Posted on 02/18/2007 11:40:54 PM PST by LibWhacker
Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas.
The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.
Details of the sensational discovery appear in Science magazine.
The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.
Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth.
Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago).
Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones.
They have assigned it to an entirely new genus and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus .
Monkey business
Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).
It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window.
Scientists think the creature lived after the lesser apes went their own evolutionary way, but before the great apes began their own diversification into different forms such as orang-utans, gorillas, chimps and, of course, humans.
" Pierolapithecus probably is, or is very close to, the last common ancestor of great apes and humans," said Professor Moyà-Solà.
The new ape's ribcage, lower spine and wrist display signs of specialised climbing abilities that link it with modern great apes, say the researchers.
The overall orthograde - or upright - body design of this animal and modern-day great apes is thought to be an adaptation to vertical climbing and suspending the body from branches.
The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented.
"It's very impressive because of its completeness," David Begun, professor of palaeoanthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, told the BBC News website.
"I think the authors are right that it fills a gap between the first apes to arrive in Europe and the fossil apes that more closely resemble those living today."
Planet of the apes
Other scientists working on fossil apes were delighted by the discovery. But not all were convinced by the conclusions drawn by the Spanish researchers.
Professor Begun considers it unlikely that Pierolapithecus was ancestral to orang-utans.
"I haven't seen the original fossils. But there are four or five important features of the face, in particular, that seem to be closer to African apes," he explained.
"To me the possibility exists that it is already on the evolutionary line to African apes and humans."
Professor David Pilbeam, director of the Peadbody Museum in Cambridge, US, was even more sceptical about the relationship of Pierolapithecus to modern great apes: "To me it's a very long stretch to link this to any of the living apes," he told the BBC News website.
"I think it's unlikely that you would find relatives of the apes that live today in equatorial Africa and Asia up in Europe.
"But it's interesting in that it appears to show some adaptations towards having a trunk that's upright because it's suspending itself [from branches].
"It also has some features that show quadrupedal (four-legged) behaviour. Not quadrupedal in the way chimps or gorillas are, but more in the way that monkeys are - putting their fingers down flat," he explained.
During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes.
As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.
Where's the "Bling?"
Somewhere between bacteria and Brad Pitt.
Just the ones who roll their own.
non-filtered...no wonder the dinosaurs died out....
but some apes are greater than others.......
Science magazine is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to one regular 'evo' here on FR, the AAAS is a political organization and has little to do with science.
Can this be the truth when it comes to global warming issues, but not true when it comes to evolution isues?
Scientists are politically motivated in one area (GW) but not politically motivated in any other areas, especially regarding evolution?
Does anyone else have a problem with this?
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That's a good one. I will add it to my list of evolutionary just-so stories.
If there was a gene for dying at age 50 in women... So it's not really a coincidence... Evolution has made it that way.
There are no such genes, but I bet you think your philosophical ramblings in a priori biology prove something about them anyway.
I thought it was in the front row of the White House press briefing room.
Of course. Several AAAS presidents were also members of the American Eugenics Society, and many more AAAS members were also AES members, and so on. Bentley Glass was both president of AAAS and director of AES in the sixties. David Hamburg was director of AES from 1989-1991 and president of AAAS 1984-85. Hamburg was president of Carnegie Corporation, which financed Davenport's ERO (Eugenic Record Office) and his Station for Experimental Evolution. So of course the AAAS has a political interest in promoting darwinism. So did all the eugenics societies, starting with Huxley's.
Would you believe it is nothing but gaps.
The world is filled with species who reached their evolutionary peak and went no further. That’s like saying that because there are alligators that dinosaurs must still be around.
This political interest wouldn't influence the reports and findings in, let's say, Science magazine, would it?
Or, what wasn't reported?
Or, how easy it would be to dissent from the "proven" worldview?
Naah...
How about a few quantitative differences:
HUMANS: MILLIONS OF INVENTIONS FROM THE WHEEL TO STEAMBOATS TO AUTOS TO ROCKETS TO SILICON
CHIMPS: NOTHING
HUMANS: WRITTEN LANGUAGE, ART, SCIENCE, MATH
CHIMPS: NOTHING
HUMANS: VERIFIABLE AWARENESS OF WHO THEY ARE; ASK ANY HUMAN WHO THEY ARE AND THEY CAN TELL YOU
CHIMP: CAN'T
Clearly, DNA is important, but it's not everything. What humans actually know about the details of the creation of life is, qualitatively, equivalent to one pebble of sand on a Destin beach.
Of course it would. There's more info about AAAS and related activities in this article.
Or, how easy it would be to dissent from the "proven" worldview?
About as easy as it would be to dissent from a marxist world view in a soviet peer-reviewed journal.
Who knows, but one thing is certain, some darwinian will give you an a priori reason for it.
Basically they're saying these 13 million year-old monkeys ate bananas because modern monkeys with the same dentition eat bananas. They've discovered that the ancestor of modern banana-eating monkeys was a banana-eating monkey.
Maybe evolution doesn't mean change, after all.
The "fruit-eating" factoid is symptomatic of ape-man evolution literature. A reader can be lulled into thinking he is learning something from dreck like 'prehistoric chimps ate bananas, they probably went for a dump now and then, climbed trees, mated, ate, and slept, blah, blah'. I'm sure you've read ape-man stories that go... "ape-man possibly ran around naked, or perhaps wore rudimentary clothing, he used his feet for locomotion, and ate foodstuffs found in nature. He mated with the opposite sex and had children. When mauled by tigers, he possibly made lound sounds. etc. etc." There's reams of that sort of rot in evolutionary literature, and if it were all pushed into the sea one day, the loss to human knowledge would be zero.
Come now, the difference between a mind of a human and that of a monkey is merely one of degree. Anyone who has spent an afternoon tea-time with monkeys can testify to that. Monkeys can even play chess, though perhaps not well or with familiar rules. Lloyd Morgan offers this apology for Darwin,
In "The Descent of Man" Darwin dealt at some length with intelligence and the higher mental faculties... His object, he says, is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties... Darwin was too good an observer and too honest a man to minimise the "enormous difference" between the level of mental attainment of civilised man and that reached by any animal. His contention was that the difference, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind.So, yes, humans have mental faculties for cathedral-building, art, mathematics, music, literature, chess-playing, rational discourse, and engineering - while monkeys merely have less of it.
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