Neanderthal research (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Thursday, September 23, 2010, 21:16 (4966 days ago) @ George Jelliss

First, a good slide show-
As I have said, evolution on a micro-scale, that is, evolution within a family, is a fact. I do not dispute that at all. I am not familiar enough with Hominoidea to say which came first/last or if they all came from each other. To use an animal that I am more familiar with, I will examine dogs. -Supposedly, all members of the Canidae family came from a common ancestor some about 40 million years ago. Now, 40 million years later, we all sorts of Canidae species. Big ones, small ones, wild ones, tame ones, but at the end of the day, they are still Canidae, not cats, or kangaroos, or rats, and as far as I am aware, all species within the family are breed-able(which is not true of humans and apes) So while I can say that to a limited extent I agree with adaptation within a species, I do not think that justifies the claim of cross species separation being reduced to a single original ancestry. I also do not think that there is enough solid evidence to make a theory about the origin of the species. Particularly in light of recent findings in genetic studies. ->It is a problematic finding because of our current understanding of early >fossils, such as the famous Toumai specimen uncovered in Chad.
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>Toumai (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) was thought to be right at the foot of the human family tree. It dates to between 6.5 and 7.4 million years ago. In other words, it is older than the point of human-chimp divergence seen in the genetic data.
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>"It is possible that the Toumai fossil is more recent than previously thought," said Nick Patterson, a senior research scientist and statistician at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and lead author on the Nature paper.
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>"But if the dating is correct, the Toumai fossil would precede the human-chimp split. The fact that it has human-like features suggests that human-chimp speciation may have occurred over a long period with episodes of hybridisation between the emerging species."
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>Commenting on the research, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, told the Associated Press: "It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis.
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>"My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."