Posted on 08/24/2007 12:01:34 PM PDT by Mikey_1962
Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday.
The near total absence to date of traces on the continent of apes from this period had led many scientists to conclude that the shared line from which humans and living great apes emerged had taken a long evolutionary detour through Eurasia.
But the study, published in the British journal Nature, "conclusively demonstrates that the Last Common Ancestor (of both man and ape) was strictly an African phenomenon," commented paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.
Lovejoy described the fossils as "a critically important discovery," a view echoed by several other scientists who had read the paper or seen the artifacts.
"This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told AFP.
The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.
The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago.
Orrorin -- discovered in Kenya in 2000 and nicknamed "Millennium Man" although its sex remains unknown -- goes back 5.8 to 6.1 million years, while Sahelanthropus, found a year later in Chad, is considered by most experts to extend the human family tree another one million years into the past.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Well, a bad side of Science is the tendency to leap to conclusions. Darwin et al. leapt to conclusions that cannot now be supported, just like the rest of us do. The bad thing was that Darwinists shouted down all opposition as obscurantism, even variant theories of evolution. Religious zealots get bad press in scientific circles, but science has its zealots as well.
When I studied evolution in grad school the standard explanation for the lack of late Miocene fossils was because so many of the apes were living in the forests. Forests are notoriously poor at preserving fossils.
Later, when groups left the forests for grasslands and lake shores, etc., the number of fossils increased.
The aquatic ape theory I think deals more with this latter time frame.
Not really, it used to be 25 million. More evidence dropped it to 7 million, no revised to 10.
That's the thing about science. More evidence gives you more confindent in the refined estimate.
Religion> Well I think it might be 10,000 years not 6000. Why? I dunno..
Amazing how these estimates keep getting pushed further and further back in time.
How far back in time is too far? 4000 BC?
I think the other poster was stating that he doesn’t think the evidence points to that, and that this evidence could be used to bolster that argument.
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