 'That looks an awful lot like Sister Dora Denkins... at least now we know what happened to her!' Well, I just busted a gut right there!"
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And the best part is that they are going to write a book on Ardi that should sell quire well to the faithful. I wonder if I can get an autographed copy... 
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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4.4 million year old ansester raises new questions
