Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
Not true. It wasn't easy at all. While granted that no one suspected (or at least openly suggested) fraud, the fact is that the "preponderance" of anthropologists concluded that Piltdown was not a single creature, but a chance association of a human skull and ape jaw. The hoaxer had to engineer a second find (Piltdown II) to quell the critics.
The follow-on to Piltdown is Hesperopithecus, in which a dim-witted goofball named Osborne, who ran the presigious Museum of Natural History in New York, lifted a pig's tooth to the light and testified in rapturous tones that it was obviously a hominid fossil.
Actually I don't think either Osborne or any of the Americans ever claimed it was a hominid (in the human family). They claimed it was a hominoid, specifically an anthropoid ape. It was an Englishman, Elliot Grafton Smith, IIRC, who elevated Hesperopithecus to human ancestry, in text accompanying that picture in the Illustrated London News that all the creationists reproduce (and which Osborne immediately dismissed as unscientific fantasy).
The claim that an ape had been found in the Americas was extraordinary enough in itself. Whatever you may choose to believe about the credulity of scientists, the fact is that there was no way in the world such a claim would ever achieved general acceptance on the basis of a single worn and eroded tooth. Further evidence was necessary, and when the researchers at the American Museum sought it out they uncovered their own error.
The basis for the event may be supernatural, but the event itself (the Ark, the flood) should have material evidence, if they did occur.
This inability to prove a supernatural event with material evidence is not, however, proof that the event is a myth that did not occur.
You're the one claiming these events occurred. I'm simply asking for proof.
Neither of your assertions has been demonstrated.
Is the existence of observers other than oneself empirically demonstrable, or is it an article of faith?
I know it must be uncomfortable for evolutionists to face their frauds. Face them you must, however. Intellectual honesty demands it.
As anyone who has acheived any rudimentary accomplishment in the field of biological study knows -- whether they be evolutionists or creationists -- Haekel purposefully and fraudulently used the same woodcut to represent cross-species embryos in his work, Natural History of Creation (Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte)(1868). This was no innocent mistake on his part. Haekel's fraud was outted by Rutimeyer, a contemporary professor of zoology at University of Basel.
Haekel was called on his fraud then and there, his factual misreprsentation was exposed, and Haekel shortly afterword as much as admitted to the purposefulness of his mis-representation. Most evolutionists today do not defend Haekel's obvious fraud, and recognize it for what it was. You needn't feel compelled to run Martian interference on your own for him, and you can still be a practicing evolutionist, if you like. Haekel has simply done you a scientific dis-service.
The Haekel fraud exposure, if it is nothing else, is really quite instructive. Sadly, wedded as they are more to a premise than they are to examining scientific evidence -- particularly readily observable evidence that debunks their premise, or the abyssmal lack of evidence to support their premise (the facts be damned; premise uber alles!), the honest debate of scientific observations still continues to be for many evolutionists, a very difficult thing.
Yeah, but wouldn't that have been a creationist (biblical inerrantist) hoax? "There were giants in the earth in those days."
Humans did not co-exist with dinosaurs and neither did apes or any other primates, to my knowledge.
Now the dinosaurs were wiped out and it was not evolution that did it and if they were wiped out then the evolving "MAN" was wiped out as well. Everything had to start over from scratch
Huh? Not everything was wiped out when the big rock hit. There were no even remotely human mammals around at the time.
Perhaps. But since natural laws were not in operation when the events occured, why do you assume the material evidence has to conform to natural law, and that evidence of the event is thus amenable to investigation by scientific means? Uniformity of physical laws does not apply, by definition.
Every year many thousands of gnus are killed in their annual migration. Over the last hundred years, that's millions of gnu skeletons. Over the last 10,000 or 100,000 years, that's billions! We should be hip deep over the entire planet with gnu skeletons!!
But I've never seen a gnu skeleton!!! Have you!! Obviously the whole gnu population is a hoax!!!!
Yeah, but wouldn't that have been a creationist (biblical inerrantist) hoax? "There were giants in the earth in those days."
In the absense of knowledge, project your intellectual weaknesses if feel you must.
It still doesn't change the fact that an evolutionist's hoax is an evolutionist's problem.
It cuts straight to your credibity, and the basic intellectual dishonesty, which characterizes so much of the evolution-driven thought processes of otherwise seemingly intellegent persons.
Uh, who here is denying, defending or excusing any fraud? Piltdown was a fraud (hoax), Haekel's embryos were fraudulent (willful distortion), and there are others that no one will deny. None of this excuses representing things that were not fraudulent (e.g. Hesperopithecus, Ramapithecus) as though they were. This is what is being responded to. Calling things "frauds" which are not fraudulent is as intellectually dishonest (and as damaging to truth) as excusing fraud.
You ought not adopt the high horse attitude while muddying the issue yourself.
This is another premise we don't share. It's also patently unproveable. Where does this idea come from?
Fractals.
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