(1449) Mon 30 Dec 96 14:29 By: DAVID RICE To: BILL WOLFF Re: Wolff the fundy liar BW+gt; p

(1449)  Mon 30 Dec 96 14:29
By: DAVID RICE
To: BILL WOLFF
Re: Wolff the fundy liar

BW> please tell us where mankind came from?

From our ancestors, silly fundy.

From Joel Hanes:

The current hominid fossil situation is thus:  we can
trace the human line backwards, through a well-established
bushy line of transitional fossils, through H. erectus and
H. habilis into the Australopithecine species of the
African Pliocene. These are not humans -- their skulls are
quite different -- but they are fully bipedal, and the
whole skeleton from the neck down is much more like a
human than like any living or fossil ape.  If they were
alive today, we'd call them "apes", I'm sure, (the name
"Australopitecus means "southern ape"), though they'd be
much more human-seeming apes than either gorillas or
chimps.

I don't know much about the fossil record of chimps,
bonobos, or gorillas.

There's a gap in our fossil record of all African apes
that covers the critical time (I think it's the late
Miocene to early Pliocene); part of the gap is a
historical accident, in that early and well-funded
physical anthropologists such as Leakey and Johannsen went
after the Pleistocene and Pliocene.  Part of the gap may
be due to environmental and climactic effects -- very few
animals leave preserved fossils.  Animals that die along
rivers and lakeshores are fairly likely to be covered with
mud and preserved; animals that live in forests are almost
never preserved, since the forest-floor decomposers and
the acid soil destroy the bones.  The gap may also be a
reflection of the real rarity of the animal we're looking
for.  Finally, I believe that few Miocene sediments are
well known in Africa -- it often happens that the
deposition from one era is almost wholly eroded in a
succeeding one.

So physical anthropologists haven't neccessarily been
digging in the right places; the creatures may have been
rare to begin with and rarely fossilized, and erosion
during any of the ensuing millenia may have destroyed most
of whatever fossils once existed.  Yet, anthropologists
are starting to concentrate on the Miocene -- I have hope
that I'll live to see the First Hominid described.

Here's a rude attempt at an ASCII diagram of our
family tree as I think I understand it:

                                       Modern
Gibbon   Orangoutang  Gorilla          Humans    Bonobo    Chimp
  |          |          |                |          |        |
  |          |          |                |          |        |
  |          |          |         Nean-  |          |        |  Pleistocene
  |          |          |         der-   |          |        |
  |          |          |         thal   |          |        |
  |          |          |             \ /           |        |
  |          |          |              |            |       /
  |          |          |           H. erectus      |      /
  |          |          |              |            |     /
  |          |          |           H. habilis      |    /
  |          |         /               |            |   /
  |          |        /    robust     gracile       |  /
  |          |       |     Australo-  Australo-     | /
  |          |       |     pithe-     pithe-        |/
   \         |       |     cines      cines         /
    \        |       |          \     /            /
     \       |       |          ancestral         /             Pliocene
      \      |       |         Australo-         /
       \      \       \         pithecus        /
        \      \       \                \      /
         \      \       \                \    /
          \      \       \       Unknown first hominid:
           \      \       \      The last common ancestor
            \      \       \     of humans and any modern ape
             \      \       \      /
              \      \       \    /
               \      \       \  /                              Miocene
                \      \       \/
                 \      \      /
                  \      \    /
                   \      \  /
                    \      \/
                     \     /
               Unknown first hominoid:
               the last common ancestor
               of humans and all modern apes



Apologies for the crudity of representation. Criticism and
corrections solicited. --- Joel Hanes


... Do YOU trust a religion that won't obey it's OWN laws?
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