Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say

National Geographic News ^ | April 13, 2006 | John Roach

[Senator Bedfellow]

When the famous skeleton of an early human ancestor known as Lucy was discovered in Africa in the 1970s, scientists asked: Where did she come from?

Now, fossils found in the same region are providing solid answers, researchers have announced.

Lucy is a 3.5-foot-tall (1.1-meter-tall) adult skeleton that belongs to an early human ancestor, or hominid, known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The species lived between 3 million and 3.6 million years ago and is widely considered an ancestor of modern humans.

The new fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as Australopithecus anamensis. The remains date to about 4.1 million years ago, according to Tim White, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

White co-directed the team that discovered the new fossils in Ethiopia (map) in a region of the Afar desert known as the Middle Awash.

The team says the newly discovered fossils are a no-longer-missing link between early and later forms of Australopithecus and to a more primitive hominid known as Ardipithecus.

"What the new discovery does is very nicely fill this gap between the earliest of the Lucy species at 3.6 million years and the older [human ancestor] Ardipithecus ramidus, which is dated at 4.4 million years," White said.

The new fossil find consists mainly of jawbone fragments, upper and lower teeth, and a thigh bone.

The fossils are described in today's issue of the journal Nature.

Found Links

According to White, the discovery supports the hypothesis that Lucy was a direct descendent of Australopithecus anamensis.

[jennyp]

Because my system is Macintosh, it's like trying to write on a Acrobat "read only" document. Why is it so important to you?

It's not a form you can fill out. Just say which ones you consider to be of the ape kind & which ones are of the human kind. I'm trying to determine exactly where this unbridgeable gap between the two created kinds is. I can never get a straight, consistent answer from creationists as to where this vast chasm between micro- and macro-evolution lies.

[Boiler Plate]

Politeness only gets you so far. Sooner or later you have to say, enough is enough.

Then why do you aggravate yourself by reading and posting in these threads?

[ahayes]

I've seen this said so many times, but you personally can't become immune to penicillin. Unfortunately penicillin isn't so great for many infections now because penicillin resistance is spreading throughout common bacteria.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Most scientist who study evolution come to the realization that there is a God, although some won't admit it. But Newton and Lord Kelvin did."

Newton didn't study evolution, as he died about 130 years before Darwin published. He was a Unitarian and thought that Jesus was just a man. Kelvin knew about it, it's true, and he didn't accept it, but he also thought the Earth was millions of years old.


I notice you have completely ignored my post that exposed that list of quotes you posted in #400 as hogwash. A large number of them were from avowed creationists though the list said specifically that they were not supposed to be creationists. Or, like Lipson, they were talking more about the origins of life instead of the theory of evolution. Most were from the first third of the 20th century.

Argument by quote salad is... underwhelming.

[Alter Kaker]

Your definition is incorrect. Apes are neither platyrrhines nor cercopithecoids and are therefore not monkeys.

[Alter Kaker]

The same thing you do with evolution... pretend you know it all...

I don't pretend to know it all. If we did, there wouldn't need to be teams of anthropologists digging in the hills of Ethiopia -- they'd never need to leave the classroom.

[Alter Kaker]

I took one off that list randomly, and looked it up. Turns out Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times was writing in May 1946 about the "mysteries" of cell biology beyond the chromosomal level, effectively lamenting the fact that DNA had yet to be discovered. Fruit of the Spirit quotes half the article's title (you think someone's perhaps being a little dishonest?) but in no way does it reflect a creationist or anti-evolution viewpoint. Oh, and FYI:

The FULL title reads:

"Greatest Mystery of All: The Secret of Life; It has baffled science for centuries: now in atomic physics we have a key to the problem.

[ml1954]

I'll stack my graduate and post graduate gradepoint, as well as my IQ against yours any day.

Then you should be able to tell me why the only posters I've ever seen bragging about their IQ on these threads are anti-evos.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" The FULL title reads:

"Greatest Mystery of All: The Secret of Life; It has baffled science for centuries: now in atomic physics we have a key to the problem."

Ah, OK. I couldn't find anything specific about that quote, so I didn't comment on it. Great work!

It should be remembered that Fruit didn't actually write the list; he copied it from a different site. I have seen the list, reproduced verbatim, a number of times already. I doubt he/she ever thought to check any of the quotes personally to see if they were what they claimed to be.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

there wouldn't need to be teams of anthropologists digging in the hills of Ethiopia

I question there is any “need” at all...

Rooted in the universal human dissatisfaction for mortality, it is a vain search for human origin(s), an attempt to rationalize a yearning for connection to something eternal.

[js1138]

Or maybe just curiosity.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker and link to The List-O-Links.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Or maybe just curiosity.

Conceit, egocentric vanity.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

I did some more research and the quote has been attributed to Erwin Schrödinger by creationists too, though it was still from that same article. Waldemar Kaempffert was the science writer at the New York Times, and was quoting Schrödinger. Probably because in 1944 Schrödinger wrote a book called, "What is life?" that tried to explain what life was, from the perspective of a physicist.

[js1138]

Or just curiosity.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

...tell me why the only posters I've ever seen bragging about their IQ on these threads are anti-evos.

Conceitedness... pretentiousness... mental pathologies of the constipated intellectuals...

[CarolinaGuitarman]

Dashwood doesn't care about curiosity, or knowledge, or about science. His attacks on evolution have nothing to do with any scientific objections (if they did, he would present at least one), but on what he perceives to be the implications in other areas. He has other obsessions that drive him. :) Pummeling evolution and related sciences (which he has demonstrated he has no knowledge of at all) is just a means to an end.

[js1138]

This is not surprising coming from an interpretation of the Bible that equates curiosity with ultimate evil.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"This is not surprising coming from an interpretation of the Bible that equates curiosity with ultimate evil."

Don't forget, he's an alleged atheist. :)

[ahayes]

I completely agree. :-D