Again, despite looking much like us, neanderthals were vastly different genetically. Their DNA has been described as "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", cleanly eliminating them as a plausible ancestor for modern man.
So Either redwolf is Ted Holden or he is plagarizing ted's 'work' or ignorant in the procedure of properly citing other people.
Certainly Ted earns the epithet of creatortionista in my books as he has posted false information on his website that he should know is false by your communication with him referenced above. This makes him an "Example of Dishonesty" too.
Maybe Neanders weren't aquatic ... ?
we are limited in our ability to understand by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}
Once more arrogantape has demonstrated his propensity for confirmation bias for his pet theory.
After raising the various weak theories why we learned to walk on two legs, they settled on an aquatic adaptation as the most likely occurrence.
And yet there are numerous mammals that have made an aquatic adaptation, and, curiously, not one of them uses an upright walking posture.
Then we have the source of this new information"
Just yesterday National Geographic Presents featured the latest findings on our chimpanzee brethren. There was some cool tool using footage, but I will cut to the chase.
While I have not (yet) found any video that matches this inadequate description (what's the name of the episode eh?) I did find this:
National Geographic Presents - The Mystery Skulls of Palau (Part 1 of 5 the rest are linked at the end of each part) .
If you can get past the embarrassing over-hype and pseudo dramatics to the actual information, there are few surprises (to me). Rather this shows how this particular program is journalistic sensationalism rather than a real source of scientific information or opinion.
Hi anglagard, welcome back to the lan of the living ....
Did you know that all placental mammals have some way to transfer milk to feed their young? Last time I looked it was part of the definition of placental mammal.
Aside from the confirmation bias issue, I believe arrogantape has fallen victim to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
A good example of this is the "big feet" issue. If you get through the NG videos about "The Mystery Skulls of Palau" (see Message 82), you will note that there is a seemingly anomalous feature in the skulls: large teeth. The conclusion is that the teeth are large, because they have retained their ancestral size, while the rest of the body\skull/s shrank in response to the ecological opportunities (minimal, in this case), and the teeth did not have time to "catch up" with the rest of the body\skull shrinkage. The feet of H.floresiensis could be similarly delayed in reduction and also extinct before fully adapted to the island ecology.
Another is the issue of upright walking making swimming easier, and whether this evolved from swimming, or evolved before swimming was possible (ecology not suitably inundated) is not considered, nor is there any evidence that early hominids were swimmers. Shellfish can be obtained by digging them out of the banks at low tide or by wading out into shallow water and digging for them. Curiously, this is how many people collect shellfish today.
quote:This species was not a savanna species like Darwin proposed, said University of Illinois anthropology professor Stanley Ambrose, a co-author of two of 11 studies published this week in Science on the hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus. This creature, believed to be an early ancestor of the human lineage, lived in Ethiopia some 4.4 million years ago.
Ambrose analyzed stable carbon isotope ratios in the soil in which the bones of 36 Ardipithecus individuals were found. He also analyzed the teeth of five Ardipithecus individuals and 172 teeth of two-dozen mammal species found in the same ancient soil layer.
The carbon isotope ratios of the soils indicated that in the time of Ardipithecus the landscape varied from woodland in the western part of the study zone to wooded grassland in the east. None of the Ardipithecus specimens were found in the grassy eastern part of the arc.
That is why doing the obvious, sticking to a quick getaway in the water sounds so plausible. I gave you three good examples of primates doing just that. So, what did you think of the three monkeys I portrayed?
You mean aside from the fact that none of these monkeys exhibit any of the traits that you attribute to hominids and a aquatic adaptation?
No loss of fur No upright gait as preferred mode of over open ground?
I call it confirmation bias and post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.
The reason I don't believe in the brave hunter model is because the few holdouts on the, "Peeking over the grass," impetus for uprightness don't really look at the difficulties presented by this model. The earliest upright walkers had no specialized tools. A pride of lions would make a quick meal of them caught out in the open.
Curiously, I consider the savanna theory to be falsified by the fact that bipedalism evolved before the savanna ecology developed.
quote:The carbon isotope ratios of the soils indicated that in the time of Ardipithecus the landscape varied from woodland in the western part of the study zone to wooded grassland in the east. None of the Ardipithecus specimens were found in the grassy eastern part of the arc.
On the west we find lots of Ardipithecus fossils and they’re associated with a lot of woodland and forest animals, he said. And then there’s a break; Ardipithecus and most of the monkeys that live in trees disappear, and grass-eating animals become more abundant.
Ardi in the woods, not in the grassland, eating foods found in the woods, not eating foods found in the grassland.
Remember, it's the transitional uprightness that would lead to a quick end, if there is no easy escape. That is why doing the obvious, sticking to a quick getaway in the water sounds so plausible.
Curiously, the quickest escape would be to climb trees, as that ability was not lost even by the time of Lucy and the australopithicines.
quote:This evidence, along with the anatomical studies indicating that Ardipithecus could walk upright but also grasped tree limbs with its feet, suggests that this early hominid took its first steps on two legs in the forest long before it ventured very far into the open grassland, Ambrose said.
Multiple lines of evidence now suggest that they were beginning to leave the trees before they left the forest, he said.
But still kept to the wooded ecology, because that provided the refuge by climbing trees to avoid predators.
quote:More than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening.
A trackway of fossil footprints preserved in volcanic ash deposited 3.6 million years ago was uncovered in Laetoli, Tanzania, more than 30 years ago. The significance of those prints for human evolution has been debated ever since. The most likely individuals to have produced these footprints, which show clear evidence of bipedalism, or walking on two legs, would have been members of the only bipedal species alive in the area at that time, Australopithecus afarensis. That species includes "Lucy," whose skeletal remains are the most complete of any individual A. afarensis found to date.
A number of features in the hips, legs, and back of this group indicate that they would have walked on two legs while on the ground. But the curved fingers and toes as well as an upward-oriented shoulder blade provide solid evidence that Lucy and other members of her species also would have spent significant time climbing in trees.
Curiously, the fact that these early hominids retained traits that allowed them to (rapidly) climb trees (to avoid predators), while at the same time evolving the traits necessary for an efficient upright gait, is how evolution works, as compared to evolving two new abilities at the same time (walking and swimming).
I also consider the aquatic ape theory to be virtually falsified due to the absolute lack of evidence of any adaptation specific to an aquatic habitat.
The hands, shoulders and feet are still adapted for tree climbing, even at 3.6 million years (long after Ardi).
Ardi was adept at climbing and moving about in trees. It is beginning to explore the ecology available to ground walkers, but only where trees are nearby.
First of all, I do not believe any hominid was aquatic. We are not born of mermaids. All I am saying is I believe the upright stance, and a push to nudity, was accomplished quickly by a move to tidal flats, streams, and lake edges. I believe they moved there for relative safety, and for a largely untapped rich food source.
Message 97: I am not just making things up. I will be more careful in the future to post sites where one can see for themselves primates using the water as an escape, and one, the Talapoin using the water for food supply. Here they are. The Allen Swamp Monkey, and the Talapoin http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/...onkeys/owallenangpatas.html The Proboscis Monkey is a well know monkey the adult mails having a pendulous nose. Their upright wading in the water is well documented.
And once again we see that your monkey examples do not show the adaptations you claim hominids have derived from your hypothesis of similar behavior:
(a) No loss of fur (b) No upright gait as preferred mode of over open ground
The chimp rules the woods with it's speed, power, and aggression. Ardi was there. What was it's advantage over the chimp?
Ardi was there, chimp was not. At 4.4 million years ago there were no chimps. There was likely an ancestor of chimps somewhere in Africa, but that would have been intermediate between our common ancestor and modern chimps. Ardi appears close to our common ancestor, which is currently put at circa 6 million years ago.
Lucy could climb trees. My son climbs trees. The chimp is still the champ.
Please, do try to use a little logic here. Neither your son nor chimps were in those woods 4.4 million years ago.
The amusing thing is that there is more evidence for tree climbing as a means for Ardi to evade predators than swimming, but you are convinced of swimming and skeptical of climbing. That is not logical.
Hi again anglagard, and those aren't the only objections.
Therefore in the interest of actually defending the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis could you actually explain any of the following evidence contrary to AAH proponent assertions: (numeric bulleting added by me to aid in ease of reading)
We also have the issue of a counter example in the Bonobos, or "pygmy chimps" (Pan paniscus):
quote:In contrast, bonobos probably never left the protection of the trees. Their present range lies in humid forests south of the Zaire River, where perhaps fewer than 10,000 bonobos survive. ...
If this evolutionary scenario of ecological continuity is true, the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees. It could most closely resemble the common ancestor of all three modern species. ... the animal might be most similar to the primogenitor, since its anatomy is less specialized than is the chimpanzee's. Bonobo body proportions have been compared with those of the australopithecines, a form of prehuman. When the apes stand or walk upright, they look as if they stepped straight out of an artist's impression of early hominids.
Bonobos become sexually aroused remarkably easily, and they express this excitement in a variety of mounting positions and genital contacts. Although chimpanzees virtually never adopt face-to-face positions, bonobos do so in one out of three copulations in the wild. Furthermore, the frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva and clitoris strongly suggest that the female genitalia are adapted for this position.
Another similarity with humans is increased female sexual receptivity. The tumescent phase of the female's genitals, resulting in a pink swelling that signals willingness to mate, covers a much longer part of estrus in bonobos than in chimpanzees. Instead of a few days out of her cycle, the female bonobo is almost continuously sexually attractive and active.
quote:Apes last shared a common ancestor with the Old World Monkeys about 25 million years ago. Gibbons split off about 18 million years ago and orangutans about 12-14 million years back; the gibbon lineage split off the siamangs about 2.5 million years ago.
Humans evolved from an ape species that existed about 6 million years ago (sometimes called "Pan prior"). About 2.5 million years ago, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo became separate lineages, as did bipedal woodland apes (e.g., Australopithecines) and our Homo lineage (in white). About 1 million years ago, both the gorilla and chimpanzee lineages split into east and west subspecies because of ice age droughts. Extinctions are shown by terminated bars; only arrows represent extant species.
What we have with Bonobos is the closest living relative to Ardipithicus in behavior and ability, adapted to both tree climbing and bipedal locomotion. Neither Ardi nor Bonobos are obligate bipedalists, but are able to transition between bipedal and quadrapedal locomotion.
We also have face to face sex without swimming ability.
Walking and sex accounted for without water adaptation, in one of our closest relatives.
Personally I also consider it highly likely that walking and apparent bareness did not evolve at the same time, but I do believe that humans were bare before venturing onto the savanna.
When you look at the facts about human hair there is strong evidence that it is a sexual selection adaptation:
(1) it is sexually dimorphic, and the appearance of hairlessness is much more evident and consistent in females, suggesting that they were the selected sex (while male apparent hairlessness is due to genetic cross-over, and shows much more variation).
(2) the appearance is not due to actual loss of hair - we have as many hairs per sq.in. as chimps of equal size - but to the hair being kept at a juvenile stage, rather than progressing to an adult stage. This allows females to look younger, and thus be more sexually appealing.
(3) the killer for the aquatic ape theory for human hair, imho, is the sexual dimorphism: if it were an advantage for survival then it should be equally expressed in both sexes, and the aquatic ape theory has no explanation for the dimorphism.
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What is the "savannah theory"? Is it just the idea that we evolved on the savannah?
The savannah theory is that ape ancestors were forced to adapt to the savannah as it became the dominant ecology at one time, and that our hominid ancestors adapted by standing up so they could see over the top of the grass, to see predators and prey.
This is falsified by Ardi standing and walking before the ecological change occurred.
This re-analysis shows that the region Ardipithecus inhabited was clearly a savannah, with perhaps 5% to 25% tree cover.
... and followed by
quote:... Cerling acknowledges Ardi could have lived in a wooded river corridor, but it was a river that flowed through savanna.
"It wasn't a pure grassland, and it wasn't forest either," says Brown, dean of the University of Utah College of Mines and Earth Sciences and distinguished professor of geology and geophysics....
... and instead indicate tropical grasses made up 43 percent to 77 percent of the ecosystem.
... For all sites, the median amount of tropical grass by biomass produced was 40 percent to 60 percent -- hardly a forest, he says.
That, to me, doesn't sound like it is "clearly savannah" but rather a mixed environment. Seems to me an argument over whether the glass is half empty or half full.
The kind of ecological opportunity that I would expect an already bi-pedal ape to take advantage of, compared to quadra-pedal cousins.
They are careful not to say that they support the "Savannah Hypothesis" (in fact, I think they reject the hypothesis themselves), but they do say that this data does nothing to refute it at all.
True, what they are saying is that the Savannah theory can't be ruled out by the evidence.
What it does mean though - in my opinion - is that the original Savannah hypothesis still needs to be revised to fit this evidence.
The original theory was that ape ancestors moved onto the Savannah, and then became bipedal.
Here we have an emerging Savannah ecology with an opportunity to expand into open areas, while still having places of refuge in groups of trees ... and the ancestors are already bi-pedal.
Thus bi-pedal locomotion still precedes the full savannah ecology. The human ancestors moved into the Savannah because they were already adapted for bi-pedal locomotion.
This is consistent with other information I've seen from other sources as well.
is about a 9 to 7 million year old apelike animal that may have spent much of its time standing upright.
Thus it is not surprising to me to find an already bi-pedal ape inhabiting an emerging Savannah habitat, pre-adapted to take advantage of the new opportunities.
Well, a "mixed environment" is what a savannah is. So, my saying that it was clearly a savannah was my saying it was clearly a "mixed environment."
Like I said, it seems to be an argument over whether the glass is half full or half empty.
I think the savannah model fits this geographic evidence perfectly. There were tree-climbing, forest apes in the forests; bipedal, grassland apes in the grasslands; and now, bipedal/tree-climbing apes in the savannahs.
This makes it a nice intermediary. I always thought this was the basic idea of the Savannah Hypothesis.
Again the issue is when bipedalism evolved. The (original) Savannah Theory states that bipedalism evolved as an adaptation to the Savannah.
This means you should find Savannah ecology before you find bipedalism.
The original theory has been modified to fit more modern evidence of earlier and earlier bipedalism:
quote:Basically, the theory states that between 5 and 8 million years ago, at the end of the Miocene epoch, a drying period enveloped equatorial Africa. As a result of this drying, the Miocene forest began to shrink, forcing the apes to begin to make the transition to a terrestrial way of life. ... The original theory, in the strictest sense, confined itself to the open grassland-savannah as an available niche for the transition to the bipedal hominids.
Adaptation of bipedalism due to the changing ecology.
quote:... Today, however, most scientist conclude that this transition took place in a woodland-savannah where the developing hominids could move about on the grassland and still escape to the forest when threatened by predators. ...
Note the distinction in types\grades\levels of savannah - more like a spectrum than discrete differences. Half full or half empty.
The essential problem is that we already see bipedalism in the earliest savannah ecologies (and earlier?), suggesting that the hominid ancestors were already pre-adapted for bipedalism, and that this allowed them to take advantage of the emerging ecology better than their non-bipedal cousins (simple natural selection in action).
This means you should find bipedalism before you find Savannah ecology.
The evidence is not conclusive yet, but it hints in this direction.
Wow, another primitive bipedal on an island, in the Mediterranean sea, no less. ... ... This is a quote from a description of a cave site ... "The people who used Blombos ... "
quote:Blombos Cave (BBC), situated near Still Bay in the southern Cape, South Africa (34025’S, 21013’E), is some 100 m from the coast and 35 m above sea level.
Creationists should note the dating section, and the number of different methods used that all result in similar dates.
quote:IN a cramped cave that looks out across the swell of the Indian Ocean, South African archaeologists are unearthing evidence of Middle Stone Age people well ahead of their time. The prehistoric occupants were painting their bodies red for rituals and carving abstract symbols. They were fishing and using bone awls, perhaps for leather working. Further excavations highlighted the Blombos people's sophistication - implements of ground and polished animal bone. At 80,000 to 100,000 years old, these are among the oldest bone tools in Africa, and much older than shaped tools discovered elsewhere. Although our ancestors worked stone 2.5 million years ago, they learnt relatively late that bone could be fashioned into something useful. But, as with stone technology, it looks as though the idea started in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fishing is another activity humans invented late in prehistory, and Blombos has the earliest evidence for that, too. ...
Further afield, it looks as though Homo sapiens was smart enough to travel by sea from Indonesia to Australia about 60,000 years ago. The fossil remains, and genetic analyses of living people, point to an origin for our species somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 150,000 years ago, and the first dispersals of Homo sapiens out of Africa perhaps 50,000 years later. ...
quote:Then, evidence of an earlier flourishing of the creative mind began to appear, in southern Africa south of the Zambezi River, dated to the Middle Stone Age, 70,000 years ago and more. Similar artifact collection typesknown as assemblages in archaeological parlancealled Howiesons Poort and Stillbay have been found at sites such as the Klasies River Caves, Boomplaas, and Die Kelders Cave I in South Africa.
These sites included sophisticated bone tools, backed blades, a careful selection of raw material for stone tools and the use of a punch technique; but most of these were controversial in one respect or another. That was until Blombos Cave.
Since 1991, South African researchers led by Christopher Henshilwood have been working at the Blombos Cave site. Artifacts found there include sophisticated bone and stone tools, fish bones, and an abundance of used ochre. Ochre has no known economic function; it is almost universally accepted as a source of color for ceremonial, decorative purposes. The Blombos Cave layers containing used ochre are dated 70,000 to 80,000 years before the present. Most recently (April of 2004), a cluster of deliberately perforated and red-stained shell beads dating to the Middle Stone Age has been found, and is being interpreted as personal ornaments or jewelry for the occupants of Blombos.
The best and most likely interpretation of these finds, and numerous others throughout Africa, is that the growth of the human symbolic thought was a slow process that continued throughout the Middle Stone Age in Africa. How that flourishing of creative thought left Africa is still under discussion, but one way may have been through the Southern Dispersal Route.
If this is the earliest evidence of hominid fishing and shell gathering, then it is significantly late in the scheme of hominid evolution ... evidence that hominids had evolved into early Homo sapiens before this behavior was developed, rather than being a defining behavior that affected early hominids becoming human.
quote:The Southern Dispersal Route refers to a theory concerning an early migration of modern human beings from southern Africa to the east along the coastlines of Africa, Arabia and India to Australia and Melanesia between about 70,000 and 45,000 years ago. ...
The theory goes that modern H. sapiens with a generalized subsistence strategy based on hunting and gathering coastal resources (shellfish, fish, sea lions and rodents, as well as bovids and antelope), traveled along the coasts eastward. ...
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