Posted on 11/19/2004 9:42:43 AM PST by freeparella
ATLANTA -- A 13-million-year-old fossil found in Spain may be that of the last common ancestor to all living great apes, including humans, researchers reported yesterday.
The great apes, including orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, are thought to have diverged from lesser apes, which include gibbons, between 11 million and 16 million years ago. But until now, there hasn't been much fossil evidence of any sort of ancestral great-great-grand-ape. Spanish paleontologists say the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil near Barcelona is the most ancient ape to exhibit the upright posture, short face and other traits of living great apes, including the family of man. They stopped short of suggesting that it was any sort of "missing link" between primitive apes and modern ones.
From the skull and more than 83 fossil bones, the researchers concluded that the new species retained a number of monkeylike features -- small hands and flexible wrists that suggest it still spent most of its time in trees. Unlike monkeys, however, whose shoulder blades are on the side of the rib cage, it has shoulder blades along its back, like modern great apes and humans. In the journal Science, Salvador Moya-Sola and colleagues at the Crusafont Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona write that creature, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, inhabited what was then a tropical forest in Catalonia. But Moya-Sola says it probably also occurred in Africa.
Although the creature lies in a gap in the fossil record between earlier primitive apes and more modern ones, the researchers say notions of "ancestors" and missing links suggest a linearity to evolution the recent research into human origins indicates may be overly simplistic. "This is a remarkable find that indicates a diversity in hominids in Western Eurasia just as we thought we were beginning to get a handle on how much diversity there was," said Clark Howell, a professor of paleontology at the University of California-Berkeley.
The presumed ancestor of modern humans, Homo erectus, emerged in Africa a little over 2 million years ago, but hominids -- species of great apes with skulls and teeth that had some human characteristics -- were present long before that.
If the Spanish researchers are correct, the fossil may lie at the place in the course of evolution that the great apes and hominids started their own branch of the family tree.
I understand the human remains found in the ice caves in France show humans older then this and Nature magazine had an article that drilling in Australia show human activity over 40 million years ago.
Seems like every find these days it the "best and final".
Oh, I thought this was a Ted Kennedy thread.
I thought we were descended from Nebraska Man, Peking Man, Java Man, and Piltdown Man?
The "missing" link is readily available to anyone who truly wants to experience Him; alll they have to do is pray...
Already other threads on this
Java Man was discovered at a Starbucks.
You forgot the picture.
As usual, another misunderstanding of the word, theory.
Theory: An established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena.
GREAT APE!!!!!
Was Peking Man discovered in a Manchu-Wok???....
The missing link pictured above is also the reason behind the stories this week that anthropologists believe man was born to run.
Blows the heck out of the Creationists' hypothesis.
Go here for a close-up of the fossil.
http://www.house.gov/waters/
was there a turban on the fossil's head?
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