Scientists Look To Europe As Evolutionary Seat

University Of Toront ^ | 19 February 2002 | Staff

[PatrickHenry]

University of Toronto anthropologist David Begun and his European colleagues are re-writing the book on the history of great apes and humans, arguing that most of their evolutionary development took place in Eurasia, not Africa.

In back-to-back issues of the Journal of Human Evolution, Begun and his collaborators describe two fossils, both discovered in Europe. One comes from the oldest relative of all living great apes (orangutans and African apes) and humans; the other is the most complete skull ever found of a close relative of the African apes and humans.

In the November 2001 issue, Begun and colleague Elmar Heizmann of the Natural History Museum of Stuttgart discuss the earliest-known great ape fossil, broadly ancestral to all living great apes and humans. "Found in Germany 20 years ago, this specimen is about 16.5 million years old, some 1.5 million years older than similar species from East Africa," Begun says. "It suggests that the great ape and human lineage first appeared in Eurasia and not Africa."

In the December 2001 paper, Begun and colleague László Kordos of the Geological Museum of Hungary describe the skull of Dryopithecus, discovered in Hungary by their team a couple of years ago. The fossil is identical to living great apes in brain size and very similar to African apes in the shape of the skull and face and in details of the teeth, the researchers say.

The discoveries suggest that the early ancestors of the hominids (the family of great apes and humans) migrated to Eurasia from Africa about 17 million years ago, just before these two continents were cut off from each other by an expansion of the Mediterranean Sea. Begun says that the great apes flourished in Eurasia and that their lineage leading to the African apes and humans - Dryopithecus - migrated south from Europe or Western Asia into Africa, where populations diverged into the lines leading towards great apes, gorillas and chimps (chimpanzees and bonobos). One of those lines eventually evolved into the ancestors of humans about six million years ago.

[Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University Of Toronto for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit University Of Toronto as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: Source. ]

[gore3000]

What a find! It took them 20 years to find some nonsense to say about this find "proving" the descent of man. The source of course does not bother to show the evidence for any of the nonsense mentioned in it - it would show them to be the liars which they are. Here is Dryopithecus:

[gore3000]

"anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid,[than Neanderthal]"

Yes, it is quite interesting that the evos continue to claim that each new find from millions of years ago gets us closer to "the missing link". What they need to find is an ancestor to man that lived from 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, because the dead do not reproduce and man could not have descended from species long extinct.

[medved]

The dead indeed do not reproduce, and fish don't walk up on to the beach and bite people. Consider the number of fish in the ocean, and the thousands of miles of shorelines in the world. If there was any possibility whatsoever of a fish walking out of the ocean and surviving on land, don't you think it would be happening somewhere in the world, at any particular time? It simply should not be that hard to walk a couple of miles along any beach and find a Darwin fish or two walking around. Where are they and why hasn't anybody ever seen one?

You gotta be pretty stupid to believe in that kind of thing, don't you? The thing which is really going to get to the evolunatics is when they get to the pearly gates and see all the adulterers, fornicators, democrats, communists, and petty criminals of every sort who nonetheless had some redeeming grace sufficient to get in, and then see the big sign which says "NO IDIOTS ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT", and realize the error of their ways too late. Kind of like the stanza from The Evolutionist (roughly transliterated into modern colloquial English since the FR censors aren't too keen on ebonics...):

...so they cut Raoul down, and they dragged him, still bound
where the rings of hell all wind down, and around
past the frightening stench and the pitiful sound
of the howling, and squealing, and wailing of clowns
trapped forever, in mires, of decay and pollution
for believing in bull (manure), like evolution...

[Youngblood]

...and fish don't walk up on to the beach and bite people.

They're a little small to bite people, but what about mudskippers? They spend much of their time on land.

[SunkenCiv]

A Blast from the Past. Note: this topic is from early 2002!!! Post replies at your own risk. Thank you.

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Stranger In A New Land

[SunkenCiv]

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