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Author Topic:   How Evolution changed humans’ appearance
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 25 of 45 (710389)
11-05-2013 7:14 AM
Reply to: Message 24 by WJK
11-05-2013 4:21 AM


In my learning mode, I am always pleased to hear opinions of others and take them into account!
I must try to find some evidence that 200,000 years ago, MotherOne "would be far more similar to Miss World than to the other Great Apes".
Perhaps my hypothesis might have been more credible if I had placed MotherOne some time earlier when she would have been one of the species which later led to both humans and chimpanzees - from my limited memory, was it homo erectus?
No - Homo erectus is very much on our line of the family tree. The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees is believed to have lived about 5-6 million years ago, based around evidence from mutation rates. H. erectus lies on our side of the split, and appears in the fossil record from about 1.8 million years ago - so it's much closer to us than a chimpanzee.
The species from around the time of the human/chimp split are Orrorin tugenensis and Sahelanthropus tchadensis. They're only known from sketchy remains, and it's controversial whether they should be treated as nearer to humans or chimps, or off on their own seperate branches.

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 Message 24 by WJK, posted 11-05-2013 4:21 AM WJK has replied

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1025 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 41 of 45 (710651)
11-08-2013 5:23 AM
Reply to: Message 29 by RAZD
11-05-2013 8:29 PM


A brief tangent on culture
The emergence of culture apparently only started some 50,000 years ago, when dolls and flutes are found.
I think your ideas are a but outdated here. The magical date of 50,000 years for the sudden emergence of a modern, cultural package is the hangover of Eurocentric palaeontology. 'Modern' culture arrived in Europe about 50,000 years ago all at once because it was brought there by people who had already gradually developed it over the course of the preceding 150,000 years in Africa. Recent discoveries have shown that people were carving abstract images, creating pigments and making jewellery in southern Africa almost as early as 100,000 years ago.
Controversial evidence that Neanderthals had artistic traditions may mean we have the push the advent of modern-like culture back a lot further than that.

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