Re: Red in tooth


Glenn wrote:
> http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9145721/
>
> "First-ever chimpanzee fossils found"
>
> "It had previously been thought that chimps never lived in the arid Rift Valley -
> they prefer more lush environments like the Congo and jungles of western Africa.
> For years, scientists believed that early human ancestors left the jungles and
> moved east to the less wooded grasslands, and that this move caused the
> evolutionary split between the human and chimp lines."
>
> "But now, with the discovery of ancient chimps and humans in the same area,
> evolutionists may have to rethink what caused humans to become humans."
>
> "For many years people have used this kind of geographic split in environment as
> an explanation as an origin of humans and bipedalism," co-author Sally McBrearty
> of the University of Connecticut told LiveScience. "People have still retained
> this idea of a split geographic distribution of chimps and humans. This shows it
> certainly wasn't true half a million years ago, and may not have been true before
> that. We need to look for another reason for the evolutionary split."

Paleontologists, please correct if necessary:

The last paragraph is either grossly out of context or McBrearty is
selling out to the sensationalist media. Reality check: The chimp human
split was 5-8 MYA. These fossils are from 0.5 MYA, when Homo was
archaic sapiens or close to it, and had spread throughout much of the
globe, perhaps many times over. Unless most of the other fossils on our
side of the lineage, especially early after the split, were in such a
geographic region, and AIUI they are mostly not, there's not much to
rethink.

Either way, it's about time that some article mentions the scarcity of
chimp lineage fossils. It's not a problem at all for evolution, but the
way it's almost never mentioned, one would think it was a problem. I
understand that science is in the business of reporting positive finds,
unlike creationism/ID, which dwells on gaps, especially if it can
misrepresent them. Interestingly this is one "gap" that creationism/ID
usually avoids as well. Imagine what it would have been like had all
the preserved fossils of ~5MY to present been on the chimp side of the
split instead. It still wouldn't be a problem for evolution, but
anti-evolutionsists would have been in their glory.

.

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