Posted on 08/31/2005 11:35:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Palaeontologists digging in the dusty wastelands of East Africa have discovered the first known chimpanzee fossil. The modest haul of just three teeth is the first hard evidence of the evolutionary path that led to today's chimpanzees.
As well as shedding light on chimps, the find throws up new questions about human evolution; it seems that chimpanzees may not have been physically separated from humans as was once thought.
That no one had previously found a chimpanzee fossil had long been a frustrating puzzle, comments Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, who made the find near Lake Baringo, Kenya, with her colleague Nina Jablonski. Set against the many human fossils found in East Africa, the lack of specimens documenting the chimp's evolutionary story was exasperating.
Part of the problem, McBrearty explains, is that chimps tend to live in hot, wet jungle conditions that are not good for the preservation of remains. Humans, on the other hand, are thought to have lived for millennia on the savannah, where bones are less likely to rot.
The great divide
Previous theories suggested that chimps never crossed east of the Rift Valley, but instead stayed in the jungles of western and central Africa. Some even suspected that this physical separation was what set the earliest chimp and human ancestors on contrasting evolutionary voyages. But now McBrearty has stumbled on chimp remains east of this divide.
This means we need a better explanation of why and how chimps and humans went their separate evolutionary ways, McBrearty says. The discovery that chimps were living in semi-arid conditions as well as in the jungle seems to blow apart the simplistic idea that it was the shift to savannah that led to humans walking upright.
The teeth are around 500,000 years old, McBrearty and Jablonski report in Nature1. So far it is impossible to say whether they belonged to the same species as modern chimps, Pan troglodytes, or to some unnamed, now extinct ancestor. "It wouldn't surprise me if there are lots of extinct chimp species," McBrearty says.
If the teeth do belong to the same species as modern chimps, this would mean the species is quite long-lived. In contrast, modern Homo sapiens has been around for only some 200,000 years. But the earlier human species H. erectus is thought to have lasted around a million years.
Finding the ancestor
The fossils are not old enough to tell us about the common ancestor of chimps and humans, which lived between five and seven million years ago, points out anthropologist Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "But this raises hope that we can find older stuff," he adds.
McBrearty suspects that although there may have been more chimps living in the jungles of western Africa, there are probably more fossils in the dry eastern savannah. It's just that "no one was looking for them" she says.
McBrearty hopes to return to Kenya in December to resume the search. In spite of the baking equatorial heat, December's dryness makes it the best time to probe for delicate remains.
Everyone be nice.
Three teeth!!!! Yeehaw!
"Palaeontologists digging in the dusty wastelands of East Africa have discovered the first known chimpanzee fossil. The modest haul of just three teeth is the first hard evidence of the evolutionary path that led to today's chimpanzees."
Can't be right, they became humans not todays chimps.
Don't they understand evolution.
Gee, what are the odds of finding the bones of the very first chimp?
What kind of spin do you think this story would get on DU?
Owl_Eagle(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
LOL this is a hoot
" The modest haul of just three teeth is the first hard evidence of the evolutionary path that led to today's chimpanzees. "
My prediction: You will see a thread started on DU about this with the first comment being, "They already found a fossil of Bush?"
it seems that chimpanzees may not have been physically separated from humans as was once thought.
The chimps were actually the masters of humans back then.
Oh wait, that was the future not the past. Yikes!
Was the big #1 tattooed on his arm?
Or was the tag sown to his fur?
Idiot so-called "scientists"!
Thanks for the link to "Comparison of Human, Chimpanzee Genomes Reveals Striking Similarities." Very informative article.
So, chimps descended from man?
Yeah, that'll clear everything up about chimp 'evolution'.
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Well that's a barely interesting link. 96%, given the raw numbers of genes, is not as great a commonality as the number is intended to imply to the unwashed masses. While accurate, it's misleading.
too many teath for him.
Hmm... Well, that would be one way to explain the looting in Katrina's wake.
Ummm, no, of its own accord, it doesn't. The chimp fossils are from 500,000 years ago. The human & chimp lineages split some 6 million years ago. The chimps had several million years to enter the area where humans (and their ancestors) may very well have been alone beforehand. That would certainly explain why no older chimp fossils have been found as well.
PS. And if these researchers did indeed say that this "seems to blow apart the simplistic idea" blah, blah, blah then they are deeply incompetent, even despite their intriguing discovery.
Shhh! Not so loud. Chimps find the thought revolting.
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