Posted on 08/08/2007 8:36:16 PM PDT by RDTF
WASHINGTON — Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.
The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors.
The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens.
But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Adam and Eve.
About 6,000 years ago.
Makes sense. In “The Beak of the Finch”, different finch species blend back and forth, and on CONUS, the Orchard Oriole and Baltimore Orole interbreed back and forth.
Bill Clinton thought a Mayan mummy of a 16 yo girl was real cute, and some women like me despite my Habiliene ways.
Love your answer and it makes the most sense.
But what about the 1.5 million years part?
Ah, the intelligentsia being shown their stupidgentsia.
What it is saying is the Homo habilis and Homo erectus overlapped in time, rather than one grading into the other. The common ancestor is just a little farther back.
This is similar to the finding some years ago that Neanderthal and modern humans co-existed for a long time before Neanderthal bit the big one (that's scientific-speak for "became extinct").
This is how science works, making one small discovery after another, and gradually increasing our understanding of how things occurred.
Couldn’t be Democrats and Republicans could it?
Well, we do have Matalin and Carville, The Terminator and Maria the Kennedy.
Ain’t nature great?
i love evolution.
It’s like Mohemmed’s religion... whatever you want it to be , just declare it to be “God’s will” at presto chango.. find a bone and everything shifts to meet the new reality.
almost like Oceania’s MOT
“This information has been posted, apparently from different sources, numerous times already”
and your point is?
We are entering the devolution phase - knuckle-dragging, briefcare carrying man.
Giggle
and your point is?
The original news release was picked up by numerous news sources, and each added their own title and put it forth.
There are perhaps five active threads on FR on the same original news release, but because of different titles, searches for previous threads do not necessarily show them.
That's all I meant.
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And that’s where all the rest of them came from. At least we can conclude that there was one male and one female.
Reporters really need to learn to do a better job with headlines.....
It’s sad to think they actually went to college to learn to write like that.
Reporters don't write headlines, editors write headlines.
And editors need to do a better job of writing headlines, but you need to do a better job of reading articles.
This article discusses evidence that two different species (Homo habilis and Homo erectus, both of which are ancestors of ours, coexisted. Obviously there were more than one individual of each species alive at any time, and if you took the time to read the article, you'd know that.
I think that’s a little broad. All I see are people just bouncing ideas and theories off each other and the public. That’s how people can get a consensus and at least try to sort our beginnings out.
Yeah, I did read the article and the headline was still not very good at giving anyone an idea about what the article was really about.
My comment was made directly in reference to the lousy headline.
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