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STATED FULLY SHE WENT WILD WHEN HE WENT WOOLY  1942 |
Interbreeding placemarker...
Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
Eureka. You've hit upon the crux of the matter. What interpretation would someone with no Christian background or knowledge draw from the evidence?
Ah, I see. So evolutionists as a whole have not yet 'evolved' a sense of humor. What a shame.
Your chosen grounds for the proof of non-evolution--God zapped one species out of existence and poofed in another one--lies in the region between 1 and 0 on the vertical axis, except it's really just the part of that space between about .9 and .5 if such markings were shown.His gap is only the region between .09 and .05.
I'm not aware of anything that would make it uninhabitable. It's possible that disease and the loss infrastructure could kill us all off, but radiation is vastly overated as a killer.
I don't know how I let this slip by me last night, but it goes to the core of how absurd your game is. It's a little like the rule in the old South that if you had any colored ancestry, be it so little as one eighth ("octaroon mulatto!"), by God you were colored.
For all we know, the only reason modern humans and neanderthals can't interbreed is that the neanderthals died out. They may never have been a separate species. I don't know how many times I mentioned last night that interbreeding may have been possible--and may have happened--to the very end. (I'll go further. It may have been the sink in which the last few of them disappeared.) If the question is ever answered to show that modern humans--not as in "early moderns" but as in "you and I"--could have mated with neanderthals, are they "by definition" us or are we them?
And, no, we really don't know this one way or the other. (** "Trying-to-forestall-the-stupidity-bludgeon" alert!! **) This is not the question that the mtDNA tests address.
Actually, we know from studies of caves in Israel, that they were on the earth the same time as modern man. My source is the magazine, National Geographic
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STATED FULLY SHE WENT WILD WHEN HE WENT WOOLY 1942 |
Interbreeding placemarker...
They have a large overlap with anatomically modern humans, yes. For sure, it includes the time of the occupation of those caves in Israel. Thank you.
Sexual selection is an engine of speciation, one of the things that pushes diverging populations apart. Darwin knew that much.
You slightly oversimplify the diversity of life on Earth. Female selection is a big deal in a lot of life forms. You can just about bet any species with a big dimorphism between males and females and the male more bizarre or gaudier than the female falls into this category.
But sexual selection is only one isolating factor, and only tends to kick in after two subpopulations have already emerged because of other factors. Geographical isolation is probably the biggest speciator. Different niche exploitation is another. Acquired differences in seasonal reproductive timing also matter.
I mean "mate selection by females," of course.
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